Sports Reference Blog

Today is one of the greatest days of the sports year: the return of the NBA! As you get ready to watch the Philadelphia 76ers look for revenge against the healthy and improved Boston Celtics, or the latest round of Kevin Durant vs Russell Westbrook, we wanted to remind you of everything we've been up to this offseason.

It's been a very productive summer at Basketball-Reference, and we've rolled out a whole host of new features and stat updates. Since it can be easy to miss during the offseason, we wanted to take this opportunity to update you on all the new stuff you'll find on our site.

Single-Game Highs

On every player page, you'll find a new table labelled "Game Highs." This table has most of the same box score stats as our Per Game and Total tables, but it displays the player's single-game highs in those categories. For example, here's LeBron's table:

You'll see there's a single-game high for each stat in each season he played, as well as a bold row across the bottom with his career single-game highs.

WNBA Advanced Stats and Play Index

While WNBA season is over, one of our most exciting summer projects was significantly boosting the research tools offered on the WNBA side of our site. We've added sortable tables of advanced stats (such as PER, Win Shares, and more), and we've added a WNBA version of our Season Finder Play Index tool.

2018-19 Simple Projection System Projections Are Live

This isn't "new" per se, but our annual NBA projections are live! You can see them on any player's page, or collected in the same place here. As a reminder, these are per-36 minute projections and the system we use is quite basic, meant to create a baseline comparison point for other, more advanced projection systems.

Box Scores and Certain Play Index Searches Now Run Back to 1946-47

Thanks to a great deal of diligent research and data entry, we've now filled out basic box scores for every game in NBA history, going back to the league's first season in 1946-47. It's important to keep in mind that these box scores do not contain the full stats that you're used to seeing, but we do now have FGs, FTs, and, most importantly, points for every player in every NBA game ever played.

That means the Player Game Finder can now pull the complete list of 50-point games, show whether Wilt Chamberlain or LeBron James had more 30-point games, and show who scored the most points in a season against the Knicks. It also means that you can use the Player Streak Finder and the Head2Head Finder and get results back to the NBA's inaugural season.

Historic Series Data

One of our most requested features, we've added a page showing the results of every playoff series by its current state. Curious how many teams overcame 3-1 deficits or what percentage of teams who win Game 3 of a 1-1 series go on to win it all? You can check that on the site now! You might not get a lot of use out of this until April, but it should come in handy when the playoffs are in full-swing.

We'll be adding more stuff as the season goes on, so make sure to keep an eye on our social media for updates. Here's to another great season of NBA action!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 16th, 2018 at 5:01 pm and is filed under Announcement, Basketball-Reference.com. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.