Sports Reference Blog

Historical East vs West Records Added to Basketball Reference

Posted by Mike Lynch on January 4, 2024

Here at Basketball Reference we take our frivolities very seriously. So seriously that we have made a new addition to our Frivolities section: season-by-season breakdowns of how the Eastern and Western Conferences have fared against each other.

You can see, for instance, that the West has the upper hand thus far in 2023-24 after the East won the series for each of the last two seasons. Before those two seasons, the West won the series in 12 straight seasons and 21 of the previous 22. You can also see how dominant the East was from mid-50s through the 60s, and also for all of the 1980s.

One technical point to bear in mind with this data is that before the 1970-71 season, the NBA was split into Eastern and Western 'divisions' instead of 'conferences.'

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Why a Major League Player Disappeared from Our Count

Posted by Mike Lynch on December 19, 2023

You may have noticed that, as of the end of the 2023 MLB season, the counter on the front page of Baseball-Reference indicated that there had been 23,115 players in major league history and that that number now says 23,114.

This change is due to the hard work and dedication of the SABR Biographical Research Committee, which continually makes new discoveries about players in the early days of the game, in particular. In this case, a mistaken identity involving a player who caught one inning for the 1900 St. Louis Cardinals has been resolved. Previously, it was thought that this catching appearance was made by Henry Edward Stein. However, it has been discovered via the Sporting News archives (which all SABR members get complementary access to as a membership perk) that the appearance was actually made by Tom Stanton. Stanton also appeared in one game for the 1904 Chicago Cubs, and thus already had a player record. This is why we now show 23,114 all-time major league players instead of 23,115.

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Quarterly Scoring Added For Most Pre-Shot Clock NBA/BAA Games

Posted by Mike Lynch on December 14, 2023

If you peruse the NBA Guide (the name of the NBA's official record book produced before every season) you'll notice that most team scoring records for quarters are restricted to 'since 1954-55', which is when the NBA first introduced the shot clock. Before that, games tended to be lower scoring, particularly in late and close situations as teams held out for possession of the ball at the end of the game. It is also often hard to find record of how much was scored in a given quarter before the shot clock as the league was generally less popular and recaps, let alone box scores, were less thorough. However, at Basketball-Reference we view it as important to attempt to preserve as many recordable facts about these games as possible. We are frequently making minor improvements to our box scores in the 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s and 80s. Thanks to some help from NBA research ace Todd Spehr, we have recently added quarter-by-quarter scoring to the vast majority of the BAA and NBA games from 1946-47 through 1953-54 that were previously missing these details. Before this recent work, we were missing these details on 709 games. We were able to add complete data for 569 of them and partial data for 62 of them. This leaves fewer than 100 games completely lacking scoring breakdowns. For instance, what the NBA considers the first game in the history of the league (though it was actually a BAA game) between the Knicks and Huskies on November 1, 1946 now has a complete scoring breakdown, with the Knicks winning despite coming up with just six points in the third quarter. Chicago Stags home games in this era might be particularly fun to look at because, as a marketing tactic, they decided to play 15-minute quarters in several home games such as this, this and this. Minutes played were not yet an official statistic, so it's unclear if any Stags were averaging over 50 MPG for some home games. We hope you enjoy these new additions.

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Coverage of Match-by-Match Premier League Assists Greatly Expanded

Posted by Mike Lynch on December 14, 2023

We have recently greatly expanded our coverage of match-by-match player assists in Premier League play on FBref. Until a few months ago we only had coverage back through the 2014-15 season. Last week we completed an effort to compile assists for all matches all the way back to the first season of the Premier League in 1992-93. This has also allowed us to make corrections to season totals, which should now match the sums of the match-level statistics. For instance, here you can see the 1999-00 Premier League Match Logs for David Beckham have all of the assists filled in. These assists are also searchable in our brand new product, Stathead FBref.

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Stathead FBref: A Football Stats Revolution Has Arrived

Posted by Jonah Gardner on November 29, 2023

After years of development, we're thrilled to announce that Stathead FBref is here! If you're a Stathead subscriber who loves football (or an American Stathead subscriber who loves soccer), you know just how much of a game changer this is. If you've never heard of Stathead, read on to discover how this is going to change everything for stat-savvy football fans.

