12th June 2019
Basketball Reference recently made an addition of preseason championship odds and win total over/unders that you can read about in a previous blog entry. The site has now also added playoff series odds where available back to 1988, which can be viewed on Basketball Reference's Playoff Series History index. The odds are taken from before the start of the series.
This postseason, you can see the Golden State Warriors were -15000 favorites over the Los Angeles Clippers in the first round, the heaviest favorites in a playoff series since the 2016 San Antonio Spurs' first round matchup with the Memphis Grizzlies. As for the 2017 Warriors, they were the second-biggest favorites in an NBA Finals, only trailing the 2001 Los Angeles Lakers, who were -2000 favorites over the Philadelphia 76ers.
Thanks to SportsOddsHistory.com for providing us with the historical data for this addition. If you have any questions or suggestions, feel free to contact us through our feedback form.
Posted in Announcement, Basketball-Reference.com, Data, History, Playoffs | Comments Off on Playoff Series Historical Odds Added to Basketball Reference
7th May 2019
Basketball-Reference has individual game logs for all of NBA playoff history. Previously, if you wanted to see a player's performance in the postseason, you would need to choose a specific season's game logs to see their game logs in that particular playoff run. But now, we have added a Career Playoffs section that will list all playoff game logs in the player's career on a single page. The Career Playoffs section, in addition to having the same game log information you'd find in the yearly pages, also includes the playoff round and game number of the series for each line.
Here are links to some examples of Career Playoffs game log pages:
If you have any questions or suggestions, feel free to contact us through our feedback form.
Posted in Announcement, Basketball-Reference.com, Features, History, Playoffs | 1 Comment »
1st May 2019
Basketball-Reference's Play Index set of tools includes a Player Game Finder that can do both regular season and playoff searches for single and combined game lines that meet certain criteria. For single-game playoff searches, we have now added round and series game number to the information displayed for each entry.
As an example of a search that now includes this information, let's say you want to browse all 50-point games in playoff history. Now you can more quickly spot that Michael Jordan's record 63-point game came in Game 2 of a first round series, while Elgin Baylor's 61-point game happened in Game 5 of the 1962 NBA Finals. Also, it's more apparent that no one's ever scored 50 points in a Game 7, although Kevin Durant this playoffs became the 4th player to have a Game 6 50-point game.
If you have any questions or suggestions, feel free to contact us through our feedback form.
Posted in Announcement, Basketball-Reference.com, Play Index, Playoffs | Comments Off on Basketball-Reference Adds Round/Game Info to Playoff Game Play Index Searches
29th January 2019
So your team is down 7 runs in the 7th inning, and you're tempted to accept defeat when you realize that you're watching baseball and one hot inning could change the end result. Wouldn't it also be nice to have some facts on your side about other teams that have accomplished improbable comebacks?
Well, Baseball-Reference is here to help with a new page that tracks the biggest comebacks in baseball sorted by the lowest win expectancy a winning team faced before mounting their comeback. Win Expectancy is a measure based on play-by-play, so this measure is available in full back to 1974 and mostly complete back to 1925.
In the regular season, we have 2 situations where a team was at 0.01% win expectancy before eventually winning. On June 29, 1952, the visiting Chicago Cubs were down 8-2 to the Cincinnati Reds with 2 outs and nobody on base in the top of the 9th inning. One more out would've ended the game, but the Cubs managed to get a string of 7 runs and ended up escaping with the victory.
The 2nd situation happened with the 1990 Phillies, who were down 11-1 to the Dodgers in the 7th inning. From there, Von Hayes drove in 2 runs in the 8th inning, and that led to a full-force comeback in the 9th inning, including a 3-run homer by John Kruk. Philadelphia went on to leave Dodger Stadium that night with a 12-11 win.
We also have a table for most improbable postseason comebacks. At the top of the list is the 1929 Philadelphia Athletics, who came back from an 8-0 deficit in the 7th inning to win Game 4 of the World Series, a series they would go on to win. More recently, you may recall the Red Sox coming back from a 7-0 deficit to take Game 5 of the 2008 ALCS from the Rays. Even if Tampa Bay went on to the World Series, Boston fans could take minor solace in J.D. Drew driving in Kevin Youkilis for the game-winning run in Game 5.
Check out the rest of the most improbable comebacks in baseball history on Baseball-Reference. If you have any questions or suggestions, feel free to contact us through our feedback form.
Posted in Announcement, Baseball-Reference.com, History, Playoffs | 2 Comments »
23rd January 2019
One of the tools in Hockey-Reference's Play Index is the Team Game Finder, and a new feature we've added to that form is a filter for teams who made or missed the playoffs in a given season. With this addition, you can now more easily find that the 1992-93 Philadelphia Flyers are the highest Modern Era goal-scoring team to miss out on the playoffs, or that the 1985-86 Winnipeg Jets made the playoffs with a -77 goal differential, worst in NHL history among playoff teams.
