Sports Reference Blog

Several New European Stats Features

Posted by sean on May 27, 2015

 

We've been working recently to make our European stats better and easier to access. Toward that end, I wanted to introduce a few recently-added features that make it easier to find detailed European league player and team stats, standings, and game logs. In case you haven't spent time on our European league sites, know that we maintain sites for the Euroleague and Eurocup competitions as well as Liga ACB (Spain), LNB Pro A (France), Lega Serie A (Italy), and the Greek Basket League.

Foremost, our European sites share a new, easy-to-find homepage at http://www.basketball-reference.com/euro. The homepage has six large links that serve as a portal to each league's individual home. Each league's page looks much like our NBA homepage, with a rotating leaderboard, league standings, results from recent games, top performers, and more.

We've also added player game logs and box scores to the site, for example this box from Real Madrid's Euroleague clinching game. To find the gamelogs, visit any active player's page and mouse over the 'Gamelogs' box, and you'll see a link for game logs from each league in which the player has appeared (see below). Links to box scores are available on the respective league homepages, team schedule pages, and are also linked from the player game logs.

 

falker_gamelogs

 

We've also added a new European stats section to the bottom-right of our homepage, with links to each league and the most recent day's games:

homepage_bottom_right

 

 

 

 

Posted in Announcement, Basketball-Reference.com, CBB at Sports Reference | Comments Off on Several New European Stats Features

NBA All-Star Legends Game boxscores added

Posted by sean on May 27, 2015

 

We occasionally get emails from users who have interesting research to share. Recently, Todd Spehr (@toddspehr35) forwarded box scores from the NBA All-Star Legends Games that were played for a decade in the mid-80s until the 90s. It would seem out of this world to modern fans, but the NBA staged an annual exhibition of living legends during its All-Star festivities. Hall of Famers John Havlicek, Walt Bellamy, and Artis Gilmore were among the participants until the exhibition ran its course in 1993.

You can find links to these box scores from any page of our comprehensive all-star archives. In particular, look for the Legends Game tab and hover your mouse for a link to every box from the 1980s and 1990s.

 

legends_game

 

In addition to his donated research, Todd is also the author of a recently released biography of the Croation legend Drazen Petrovic: Drazen: The Remarkable Life & Legacy of the Mozart of Basketball.

 

Posted in Announcement, Basketball-Reference.com, CBB at Sports Reference | Comments Off on NBA All-Star Legends Game boxscores added

CBB: Adding SRS to historical (pre-1980) schedules

Posted by sean on May 26, 2015

 

Earlier this month we added historical NCAA schedules going back to the 1949-50 season. Just wanted to follow-up that we've added SRS and SOS for those seasons, as well.

As we've already published SRS going back to 1980, the only newcomers to the top 10 all-time teams are 1960s/70s UCLA juggernauts: 1967 (#10), 1968 (#3), and the 30-0 1972 team (#2)

The 1998-99 Elton Brand-led Duke team still has the highest single-season SRS rating (34.8), even with their championship-game loss. Curiously, the only team in the top 10 that didn't at least make the Final Four was the previous season's Duke team that was bounced by Kentucky in the regional final.

 

SRS and SOS are published at the top of the school season pages (illustrated below), and you can find a list of all schools' ratings on the season standings page or the dedicated ratings page.

 

ucla_1972

 

 

Posted in Announcement, Basketball-Reference.com, CBB at Sports Reference | Comments Off on CBB: Adding SRS to historical (pre-1980) schedules

Stanley Cup Playoffs Comebacks Added

Posted by Mike Lynch on May 20, 2015

We just wanted to quickly point out that we have added a new Frivolity to the site: Teams to win a Best-of-7 series after trailing 3-0 or 3-1. The Rangers recent comeback against the Capitals got us thinking about this, so we figured we'd add the list. Please stay tuned for more cool Best-of-7 series features like this in the feature.

Posted in Announcement, Data, History, Hockey-Reference.com, Playoffs | 3 Comments »

Play Finder Now Shows Searches As You Type

Posted by Mike on May 20, 2015

Trying to make the game play finder a bit easier to use, we've added a new feature that shows what your search will be as you change various options. When you load the page you'll now see this box at the top of the form:

Screen Shot 2015-05-20 at 9.01.08 AM

As you update items in the form, this box will change to reflect what is being searched for, for instance:

pi_recorded

This should help make it clearer what you're going to get before you even search so you can get exactly what you're looking for. Look for this feature to roll out to more Play Index tools in the future, and if you have any suggestions let us know in the comments.

Posted in Announcement, Pro-Football-Reference.com | Comments Off on Play Finder Now Shows Searches As You Type

College Basketball Schedules Back to 1949-50

Posted by sean on May 15, 2015

 

I'm excited to announce that we've extended our historical College Basketball schedules back to 1949-50. Previously, we had published them back to 1979-80, and had displayed a scanned image of the team's schedule when available. These three decades of additions supplements our full collection of historical NCAA Tournament box scores.

Some of the highlights of this new addition include the full-season slate for the 1975-76 undefeated Hoosiers,  John Wooden's 1967-68 NCAA Champion UCLA Bruins, and the 1973-74 NC State Wolfpack.

The easiest way to find school schedules is to click on a school season page and click on one of the prominent Schedule links:

 

schedules

 

Note that we also publish schedules in the Conferences section, if you just want to view conference games:

 

schedules_conf

 

Many thanks to Kevin Johnson, from whom we source this and much of the historical data on the site.

