The main player stat tables on Basketball Reference (the first set of stats on a player's page) now feature information on awards the player won, and some award voting information for each season. The information included uses the following shorthand:

AS: All Star

NBA1, NBA2, NBA3 (or WNBA1, etc): All-NBA/WNBA First, Second or Third team

DEF1, DEF2: NBA/WNBA All-Defense First or Second team

MVP-1: MVP voting rank (1 means the player was the MVP, 2 means they were runner-up, 3 means third place, etc)

DPOY-1: Defensive Player of the Year voting rank

ROY-1: Rookie of the Year voting rank

MIP-1: Most Improved Player voting rank

CPOY-1: Clutch Player of the Year voting rank

6MOY-1 Sixth Man of the Year voting rank

LeBron James's and Breanna Stewart's pages are great places to see a sampling of this information.

We are pleased to announce that our partnership with Stats Perform Opta has expanded to include six new leagues of advanced data.  This data not only includes the current seasons, but also 3-4 historical seasons.

The new leagues are

• Germany's 2.Bundesliga
• France's Ligue 2
• Italy's Serie B
• Spain's La Segunda (La Liga 2)
• Belgium's Jupiler Pro League, and
• Argentina's Primera Division and Copa de la Liga

These pair with

• England's Championship
• United States and Canada's MLS
• Mexico's Liga MX
• Brazil's Serie A
• The Netherlands' Eredivisie
• Portugal's Primeira Liga
• Conmebol's Copa Libertadores
• UEFA's Europa Conference League

To form our Next 14 tier for scouting reports and the like.   This is all described on our scouting reports explainer.

Thank you for your support.  It allows use to expand our stats in more directions and continue to serve you better.

This summer, Sports Reference has added Becky Ligon (Test Engineer) and Kyle Brown (Community Marketing Coordinator), bringing the full-time staff size to 33. Welcome Becky and Kyle! Here's some more about our new teammates:

Becky Ligon, Test Engineer, joined Sports Reference in the middle of 2023. Becky previously worked as a technical business analyst and performance/automated test engineer in the wholesale industry. She is a Virginia native and loves playing volleyball and watching soccer, hockey, and college football.

Kyle Brown, Community Marketing Coordinator, joined Sports Reference in the middle of 2023. He has worked at sports media companies such as Bleacher Report and The Athletic. He calls the Bay Area home, but currently lives in Southern California. He is a fan of the San Francisco Giants and 49ers, Warriors, Oregon Ducks, and literally anything that Steph Curry does.

We are proud to announce that Immaculate Grid now includes hockey! Alongside baseball, football and basketball, you can now test your hockey knowledge daily. New grids launch at 9am ET.

Integrating into Hockey-Reference.com and Stathead, Immaculate Grid Hockey will include the same great features: hyperlinked player pages, possible answers for each cell, most popular answers, accuracy, rarity score, and player scores.

Play now at immaculategrid.com/hockey.

You can now play Immaculate Grid Basketball, along with your other favorites like baseball and football! In an effort to bring you all of the sports you love, we're proud to introduce the newest sport to the Immaculate Grid suite of games. New basketball grids will launch every day at 9am ET.

WNBA Grid update: The Sports Reference team is taking some additional time before launching a women's basketball grid. Our goal is to to make sure we do it right. Due to the relatively small number of teams and the short history of the league, there are some unique challenges to overcome ahead of a launch. If you have feedback or ideas, please share them with us here.

Reminder: Starting July 26th, new baseball grids will launch at 9am ET rather than the original time of 12am ET. Learn more about the change here.

We have expanded our newly acquired trivia game, Immaculate Grid, to include professional football! You can now play the viral sports trivia game for both baseball and football with more sports coming soon. New football grids will launch daily at 9am ET.

Integrating into Pro-Football-Reference.com and Stathead, Immaculate Grid Football will include the same features as baseball grids: hyperlinked player pages, possible answers for each cell, most popular answers, accuracy, rarity score, and player scores.

Test your football knowledge now at immaculategrid.com/football.

Programming Note - New Grid Launch Timing Starting Wednesday, July 26th, 2023.

Starting 7/26/23, new Immaculate Grid games for existing sports will launch at 9am ET. In order to provide the most reliable and supported experience for our users as we expand to multiple sports, this time change will allow the Sports Reference team more flexibility to respond to issues and feedback in a timely manner. It also allows us to stop pulling all nighters :)

Questions about any of the above? Contact us at here.

