Sports Reference Blog

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.

 

Comments are closed.