Sports Reference Blog

In November, we announced that we were no longer able to support automatic export of our tables to Excel. This was due to newer browsers not behaving in ways we expected, making it difficult to support the feature. We're happy to announce that we've figured this out, however.

Today, the automatic Excel export feature has returned to all of our sites. To export any of our tables to Excel, please hover over "Share & more" above the table you'd like to export. Once you hover, you'll see a dropdown where you can select "Get as Excel Workbook (experimental)", which will download the table into an xls file you can open with Excel.

Read the rest of this entry

As a college hoops junkie, I'm pretty excited to announce that College Basketball Reference has added digitized stats for nearly all NCAA Division I (or equivalent) men's basketball players back to 1947-48. This is literally the biggest update in the life of this site, as the player statistics were previously only digitized back to 1992-93. For many older seasons, we had scans of team stat sheets (which we have left in place at the bottom of many pages), but those players couldn't be searched for, sorted, or linked to. Now that everything is digitized, you can search for players or even do things like look at every player in the 1984 ACC sorted by scoring average, or see the season statistics for every ACC Player of the Year winner.

We would like to thank Dave Quinn for his incredible efforts in compiling all of this data. This is a massive update, which adds great depths of information to the site, but it's also not 100% complete. To give you a better idea of the breadth of this data, please let me offer some details:

Read the rest of this entry

Based on 5,000 simulations, here is our 2017 NCAA Tournament Forecast. We have Gonzaga as the likeliest champion, and 10-seed Wichita State as the 14th-likeliest champ. Don't forget to check this out before you fill out your bracket!

There are other contenders for Best Sports Weekend of the Year -- the first two days of the NBA Playoffs and the Divisional Round of the NFL Playoffs are both up there -- but, in my opinion, there's no better series of days on the sports calendar than the first week of the NCAA Tournament. For one thing, unlike other sports weekends, this extra-long one lasts four days, and it's packed with wall-to-wall basketball, starting at noon and stretching well into the night.

That weekend is nearly here! March Madness kicks off this week and there's a lot to look forward to. Pro basketball fans will have the chance to see how top prospects for this year's NBA Draft, like Lonzo Ball and Josh Jackson, perform on the NCAA's biggest stage. College hoop-heads will have the chance to see Naismith Award semi-finalists like Nigel Williams-Goss and Josh Hart in action and potentially even squaring off in later rounds. Read the rest of this entry

I want to give a short update as to where the new redesign stands. We have fixed we believe all of the bugs (that didn't already exist) in the play index. There are a few open issues in the register section. We have incorporated many of the suggested changes to the site from users who were experiencing issues.

Open issues

• The register has a few open bugs
• The in memoriam is not yet showing our non-players
• There are a few bullpen style and administrative issues.
• There appear some issues relating to Internet Explorer hanging in a way we can't reproduce.
• We are working on publishing the 2017 spring training stats, the projections, and the foreign leagues already underway.

We are working through all of these and expect to be 100% ready to go on Opening Day.

We added support for the Make Tiny Url in the play index. Previously, you would not be able to fully share those reports, but this has been fixed and works easy as pie. Just create your report and click on the "Make Tiny Url" and share the url.

An added perk of this is that this could be used to re-run reports daily. Just bookmark the link and re-use it.

As you probably noticed, we re-designed Baseball-Reference.com last week. Our goal is to have all of the kinks ironed out as soon as possible. This means that we don't have as much time as we normally would to get things like Spring Training stats up and running. Many people would like to see them now, but the fact of the matter is that few will care about them a month from now, so it's not our highest priority. That said, we hope to have Spring Training stats up and running within the next two weeks. We are also hopeful to get 2017 Marcel Projections up, but we cannot make any promises

Thank you for your patience as we work on perfecting the new site.

Russell Westbrook has broken a lot of things this year: triple-double records, Basketball Twitter, the lengthy drought of NBA players failing to appear on-stage with Migos. However, there's something a little less well-publicized than those that we can add to the list: Basketball-Reference's MVP Projections.

The MVP Projection uses a model that's based on previous MVP winners to use stats like points, rebounds, and assists, as well as team win-loss record, to determine which players voters are likely to target this year. And, as you can see below, it has a minor disagreement with the consensus on Westbrook's odds: Read the rest of this entry

Update: A March 9th update on where the redesign stands

First off, change is hard. I know that. We've moved a few things and some things have changed, but please be assured that we had very good reasons and have tried to make the redesigned site more useful than it was before. It's not perfect, but neither was B-R last month. Please keep an open mind for a day, and if you still hate it, please let us know.

If you follow me on twitter, you know that this work has been a long time coming. Starting in January of 2015, Adam Wodon, Adam Darowski, and I started throwing around ideas for a more mobile-friendly version of our sites. Our mobile experience could have been charitably described as limited and functional. With over two-thirds of our visits coming from handheld devices, we clearly needed to up our game there.

This led to a complete review of how we present data on desktop and how we can make that usable on a small screen. It's not easy and after months of design, user testing and work, we have an approach that we believe will serve both desktop and mobile users better than they are now. If you use our other sites, this is not a surprise as all of those sites were re-launched last summer and into the early fall. That left the baseball site and its 17 years of code that needed some changing, rewriting, upgrading and general improvement. It's taken awhile, but the entire Sports Reference team has pulled together to get this out before the games start this spring.

Read the rest of this entry

LeBron's mad at his team, the New York Knicks are weighing a number of absurd trades, and Lance Stephenson is on a roster. That can only mean one thing: It's February in the NBA and everybody could use a break.

Fortunately, we've made it to All-Star Weekend! While it's a bummer to have to survive a few days without real, competitive basketball, All-Star Weekend gives us the chance to take a breather, take stock of the season, and see the NBA's biggest stars in a looser environment.

The highlight of this weekend, of course, will be the NBA All-Star Game, now in it's 66th year of existence. The event and the league have both come a long way from 1951, when George Mikan went 4-17 as the West fell to the East 111-94.

So, to get ready for Sunday night, we're going to take a look back at a few NBA All-Star Game records. Some of these have stood for decades while others were just set in the last few years. And for each one, I'll identify a couple of players who just might manage to break them this year. Read the rest of this entry