Sports Reference Blog

After years poring over play-by-plays, watching videos (tough, I know) and reading thousands of game stories in newspaper archives, Basketball-Reference has compiled the first comprehensive list of every buzzer-beating game-winning shot in the history of the NBA and the BAA. To date, there have been 772 such shots in NBA history, including free throws with time expired. I'm defining game-winning buzzer-beaters as successful shots taken with the shooter's team tied or trailing which left no time on the clock after going through the net. These are true game-enders leaving no opportunity for the opponent to respond. As Tim Duncan knows, there are no such thing as game-winning buzzer-beaters that leave even 0.4 seconds on the clock.

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We have compiled every game-winning buzzer-beater in NCAA Tournament history. Since you cannot advance the ball to half-court with a timeout in college basketball, we have been lenient with how we define "buzzer-beating game-winner" and included all shots in the final 2.0 seconds of a game that put the winning team in the lead (so either tied or trailing at time of shot, and leading afterwards). However, it wasn't until the 1993-94 season that the clock automatically stopped on makes in late-game situations. Consequently, we have included some shots from 1993 and earlier that were made with more than 2 seconds left, but which left the opponent with 2 seconds or fewer left to respond by the time they chased down the make to inbound or call a timeout. An additional wrinkle is that the NCAA added tenths of a second to the clock for the 1990-91 season, but just had whole numbers for earlier seasons. One notable exception is Tate George's buzzer-beater against Clemson, since that was played in an NBA arena (The Meadowlands).

A few notes about how this data was compiled:

• • • • We read recaps or watched video of every NCAA Tournament game decided by three points or fewer. It's possible there was a game with free throws shot after time expired due to a technical foul (or something else) that we missed because the final margin ended up being 4+ points. Same with a three-pointer made at the buzzer on which the player was also fouled or a team that scored multiple times in the final two seconds.
      • The distances and assists listed are unofficial, gathered from play-by-plays, video review and newspaper accounts. Distances sometimes varied in different accounts, so we used the distances listed in the most comprehensive game stories we could find.

    If you have any additions to this data, please
    let us know

Earlier this season, there was some buzz that LeBron James had lost to Kemba Walker for the first time in their 29 head-to-head appearances. However, did you ever consider who LeBron loses most often to? If you set a minimum of 10 head-to-heads (regular season and playoffs), that would be Patrick McCaw, who is 4-1 against James in the regular season and 8-1 against him in the playoffs.

This is now more easily searchable thanks to Basketball-Reference's new Teammates And Opponents tool, located in the Frivolities section of the site. This will produce a list of either every player your choice, in this case, LeBron, has played against, or played with. As an example of the teammates function, here's a link to every player Russell Westbrook has played with. You may be surprised that among players who've been in 50 games with Westbrook, Hasheem Thabeet has the highest winning percentage with him.

So try out our new Teammates and Opponents tool and see what interesting results you can find! If you have any questions or suggestions, feel free to contact us through our feedback form.

On our sites that cover the pro sports, we at Sports Reference make an effort to include portraits of the players being covered, as there is power to attaching a name and stats to a face. With that in mind, we're happy to announce both the addition of headshots for players currently participating in the 2019-20 college basketball season, as well as pictures for 500 major historical players.

If you're subscribed to our College Basketball Stathead daily recap newsletter, you may have noticed we recently added the headshots of the top 5 players for each night to give your inbox a splash of color. (And if you're not subscribed but are interested, sign up here!) Luka Garza, Markus Howard, Xavier Tillman, they've all got their faces on the site now.

As for the historical players, check out Bill Walton when he was playing college ball instead of commentating on it, or Tony Bennett's big smile back when he was shooting threes for Green Bay instead of coaching the Cavaliers. Charles Barkley when he had hair, or David Thompson rocking the 'fro at NC State are also choice additions.

We do plan to incorporate historical coach headshots in the near future as well. If you have any questions or suggestions, feel free to contact us through our feedback form. Thanks for following us!

For April 2017, MLB awarded Reliever of the Month honors to Greg Holland (NL) and Tommy Kahnle (AL) and has kept up this award through the 2019 season. With 3 years of the award in the books, we have added it to Baseball-Reference's repertoire of awards history. This will appear in the Leaderboards, Awards and Honors section of player pages as Monthly Awards. Here's a link to Edwin Diaz, who currently leads with 5 Reliever of the Month honors.

Check out the full list of Reliever of the Month recipients at Baseball-Reference.com. If you have any questions or suggestions, feel free to contact us through our feedback form or Baseball Reference's official Twitter account. Thanks for following us!

As part of our partnership with StatsBomb, FBref continues to incorporate more advanced statistics for players in the major international leagues. Additions have included expected goals, passing data and plus/minus, which you can read more about in this blog post. We have now added post-shot expected goals for goalkeepers, which uses expected goals on on-target shots to measure the shot-stopping ability of goalkeepers.

This information is available in competitions' advanced goalkeeping page. For example, here is a link to the advanced goalkeeping table for the 2019-20 English Premier League. You can read FBref's xG explainer as well as Statsbomb's PSxG explainer for more information on how these figures are calculated.