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Player Game-by-Game Fumble Coverage Extended Back to 1987

Posted by Mike Lynch on November 10, 2023

In June Pro Football Reference extended its game-by-game coverage of player fumbles, fumbles recoveries and fumble return yards back to 1989. Today we're happy to announce that we've added two more seasons of coverage (1988 and 1987) thanks to the research of Ken Pullis. In 1988 Randall Cunningham led the NFL with 12 fumbles. You can now see which games those came in in his game logs for that season. Similarly, you can see Dan Marino's league-leading eight fumble recoveries in his game logs. Fumble return yardage also shows up in the game logs back to 1987. Such as Reggie White's 70-yd return in 1987 against Washington. This information also appears in the box scores.

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Player Nicknames Added to Hockey Reference

Posted by Mike Lynch on November 8, 2023

Hockey-Reference has recently joined many of our other Sports-Reference sites in featuring nicknames for players on the site. Nicknames for over 2,300 players have been added to the site. These range from legends like Wayne Gretzky, Bobby Orr and Toe Blake to stars like Rod Brind'Amour and brawlers like Dave Schultz. We would like to thank our 2023 summer intern Brendan Avey for his thorough research in finding these nicknames and readying them for insertion into our dB. We would also like to thank Doug Reynolds of The Hockey Databank for allowing us to use the hundreds of nicknames already in his database. We hope you enjoy this new feature and please let us know if there are any others we're missing that you think are worthy of inclusion.

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WNBA Assistant Coaches Added to Basketball Reference

Posted by Mike Lynch on November 2, 2023

Basketball Reference has added assistant coaches to our WNBA team pages and also created pages for these assistant coaches and added assistant coaching stints to pages for head coaches. We would like to thank one of our 2023 summer interns, Alison Gilmore, for her exhaustive research in tracking these down. This information was difficult to find in many cases, but she was able to add over 1,000 datapoints. If you notice that we're missing any of these coaching stints, please let us know.

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Major Improvements to Men’s College Basketball Leaderboards

Posted by Mike Lynch on October 31, 2023

Thanks to some recent data expansions, we have vastly improved the coverage of seasons on our men's college basketball leaderboards on the Sports Reference College Basketball site. This will make the most comprehensive online archive of college basketball statistics even more robust. One thing to note is that in some cases this allows for our leaderboards to be even more comprehensive than what is included in the NCAA Record Book. This is because many schools tracked statistics such as blocks, steals and assists long before they became 'official' NCAA categories. Below is a breakdown of some of these changes.

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Posted in Announcement, CBB at Sports Reference, Data, Features, History, Leaders | 1 Comment »

Expanded Data Added to Team Executives on Basketball Reference

Posted by Mike Lynch on October 31, 2023

Basketball Reference has added new details to our Executives pages to provide greater context on the careers of the NBA's main decision makers.

While we have long had lists of transactions made by each of these execs on their pages, we have now mirrored the statistics that we show for NBA head coaches on these pages and added a sortable register.

So, for instance, you can now sort the details of all of these execs to see that Red Auerbach (who stayed on in the Celtics front office years after he retired from coaching) is the all-time leader in seasons (34), games (2,667), wins (1,738), playoff games (342), playoff wins (206), playoff losses (136) and championships (15).

Another sortable column on the table shows how many games each exec is over or under .500, which combines success with longevity. Five execs in NBA history are at least 150 games over .500: Auerbach, R.C. Buford, Jerry West, Pat Williams and Daryl Morey. It should also come as no surprise that one exec is more than twice as many games under .500 as any other in NBA history: Elgin Baylor.

Basketball Reference defines 'Executive' in this use case to be the executive in charge of player personnel decisions. For much of history, this was generally the front office employee with the 'General Manager' title, but this is often a 'President of Basketball Operations' or something similar now and was often the owner in the earliest days of the league. Sometimes this is hard to define and so we rely on beat reporters and league/team employees for their best judgments on who is making the calls in a given front office. If you have disagreements with any of the decisions made here, please let us know.

 

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