If you have any questions or suggestions, feel free to contact us through our feedback form.
Posted in Announcement, History, Hockey-Reference.com, Play Index, Playoffs | 3 Comments »
15th January 2019
People have been betting on football for decades, and the data surrounding that industry can give us valuable context by informing who was favored at the time and by how much. Because of that, Pro-Football-Reference included all Super Bowl point spreads in the big game's history, as well as all regular season and postseason games since 1977. And now, with a big thanks to SportsOddsHistory.com, we have now extended our postseason point spread data to cover the full Super Bowl era (since 1966).
That covers a lot of historic playoff matchups that PFR previously did not have point spread information on. For example, the 1967 NFL Championship, known today as The Ice Bowl, had the Packers favored by 7 going into the game; that game-winning sneak by Bart Starr was not enough to cover. There's the 1972 AFC Divisional matchup between the Raiders and the Steelers, who were actually 2-point underdogs at home but escaped with the win thanks to the Immaculate Reception by Franco Harris. And then there's the 1975 Vikings, who were favored by 8 points when they fell to the Cowboys in the 1975 divisional round thanks to Roger Staubach's Hail Mary to Drew Pearson.
This newly added data is searchable in the Team Game Finder section of the Play Index. One search you could look for is biggest home underdogs in the playoffs by point spread, and that search would reveal that the 1966 Cowboys, who were 7-point underdogs at home in the 1966 NFL Championship, held that mark until the 2010 Seahawks took their place atop the leaderboard. The 2010 Seahawks covered, while the '66 Cowboys ended up pushing.
If you have any questions or suggestions, feel free to contact us through our feedback form.
Posted in Announcement, Data, History, Play Index, Playoffs, Pro-Football-Reference.com, Trivia | Comments Off on Postseason Point Spreads Now Available Back to 1966 on PFR
18th June 2018
While the NBA is in offseason mode, teams are still making moves to improve themselves, and the same goes for Basketball-Reference as well. With that in mind, we've added a page that details historical data for seven-game playoff series based on various game results. Just to give an example, if we had just watched the Cavs go down 2-3 to the Celtics in the Eastern Conference Playoffs, you'd look for the Team is Down column, find the 2-3 section, and locate their predicament where they'd lost the first two away games, won their first two home games and then lost the third away game, displayed as two red A's, two green H's and one more red A. Then, you'd find that prior to the Cavs pulling off the series win, teams in that situation were 2-40, with only the '07 Utah Jazz and the '08 San Antonio Spurs able to pull off the same feat. We have overall winning records for both the modern 2-2-1-1-1 format, as well as the classic 2-3-2 format.
If you have any questions or suggestions, feel free to contact us through our feedback form.
Posted in Announcement, Basketball-Reference.com, Data, Features, History, Playoffs | Comments Off on Basketball-Reference Adds Historical Playoff Series Outcome Data
1st November 2017
With tonight's World Series Game 7, we thought we'd post quick links to Play Index searches showing every championship round Game 7 in MLB, NBA and NHL history. The lists are searches for home teams in Game 7s, sorted by date. If you click the date, you can see the box score for the game (when available). Enjoy!
Read the rest of this entry
Posted in Announcement, Baseball-Reference.com, Basketball-Reference.com, Data, History, Hockey-Reference.com, Play Index, Playoffs | 1 Comment »
29th September 2017
Even though the temperature has been in the 80s here in Philadelphia this week, the calendar insists it's nearly October, which means it's nearly time for glorious postseason baseball! Following last year's World Series will be a tall order, but there are plenty of intriguing matchups lined up and no clear frontrunner to win it all.
To help you get ready, Baseball-Reference has plenty of postseason data. However, we've found that some users aren't quite sure where to find it or don't know quite how deep our postseason dataset goes. So, here's a quick primer on how to get all the information you need on MLB Postseason History. Read the rest of this entry
Posted in Baseball-Reference.com, Playoffs, Statgeekery | 7 Comments »
24th August 2017
At Basketball-Reference, we have every box score in NBA history, including the playoffs. However, for many years, we don't have all statistical categories filled in in these box scores. We have recently taken a major step towards remedying this issue with our playoff box scores. We now have nearly complete box scores and series cumulative boxes for every NBA Finals series in NBA history.
Read the rest of this entry
Posted in Announcement, Basketball-Reference.com, Data, Features, History, Playoffs, Uncategorized | Comments Off on Major Improvements to NBA Finals Box Scores
We're Social...for Statheads
Every Sports Reference Social Media Account
Site Last Updated: Friday, May 1, 2:56PM
Question, Comment, Feedback, or Correction?
Subscribe to our Free Email Newsletter
Do you have a sports website? Or write about sports? We have tools and resources that can help you use sports data. Find out more.