You can keep up with the latest additions of competitions coverage and new features here on the Sports Reference Blog, or by signing up for the This Week in Sports Reference mailing list. Feel free to send us any questions or suggestions through our feedback form or FBref's official Twitter account.

The NFL began handing out Player of the Week awards in 1984, but before then the Associated Press handed out their own Player of the Week awards. Thanks to compilation work by John Turney, we now have that award's history from 1963 to 1973. Notably, before 1970 there was an AFL and NFL version of the award. Len Dawson and John Hadl lead the way with 8 AP Player of the Week honors. The AP was also liberal enough with its criteria to award entire units, such as the Raiders Linebackers in Week 2 of 1973, or the entire Fearsome Foursome of Merlin Olsen, Deacon Jones, Lamar Lundy and Roger Brown in Week 14 of 1967.

Check out the full list of Player of the Week recipients at Pro-Football-Reference.com. If you have any questions or suggestions, feel free to contact us through our feedback form or Pro Football Reference's official Twitter account. Thanks for following us!

With the season concluded, we're pleased to report that we've added 2019 Approximate Value (AV) numbers to the site for all NFL players. Note that these numbers are just provisional right now; the final numbers will be released after the Pro Bowl rosters and All-Pro rosters are finalized. However, there's already some interesting preliminary information to take a look at.

As of now, Lamar Jackson is the clear AV leader at 26, tied for the all-time record with LaDainian Tomlinson's 2006 MVP season. Michael Thomas, Patrick Mahomes, Dont'a Hightower and Dak Prescott round out the top 5.

Not sure what AV is? To learn more about PFR's attempt to put a single number on each player-season since 1960 (for the purposes of comparing players across position and era), check out this link. Feel free to send us feedback via our site's form.

Baseball-Reference tracks various Hall of Fame predictor statistics such as Bill James' Hall of Fame Monitor and Jay Jaffe's WAR Score System. Basketball Reference also has a Hall of Fame Probability formula that we display on player pages and gives people a brief glance at where players stand based on their statistical case.

With the Pro Football Hall of Fame class of 2020 being debated this winter, we figured it was time to work up a Hall of Fame predicting formula for the NFL. We have devised a new HOF Monitor metric that we are deploying for Pro Football Reference beginning today! Here's a link to the quarterback HOF Monitor page, which also includes links to the other positions. Links to these tables will also appear under the Leaderboards and Awards section of player pages.

The base formula uses weighted Approximate Value (which is 100% of the player's peak year, 95% of their second-best year, 90% of their third-best, and so on) as a starting point. Bonuses are added for Pro Football Hall of Fame All-Decade selections, MVP awards, Defensive Player of the Year awards, first-team AP All-Pro selections, Super Bowls/titles, and Pro Bowls, in descending weights.

In addition, bonuses are added if a player has earned first-team All-Pro in over 33% of their seasons. This reflects the reputation boost afforded to players who led the league in short careers like Gale Sayers and Terrell Davis. For players not yet inducted, small bonuses are also added for semi-finalist and finalist appearances on previous HOF ballots, since that indicates that they've already been seriously considered.

On top of the base formula, there are statistical bonuses given depending on the position. For quarterbacks, wide receivers and tight ends there are different thresholds depending on the era they played in so as to narrow the gap between the depressed passing stats before 1980 and the explosion after that. For the full methodology, check out our PFR HOF Monitor explainer page here.

Similar to JAWS, a score of 100 is around the average modern-era HOF inductee for each position. All eligible players with a score over 120 got into the Hall of Fame fairly quickly, save for a few exceptions such as Willie Wood. A score of 150 would be a first ballot lock (sole exception of Alan Page who had to wait a year).

A score of 80 or above means they're a good candidate to eventually get in, or they’re the highest-profile borderline candidates. The absolute lowest score for HOF inductees would be 40, although most of these lower scoring Hall of Famers are courtesy of senior committee selections.

To get a sense of what absolute HOF locks look like in this system, here's a look at the highest HOFm scores:

As for the Centennial Class of 2020, here's how the HOF Monitor judged the modern-era semifinalists on the ballot, with this year's inductees marked with an asterisk:

We want to stress that this is especially meant to judge a player's chances of getting into the Pro Football Hall of Fame and not necessarily for "who is the best middle linebacker" debates. Many analysts agree that championships won reveal little to nothing about a player's individual skill, but it's certainly a factor that's taken into consideration by Hall of Fame voters. With that caveat out of the way, we're eager to hear feedback on the formula. Particularly, if you're interested in testing out your own tweaks, feel free to reach out to us via our feedback form and we can share the player data used to test out this system.

As we continue to make efforts to flesh out as many historical NBA box scores as possible, one of the benefits is being able to capture many of the most outstanding individual efforts in NBA history. A prior example is that we have shooting numbers for all but one 50-point game in NBA history. Recently, we were curious to see how robust our coverage of NBA triple-doubles is. We're happy to report that we believe we have details on 99% of the triple-doubles in NBA history (well, technically it's only 98.6%, but we'll round up).

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