Sports Reference Blog

Through the games of February 5, 2019 there have been 533 50-point games in NBA history (497 in the regular season and 36 in the playoffs). We have a box score with FGM, FTM and Points scored for every player for every game in NBA history. What we don't always have (particularly for older seasons) is FGA and FTA. However, we have made a concerted effort to get these details for every 50-point game in league history and we now have the full shooting details for all of these performances with the exception of three one.

Read the rest of this entry

Last month, we announced that you could now search for spans of starts by QBs, back to 1950 in the Player Game Finder. We want to point out that you can also use this feature as a simple toggle to restrict your search to starters or subs. This can be done for all other positions only back to 1999, but for quarterbacks it works back to 1950 using the "QB Started" filter.

Here's a few examples of searches you can run with this capability:

• • • The most touchdown passes thrown in a game by a substitute is five (done three times)
    • The most pass attempts in a season in games in which a player came off the bench is 205 by Bobby Thomason of the 1951 Packers.
    • Babe Parilli threw for 4,666 yards in his career as a reserve. That's the most career passing yards off the bench by anyone since 1950.
    • Among players with 100+ career pass attempts as reserves, the top three passer ratings all belong to Super Bowl winning Hall of Famers.
    • Y.A. Tittle authored eight Game-Winning Drives as a reserve, which is the most since 1950.

Our most recent addition to FBref's coverage is Bulgaria's First Professional Football League, which we now have statistics for back to the 2009-2010 season. You can take a look at current season standings for the First League as well. This data helps fill in a handful of players on teams hoping to get back into the top tiers of the major European systems. One example is former CSKA Sofia player Ivaylo Chochev, now an occasional starting midfielder for Palermo, the team currently atop the Italian Serie B standings. Also there's defender Stefan Velkov, who is currently in his first season with Den Bosch after spending 4 seasons with Slavia Sofia.

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

So your team is down 7 runs in the 7th inning, and you're tempted to accept defeat when you realize that you're watching baseball and one hot inning could change the end result. Wouldn't it also be nice to have some facts on your side about other teams that have accomplished improbable comebacks?

Well, Baseball-Reference is here to help with a new page that tracks the biggest comebacks in baseball sorted by the lowest win expectancy a winning team faced before mounting their comeback. Win Expectancy is a measure based on play-by-play, so this measure is available in full back to 1974 and mostly complete back to 1925.

In the regular season, we have 2 situations where a team was at 0.01% win expectancy before eventually winning. On June 29, 1952, the visiting Chicago Cubs were down 8-2 to the Cincinnati Reds with 2 outs and nobody on base in the top of the 9th inning. One more out would've ended the game, but the Cubs managed to get a string of 7 runs and ended up escaping with the victory.

The 2nd situation happened with the 1990 Phillies, who were down 11-1 to the Dodgers in the 7th inning. From there, Von Hayes drove in 2 runs in the 8th inning, and that led to a full-force comeback in the 9th inning, including a 3-run homer by John Kruk. Philadelphia went on to leave Dodger Stadium that night with a 12-11 win.

We also have a table for most improbable postseason comebacks. At the top of the list is the 1929 Philadelphia Athletics, who came back from an 8-0 deficit in the 7th inning to win Game 4 of the World Series, a series they would go on to win. More recently, you may recall the Red Sox coming back from a 7-0 deficit to take Game 5 of the 2008 ALCS from the Rays. Even if Tampa Bay went on to the World Series, Boston fans could take minor solace in J.D. Drew driving in Kevin Youkilis for the game-winning run in Game 5.

Check out the rest of the most improbable comebacks in baseball history on Baseball-Reference. If you have any questions or suggestions, feel free to contact us through our feedback form.

A couple of weeks, Pro-Football-Reference added a feature to its Player Game Finder tool where you can now filter games by whether a player started or came in as a substitution. While we have that data available for all offensive and defensive players back to just 1999, we actually have data for starting quarterbacks all the way back to 1950. So with that information, we have now added another section to the Player Game Finder where you can search for a range of QB career starts. Most statheads will likely use this for searches involving a QB's first career start or to find cumulative statistics through a QB's first x starts.

Here are some examples of searches you can now execute with this new addition:

Patrick Mahomes has made 17 career regular season starts at QB and continuously set "first x QB starts" records in 2018. Right now, he has a 6-TD and 587-yard lead over Kurt Warner's first 17 starts at QB. He is also just ahead of Warner and Dan Marino for best passer rating in a QB's first 17 starts.

Lamar Jackson appeared in several games in the first half of 2018 but didn't get his first start until Week 11, when he dazzled with 119 rushing yards in a win over Cincinnati. That day he set a post-merger record for most rushing yards in a player's first start at QB, passing Randall Cunningham and Tim Tebow.

Nick Mullens made his first career start on Thursday Night Football and torched the Raiders for 3 TDs and a 151.9 passer rating. That's the highest passer rating of any QB who's made their first NFL start in a non-Sunday game. Honorable mention goes to AFL-era Patriots primary punter Tom Yewcic, who got his first start at QB at the age of 30 on a Friday night and posted a passer rating of 152.6 in a win over the Bills.