 

Posted in Announcement, Basketball-Reference.com, CBB at Sports Reference | 3 Comments »

Daily Fantasy Points added to Game Finder, player pages

Posted by Hans Van Slooten on May 14, 2015

We've extended the Daily Fantasy Points to the Play Index Game Finders as well as adding a chart to the player pages showing their DFS points over the current season. These statistics are located towards the far right of the table. DFS (DK) stands for DraftKings points, while DFS (FD) stands for FanDuel points.

Screenshot 2015-05-14 08.32.50

We'd also like to take this opportunity to remind our users that a $15 deposit on a new DraftKings account through this link will come with a free year of Play Index access (normally $36/yr). More details on this offer can be found here.

We hope daily fantasy players enjoy this new feature and would love to hear about any other features you would like to see.

Posted in Announcement, Baseball-Reference.com, Play Index | 6 Comments »

New Team Roster Features

Posted by sean on May 7, 2015

 

Just wanted to show off a couple new features that we've recently introduced...

 

When you find yourself on our team season pages look for the "Game-by-game roster status" links:

 

roster_status_link

 

These will bring you to a Roster Status page with a color-coded visualization of each player's roster status for the 82 regular season games, and the playoffs. Designations include Starter, Reserve, DNP, Inactive, and Suspended. Note that a player's status is also noted on boxscores and our player gamelogs. Notable in 2014-15 are the Raptors, Bulls, and Magic, all of whom maintained a stable roster throughout the season. The Sixers page is a lot of fun to look at, too.

We've published these going back to 2013-14, and should hopefully extend that period at some point.

 

rockets_screenshot

 

 

The other new feature is a historical time series of roster continuity for each currently-active franchise. Our accounting begins with 1952-53 given that the season prior is the first for which we have Minutes Played data for every league player.

Several years ago former colleague Neil Paine published some musings on our blog about Team Continuity, and Dean Oliver devotes a couple pages in his Basketball on Paper book in the context of historically bad teams. The Spurs are well-noted stalwarts of year-to-year stability - on the other hand, the Cavaliers and Mavericks show that it's possible to turn over most of your minutes and not come apart at the seams, especially if one of your newcomers is LeBron James.

You can find a link to this page on our Frivolous Pages index, under Roster Continuity.

 

continuity

 

 

Posted in Advanced Stats, Announcement, Basketball-Reference.com, CBB at Sports Reference, Data | Comments Off on New Team Roster Features

2015 NFL Draft Features

Posted by Mike on April 29, 2015

With the NFL Draft rapidly approaching (thus bringing an close to the endless months of draft prognostications), now might be a good time to point out all the draft resources we have available at Pro Football Reference. You can check out:

Hopefully these are of some assistance to you as you're tuned into the draft wondering if your team is going to pick the next Peyton Manning or.. not.

Posted in Announcement, Pro-Football-Reference.com | 1 Comment »

The Impact of Multi-Player Trades on Performance in the NBA

Posted by Mike Lynch on April 27, 2015

Sometimes SR data finds its way into academic journals. Here's a summary Benjamin Campbell has written up on some of his findings about post-trade player performance:

"Although NBA GMs make mid-season trades for multiple reasons, one frequent objective is to improve

the short-term performance of the team. Since the rim is 10 feet from the floor everywhere from Hinkle

Fieldhouse to the Staples Center and the rules are the same everywhere, this seems to be a good

strategy. However, given the interdependent nature of basketball, trades present a challenge to short-

term performance because they disrupt the ability of players to productively play together. It is through

experience and time together that players can learn how to best play together, thus there is a learning

curve whenever a trade occurs. This learning curve impacts both the players joining a new team and the

incumbent players on that team that now have to learn to play with new players.

 

The learning curve for players to adjust to a trade is impacted by the size of a trade. For example, when

Raef LaFrentz, Nick van Exel, Avery Johnson, and Tariq Abdul-Wahad moved together from Denver to

Dallas in exchange for three players on February 21, 2002, they had less of a learning curve than a single

mover because they already knew how best to play with each other. However, their new teammates in

Dallas had a steeper learning curve because the incumbent players have to learn the idiosyncrasies of

four new, already coordinated teammates.

 

Using data from basketball-reference.com, a recent academic paper explores the learning curve

associated with single and multi-player trades on player performance over time. The authors find that

players who move from one team to another by themselves lose 2.3 percentage points from their true

shooting percentage on average, and take about 20 games to get back to their previous performance.

The true shooting percentage of players who move as part of a multi-player trade is not significantly

impacted. However, the reverse is true for incumbent players: players who are joined by one new

teammate experience no reduction in team shooting percentage, but players who are joined by multiple

teammates at the same time do experience a small (but statistically insignificant) reduction in true

shooting percentage. These effects are similar for both starters and little-used players alike.

Screen Shot 2015-04-27 at 1.03.08 PM

Screen Shot 2015-04-27 at 1.03.26 PM

The authors also show that moving with other players has a substantially larger positive effect on

movers’ individual performance when moving to teams with a losing record than when moving to teams

with a winning record. This suggests that it is easier for players moving together to import their existing

relationships in to low-performing teams than in to high-performing teams.

 

Together, the results highlight the double-edged sword of trading to improve the short-term

performance of a team. Trades may improve short-term performance by bringing in better players

and/or players that will eventually fit the team better. However, bringing in new players is disruptive to

all players on the team which erodes the short-term benefits of the trade.

 

For more information, see “Resetting the Shot Clock: The effect of comobility on human capital,” by

Benjamin Campbell, Brian Saxton, and Preeta Banerjee, which appeared in the February 2014 issue of

the Journal of Management."

Posted in Academics, Announcement, Basketball-Reference.com | 2 Comments »