Exciting news from your friends at Stathead! We've rolled out a new set of filters to the Season Finders on all of our sports. These filters allow you to explore the history of the draft in some exciting new ways! Read the rest of this entry

We've added Plus/Minus as a statistical filter to the Basketball Game, Streak, and Span Finders. Our Plus/Minus coverage dates back to 1996-97 in the NBA and 2018 in the WNBA.

In the Game Finder, you can now find:

• Luc Mbah a Moute recorded a +57 on November 22, 2017. It's the highest single-game NBA Plus/Minus total in our NBA database.
• Kaela Davis' +27 on May 20, 2018 was the best single-game Plus/Minus in our WNBA database.

In the Streak Finder, you can now find:

• Nikola Jokić's streak of 4 games with a Plus/Minus of at least 20 was the longest streak in the NBA this season.
• A'ja Wilson and Breanna Stewart both had streaks of four games with a Plus/Minus of at least 20, the longest such streaks in our WNBA database.

In the Span Finder, you can now find:

• Nikola Jokić has the best 5-game span Plus/Minus totals of both the regular season (+116) and playoffs (+79) this season.
• In 2019, Elena Delle Donne had a ten-game span with a Plus/Minus of +176, the best span in our WNBA database.

We hope you enjoy combining Plus/Minus searches with all of the other filter options in our Game, Streak, and Season Finders!

Not a Stathead subscriber? It's your all-access ticket to the Basketball Reference database. Plans start at just $8 per month with a one month free trial. Learn more at Stathead.com.

As the 2023 season begins, we have made some updates to our Wins Above Replacement calculations. You may notice some small changes to figures as you browse the site. As always, you can find full details on how we calculate WAR here.

New Data For Negro Leagues Players

Recently, we updated the site with the latest player records for Negro Leagues players. This update included biographical updates (such as full names, handedness, and birth/death information) but also added data for many new box scores discovered by the team at Seamheads. See the blog post for more details about the scope of this update.

2021 Park Factors

Park factors for 2021 have been re-computed to include the 2022 season, since WAR uses a three-year average for park factors when computing pitching WAR. The most significant changes here are the Milwaukee Brewers, whose pitching park factor fell from 101 to 98 (where <100 represents a pitcher’s park and >100 represents a hitter’s park), and the Los Angeles Dodgers, whose pitching park factor rose from 97 to 100.

The biggest gainers from these changes were Dodgers pitchers Walker Buehler (gaining 0.5 WAR for 2021) and Julio Urías (0.3 WAR), while Brewers ace Corbin Burnes saw his WAR decrease by 0.3 as we adjust American Family Field in Milwaukee from being a modest hitter’s park to a modest pitcher’s park. All other changes to 2021 WAR are smaller in magnitude than these three examples.

New Data From Retrosheet

Today, we are also deploying an update to past box scores, play-by-play, and game logs from Retrosheet, including play-by-play for 1,712 games that previously did not have play-by-play coverage, including 833 games in 1914, a season which previously had no play-by-play coverage at all. See the blog post for more details.

Biggest Career Movers

The top mover for position players in career WAR is Tommy Butts, whose career WAR is 2.8 wins higher after this update. Most of this value was from his stellar infield defense at shortstop. Hall of Famers Willard Brown and Buck Leonard experienced a gain of 2.1 WAR and 1.6 WAR respectively over their careers.

On the mound, we see Birmingham Black Barons pitcher Dan Bankhead leading the way, adding 2 wins to his career WAR total. Bankhead’s playing record has 41⅓ more innings pitched with the latest update.

We’ve highlighted some of the more extreme changes here, but to see full lists of the largest changes to season and career WAR totals, please see the spreadsheet here.

Thanks to our partnership with the Seamheads Negro League database, we have released our second annual update of the dataset. Our last update, in April of 2022, was covered in this blog post. Like last year, this update includes thousands of incremental improvements. The most significant new data revolves around expanded statistics for the 1940 and 1941 seasons in the Negro American League and the Negro National League II. Additionally, lots of new biographical data has been added. Here's a rundown of some of the improvements Baseball Reference users will now see:

Read the rest of this entry