Check out our Player Game Finder and see if you can find any other interesting statistics to share! If you have any questions or suggestions, feel free to contact us through our feedback form.

One of the tools in Hockey-Reference's Play Index is the Team Game Finder, and a new feature we've added to that form is a filter for teams who made or missed the playoffs in a given season. With this addition, you can now more easily find that the 1992-93 Philadelphia Flyers are the highest Modern Era goal-scoring team to miss out on the playoffs, or that the 1985-86 Winnipeg Jets made the playoffs with a -77 goal differential, worst in NHL history among playoff teams.

If you have any questions or suggestions, feel free to contact us through our feedback form.

One of the more requested features for Basketball-Reference has been a way to easily compare coaches in a given season. So, we've added a Coaches section to our season summary pages that give vital information such as who coached in that season, what their record was not only in that season but also with the franchise and for their career. We are also showing the coaches' playoff records for that season as well as their franchise tenures and their full career.

Here's a link to the 2018-19 Coaches page, where we can take a quick look at who's leading a couple of these categories. Raptors head coach Nick Nurse leads this season with 34 wins, but these are also the first 34 wins of his career. Gregg Popovich, Doc Rivers, Rick Carlisle and Mike D'Antoni make up the top 4 in career wins among active coaches, although if you sort by just with their current franchise, the top 4 shifts to Popovich, Erik Spoelstra, Carlisle and Terry Stotts.

Go back to past seasons as well and explore what the coaching landscape looked like at the time. Maybe check out Popovich's first season as a head coach as a starting point. If you have any questions or suggestions, feel free to contact us through our feedback form.

The next new country to get their domestic league added to FBref's continuously expanding coverage is Greece! We now have Super League Greece statistics for the ongoing 2018-19 season, all the way back to the 2000-01 season when the league was known as the Alpha Ethniki. We have the 21st century history of Greek stalwarts like Olympiacos and Panathinaikos. Napoli goalkeeper Orestis Karnezis and Arsenal defender Sokratis Papastathopoulos are among the players in the major European leagues that now have their early years in the Greek League covered with this addition. You can also take a look at young stars currently rising in the Greek Super League, like the current league leading goal scorer Efthimis Koulouris, or the current league leader in clean sheets, Vasilios Barkas.

We will continue to announce new country additions on our Sports-Reference Blog, but you can also get availability updates directly to your inbox if you sign up for FBref's mailing list. Feel free to send us any questions or suggestions through our feedback form or FBref's official Twitter account.

People have been betting on football for decades, and the data surrounding that industry can give us valuable context by informing who was favored at the time and by how much. Because of that, Pro-Football-Reference included all Super Bowl point spreads in the big game's history, as well as all regular season and postseason games since 1977. And now, with a big thanks to SportsOddsHistory.com, we have now extended our postseason point spread data to cover the full Super Bowl era (since 1966).

That covers a lot of historic playoff matchups that PFR previously did not have point spread information on. For example, the 1967 NFL Championship, known today as The Ice Bowl, had the Packers favored by 7 going into the game; that game-winning sneak by Bart Starr was not enough to cover. There's the 1972 AFC Divisional matchup between the Raiders and the Steelers, who were actually 2-point underdogs at home but escaped with the win thanks to the Immaculate Reception by Franco Harris. And then there's the 1975 Vikings, who were favored by 8 points when they fell to the Cowboys in the 1975 divisional round thanks to Roger Staubach's Hail Mary to Drew Pearson.

This newly added data is searchable in the Team Game Finder section of the Play Index. One search you could look for is biggest home underdogs in the playoffs by point spread, and that search would reveal that the 1966 Cowboys, who were 7-point underdogs at home in the 1966 NFL Championship, held that mark until the 2010 Seahawks took their place atop the leaderboard. The 2010 Seahawks covered, while the '66 Cowboys ended up pushing.

If you have any questions or suggestions, feel free to contact us through our feedback form.

One of Pro-Football-Reference's Play Index tools is the Player Game Finder, which can do many kinds of game-level searches. A new filter we've just added to the form is searching just for games where the player started or games where the player did not start. We have this information back to 1999 for offensive and defensive players.

Some examples of searches you can now do with this new feature:

Derrick Henry had a monster 47.8 fantasy points (standard scoring) in Week 14 against the Jaguars this year, but Dion Lewis was the starting running back for the Titans that night. Since 1999, Henry's game is the most fantasy points by a non-starter.

Amobi Okoye started the first game of the 2007 season for the Texans at 20 years and 91 days old, while Tremaine Edmunds' first start this year, also a Week 1 situation, came at 20 years and 130 days old. Those two are the youngest players to start an NFL game since 1999.

Elvis Dumervil has 105.5 sacks in his career, 42 of those coming in games he didn't start. He edges out Robert Mathis for most sacks in relief since 1999.

If you want to weed out QBs brought in for trick plays and only focus on QBs who were targeted as a receiver in a game they started at QB, you can do that now. Drew Brees leads with 9 QB starts where he was targeted, and Donovan McNabb with 8 such starts.

If you have any questions or suggestions, feel free to contact us through our feedback form.