Thanks to the efforts of our data intern Maddy Brown and our engineering intern Clare O'Dwyer, Basketball Reference has compiled and added descriptions for gap years for WNBA players. Similar to what we display for NBA players, these show career interruptions where a player misses a whole season due to injury, retirement or other circumstances. Some good examples are Sue Bird (who missed 2013 and 2019),  Sheryl Swoopes (2001, 2009, 2010), Elena Delle Donne (2020) and Lisa Leslie (2007).

We hope you enjoy these additions.

Exciting news! You can now search college football stats with a Stathead Football subscription! Our first tool for college stats, the College Player Season Finder, is now live on Stathead Football. With this addition, Stathead is your all-access pass to the College Football Reference database.

The Player Season Finder is one of Stathead's most popular tools, giving you the ability to answer questions from a single season, multiple seasons, and way more. Here's a few examples of the questions you can answer with this new tool:

1. What were the most rushing yards by a freshman?
2. Who had the most seasons with 4,000 passing yards?
3. What's the school with the most Heisman Trophy winners?
4. Who had the most rushing yards in a season with 30 passing TDs?

You can search offensive stats back to 1956 with a Stathead subscription! More tools will be coming in the months ahead, giving you the ability to search team stats and look for player game stats as well.

If you haven't tried Stathead Football, now's the perfect time! Plans start at $9 per month and there's a month-long free trial so you can decide if Stathead is for you.

We have decided to turn off the Oracle of Baseball for good. There are a couple of reasons for this which I'll get into below. This feature was launched in 2002 or so, so this isn't a decision we take lightly. We know there are a number of users who will be sad to see this tool go, but in order for us to update the sites in a number of important ways we will be making this change.

• The Oracle of Baseball only gets about 10,000 user sessions per year which makes it very hard to prioritize work to improve or modify it.
• Related to the above, the Oracle data hasn't been updated since 2021. Due to some underlying data changes it became difficult for us to keep the data generated and up to date. As I said above, it's hard to prioritize a multi-day project to update the tool when it won't pay off for decades at current usage rates.
• We are working on a major upgrade to our operating system on the sites' servers. The Oracle is a custom built app that runs as a daemon in the background on the servers and porting this over to our new infrastructure would be a difficult process even for a tool that was generating a lot of revenue.

All three together mean we can't make a business case (or even a user-based case given the opportunity cost of this work) to continue supporting this feature. We apologize for the inconvenience.

Earlier in the week we added All-Rookie voting for the 2023-24 season to Basketball Reference on our Award Voting page and player pages. We also took this opportunity to flesh out most of the history of the voting for this honor thanks to the research efforts of NBA historian Todd Spehr. Read the rest of this entry

Sports Reference has made three hires this Spring—two Product Managers to help define and guide new product efforts and an Executive Operations Coordinator to streamline company’s operations. We are thrilled to welcome:

Zach Bellavia, Product Manager, joined Sports Reference in April 2024. He's a Butler University alum and has an affinity for the scrappy underdog. Zach follows most Chicago sports teams. He also enjoys the niche fandom of professional track and field and distance running.

Emily Anderson, Product Manager, joined Sports Reference in 2024. Originally from Indiana, Emily now resides in Chicagoland after a long stint in Los Angeles. Emily was indoctrinated into following Michigan football and the Detroit Tigers from childhood, but her support of Arsenal, Chicago Sky, and the Chicago Red Stars is self-imposed. You can find her on Twitter at @EmCAnderson.

Kristiana Passeri, Executive Operations Coordinator, joined Sports Reference in the middle of 2024 after interning on the marketing team the previous summer. She resides in the Chicagoland area and is a fan of the Bears and Fire, as well as FC Barcelona, Argentine/US soccer and Formula One.

Exciting news! We've just added our newest discovery tool to Stathead Basketball: the Team Season Finder for college stats.

The Team Season Finder gives you the ability to search College Basketball Reference's vast and mighty database of men's and women's team stats. Search stats including basic stats like wins, points, assists, and rebounds, as well as advanced stats like offensive and defensive rating and pace. You can find information like:

1. Most wins in a season for a Men’s team
2. Fewest wins in a season for a Women’s Team that won the National Championship
3. Worst record by a team that made the men's Final Four
4. Fastest women's team by pace factor since 2002-03

Coverage for some stats goes all the way back to 1947-48 for men's teams and 1987-88 for women's.

Haven't tried Stathead yet? What are you waiting for? It's your all access pass to the Basketball Reference and College Basketball Reference databases and your first month is on us. Upgrade to Stathead today

Games Started have been officially tracked as an NBA statistic since 1970-71, but comprehensive season-level data on games started is only currently in the public realm back to 1981-82. Thanks to old media guides we have been able to flesh out this coverage for some players and teams (most notably the 76ers due to the legendary efforts of Harvey Pollack). Basketball Reference is happy to announce that we have added regular season starts for the Knicks back to the 1964-65 season. So, for instance, we are now able to present that Willis Reed started 613 of his 650 Knicks games and that Walt Frazier started 666 of his 759 games with the franchise. It is also interesting to note the pattern of the number of starts for Bill Bradley and Cazzie Russell during the Knicks glory years of the late 60s and early 70s. This information is thankfully printed in the Knicks media guide and we should be able to add playoff starts for the franchise back to 1954, as well. Though starts have only been 'officially' tracked since 1970-71, obviously it was something that teams could reliably compile for earlier years, as the Knicks have done. Additionally, we have recently found games started for the Chicago Bulls back to 1970-71, so we hope to soon have an extra decade of starts coverage for the Bulls.

Pro Football Reference has added game-by-game player punting stats to the site. This new data appears in our box scores and player gamelogs. It also queryable in Stathead Football's tools such as the Player Game Finder. Here, for instance, is a search for the most punt yards in a game from 1950-59. We'd like to thank Ken Pullis and Pete Palmer for contributing this data.

Thanks to our friends at Retrosheet, we have added Play-by-Play for 3,868 games from 1912 to 1972. The additions mean we now have Play-by-Play for all games back to 1969. Before this update our coverage was 100% back to 1973. Additionally, we have Play-by-Play coverage for over 99% of games in each season back through 1957. You can see our full NL/AL/Federal League Play-by-Play coverage map by season here.

Read the rest of this entry

As the 2024 season begins, we have made some updates to our Wins Above Replacement calculations on Baseball Reference. You may notice some small changes to figures as you browse the site. As always, you can find full details on how we calculate WAR here. Read the rest of this entry