Sports Reference Blog

---UPDATED TO ACCOUNT FOR FULLER DATA SINCE 1990-91 ON 3/15/23---

While the NBA has only had a Defensive Player of the Year Award since 1982-83, it has named NBA All-Defensive teams since 1968-69. The All-Defensive teams allow fans to know which defenders were held in the highest regard, but don't necessarily tell us who was considered the best defender in a given season. Thanks to the research of Josh Elias and Sumitro Datta, we have added voting for the full history of the NBA All-Defensive teams, which allows us to get closer to answering that question.

Read the rest of this entry

Late last year Basketball Reference added NBA Coach of the Year voting back to 1995-96. Thanks to the research of Josh Elias and Robert Bradley, we have now added voting for the award all the way back to the 1962-63 season, which was the first year of the award. Read the rest of this entry

We are happy to announce that we have added shooting handedness for all players in WNBA history to player pages on Basketball Reference.
Read the rest of this entry

An eagle-eyed user recently noticed that the True Shooting Percentage calculation we were using in our college basketball box scores seemed to differ slightly from the method we spell out in our glossary. It turns out we were mistakenly using the FT constant we use for the pro game (.44) in our college box scores, rather than the .475 that we spell out in our glossary and that we use to calculate season and career-level data for players.
Read the rest of this entry

Sports Reference is proud to announce a major update to College Basketball Reference. We have nearly doubled the size of our database by adding women's college basketball statistics dating back to 2009-2010 with more to come in the next few weeks.

At Sports Reference, our core purpose is to democratize data, so our users enjoy, understand, and share the sports they love. Our goal is to make as much information about sports available to everyone. We also strive to ensure our coverage includes sports that have traditionally been underrepresented. As such, we're very excited to be able to bring this data to women's college basketball fans all over the Internet.

This update includes:

• Traditional box score stats like points, rebounds, and assists
• Advanced stats like PER and Win Shares
• Gamelogs and split stats for players
• Advanced stats for teams
• Box scores for games
• and much more!

Read the rest of this entry

Last October, when we converted over from StatsBomb to Stats Perform Opta data one of the stats that we had to stop carrying on the site was Progressive Carries. Thanks to help from Michael Caley of the Double Pivot Podcast, we are pleased to reintroduce Progressive Carries to the site. Given our expanded data coverage from Opta, we now have this stat for over 20 competitions (for both current and historical seasons) including most of the top women's football leagues.

Read the rest of this entry

Basketball Reference has tracked player call-ups and send-downs between the NBA and the G-League for many seasons. Given the lack of popularity of this feature (plus the time it takes to track these frequent transactions), we have decided to stop documenting these transactions and will be deleting all such transactions for 2022-23 from our database. We will still carry statistics for all G-League players.

From time to time Baseball-Reference receives updates to the historical record from trusted sources. These are transmitted to us via the Chadwick Baseball Bureau, which obtains updates from the legendary sports researcher Pete Palmer.

Generally these sorts of updates are most numerous when our friends at Retrosheet release new seasons worth of data. However, earlier this month we loaded a smaller update that deserves a mention and some further reflection on our part on how to best proceed.
Read the rest of this entry

Over the past few months, we have significantly bolstered our Engineering team with four new full-time hires.

• Ben Wozniak, Software Engineer, joined Sports Reference towards the end of 2022. Ben lives in Milwaukee and previously worked at Brady Corporation as a Software Engineer. He is primarily a Chicago sports fan, particularly the Cubs and Bears. Follow him on Twitter at @ben_woz.
• Jonathan Moore, Software Engineer, joined Sports Reference towards the end of 2022. He attended Illinois State University and Tufts University. Jonathan lives in Boston and previously worked at Left Hook, Inc. as an Integrations Engineer. He is originally from Bloomington-Normal, IL and is a Chicago Sports fan.
• Matthew Carr, Software Engineer, joined Sports Reference at the start of 2023. He lives in Toronto, Canada and previously worked as a full stack developer in the healthcare industry. He was in attendance for Joey Bats’ bat flip and is a fan of the Raptors, Jays and Leafs.
• Joe Zobel, Software Engineer, joined Sports Reference at the start of 2023 after interning the summer of 2022. He grew up in the suburbs of Chicago and graduated from Purdue University with a degree in Computer Engineering. He is a Chicago and Purdue sports fan.

Welcome to the team, Ben, Jonathan, Matthew, and Joe!

Joe is an example of our summer intern program leading to a full-time hire. If you're interested in our intern program, we are currently hiring seven summer interns for 2023 (in Data, Engineering, Marketing, and Product). These are paid internships.

If you're a Stathead user, you're probably already familiar with the Player Span Finders, which give you the option to search player stats over a span of games. Well, now we're excited to roll out the team version of this tool to all the Stathead sports!

Previously, Baseball users had a Team Span Finder, but now the option is there for Basketball, Football, and Hockey as well. With the Team Span Finder, you can:

• Search for combined stat totals over a consecutive span of games
• See records like "the most points in any 10-game span"
• Filter spans by ranges like the beginning or end of a season, or narrow the search by team, game circumstances, and more
• Use a Postseason filter to search for Postseason spans

In short, all the same great functionality and search options that you had in the Player Span Finder are now available on the team level. Search any and every span of games to uncover remarkable records in Stathead, your all-access pass to the Sports Reference database.