Sports Reference Blog

With the NBA Finals (finally) tipping off tonight, we just wanted to quickly link to some of the NBA Finals data & tools we have on the site.

• For a full list of NBA Champions, Finals MVPs & annual top playoff performers click here.
• For greater detail on the performance of Finals MVPs, check out this list. LeBron James is 1 of just 10 players with multiple NBA Finals MVPs. Only Jordan, Duncan, Magic & Shaq have more than 2.
• For a full list of every Playoff series in NBA history click here. You can also click on any series on that list to see a cumulative box score for that series, with links to every game. Here is the 2014 NBA Finals, for instance.
• If counting "ringz" is your thing, check out our list of the players with the most championships. As you can see, LeBron James has a chance to match another all-time great SF, Larry Bird, with 3 titles.
• Additionally, you can use our Play Index to run searches specifically for NBA Finals games. In the Team Game Finder or Player Game Finder, just set the game type filter to Playoffs and the round filter to Finals like in the image:

• This allows you to run searches like Most Points in an NBA Finals Game since 1964 or Largest Margin of Victory in NBA Finals History or the Most Lopsided Series in NBA Finals History.
• You can also use the Game Finder on a specific player to find things like Every NBA Finals Game of LeBron James's Career
• And with the Team Score Finder, you can find the Highest Scoring Quarters in the NBA Finals in the Shot-Clock Era. Or the inverse. Or the largest halftime leads, largest 4th quarter comebacks, etc.

We hope you find these tools useful as you enjoy the 2015 NBA Finals.

We're excited to introduce a new resource for our users to enjoy during the Stanley Cup Playoffs. This new feature contains a game-by-game breakdown of how teams in any given situation fare in Best-of-7 series.

The page consists of a series of tables. The first one shows the home team's record in any given game of a series:

Regular games & overtime games are self explanatory. Closeout games cover any game in which a team has a chance to clinch the series. Elimination games are games in which a team is facing elimination. All Game 7s are both closeout games & elimination games, so we have zeroed out those rows.

The second table is a little more complicated, but features some really cool information once you get acquainted with how to read it. Using this table, you can see how a team's historical odds of winning a given series change with each passing game. For instance, road teams that win Game 6 to tie a series at 3-3, have gone 34-23 in Game 7. Teams that take a 2-0 series lead go on to win the series 87.0% of the time, etc. This table contains the history of every position a team could be in in a Best-of-7 series.

Beneath that behemoth of a table is a simple table with every franchise's record in Best-of-7 series. It's sortable, so you can see that the Canadiens have won the most series and that the Oilers have the best series win percentage.

Finally, the fourth table features every franchise's record in the all-important seventh game. The data is broken down into overall record, home record and away record. Of particular note, with a home Game 7 looming for the Rangers, is that their 7-0 record is home Game 7s is the best in NHL history. You'll also notice that the accompanying winning percentages contain hyperlinks. If you click on those links, they will bring you Play Index query results listing each of those games. So you can easily see all 7 of those Rangers home Game 7s, and then click through to the box scores, as well.

We also wanted to give quick mention to a few other recent additions, in case you missed them:

All-time comebacks from down 3-0 or 3-1

Every Overtime Goal in NHL Stanley Cup Playoffs history

We hope you all can enjoy this new feature as much as we already are at the office. And enjoy what's left of the 2015 Stanley Cup Playoffs.

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.

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:

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.

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.

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.

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.

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:

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

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.

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:

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

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

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.

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.

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:

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.

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.