Archive for the 'SR News' Category

Sports Reference's New Blog: Stathead

I have to admit that I find it very hard to follow all of the great research that people people are producing every day on the web. It's hard enough just checking the two or three largest sites, but when you add in team blogs, other stathead blogs and everything else, it becomes impossible. This doesn't even include trying to locate recent research in baseball, basketball, football and soccer.

So we've decided to do something about it. Every weekday, the Stathead blog will summarize the best research-related studies, news, conferences, and resources for baseball, basketball, football, hockey and soccer.

The blog will primarily be edited by Neil Paine and will typically feature 20-30 links to analytic content around the internet. We've been working out the format over the last two weeks, and we think you'll soon appreciate our concise summaries for all of the articles we write about.

Feedback as always is welcome.

Created by H-R founder Justin Kubatko, the Point Shares method is an attempt to estimate the number of standings points each player contributed to his team's total. This page is designed to be a quick reference for all things point shares, containing information about the system and links to where the stat can be found on our site.

A Brief Explanation:

Individual players (goalies or skaters) can contribute to team success in either of two ways: by creating marginal goals on offense, or by preventing them on defense. Since there is a relationship between marginal goals and points in the standings, we calculate the marginal goals each individual contributes on offense/defense, and use the league's ratio of marginal goals per point to determine how many points a player's contribution was worth. The sum of a team's individual player point shares will roughly equal the team's point total in the standings.

The Full Explanation:

Calculating Point Shares | Hockey-Reference.com

Hey! Aren't there similar systems to this out there?

Yes, this is hardly the first all-in-one hockey stat to be featured on the internet. In fact, while it was inspired primarily by baseball's Bill James, Point Shares also drew on research done by hockey analysts Tom Awad, Iain Fyffe, and Alan Ryder, among others. But since there was no easy place to find those metrics for every season in NHL history, it was only logical for us to develop our own player value stat that would be easily accessible for hockey fans.

Where to Find Point Shares on the Site:

• Leaderboards: Single-Season, Career, Active, Year-by-Year, Progressive
• Player Pages: Stat tables, leaderboard appearances
• Team Pages: Skater and goalie tables
• Franchise Pages: Season and career leaders
• H-R Play Index: Player Season Finder (example)

Just in time for the big game, our Super Bowl Squares mobile app is now available at the iTunes store and the Android Marketplace.

If you're at a Super Bowl party this weekend and there's a game of squares set up, this app will tell you which squares have the best chance of winning based on game data from 1994-2010. Also, if you're new to the game, there's a page devoted to basic rules that will help you navigate your first SB squares experience. The app costs $0.99, but will pay for itself many times over if you win the pool.

For more information about its features, as well as links to posts about Super Bowl squares theory, click here.

Starting today, SR's college basketball site will be updated on a daily basis with 2010-11 statistics and results. Player game logs and splits are not ready yet, but they should be up by December 1 at the latest. Keep in mind that there are almost 350 Division I schools, so early on there may be a few hiccups. Please help us out by letting us know if anything looks amiss, either by posting a comment on the CBB blog or by filling out the CBB feedback form.

Just a quick note to let everyone know there will be a brief site downtime at 4AM EST tomorrow morning. As always, send us an e-mail if you have any questions or comments, and hopefully everything will go smoothly with minimal inconvenience to all.

OK, I've gotta toot our own vuvuzela for a second here: I just found out that the Sports-Reference family of sites has been named to TIME Magazine's list of the 50 Best Websites for 2010! It's a great honor for us, and a thrill to know that our users get so much enjoyment & utility out of the sites. Here's to being your favorite sports stats destination for many years to come...

Sponsoring a page is fun, fast, and easy way to support what we're doing here at Hockey-Reference. With a sponsorship, you can:

• Show your support for your favorite player or team.
• Drum up traffic for your own site & draw in fans with a common interest.
• Get some well-deserved recognition for your support of BBR.
• Make your voice heard by the tens of thousands of people who visit Hockey-Reference every day.

Here's all you have to do to get involved:

1. Create a membership account.
2. Find the page(s) you'd like to support, and click "sponsor" (available pages).
3. If the page you want is already sponsored, click "Alert Me!" to be informed when the current sponsorship expires.
4. Follow the instructions to create your message and make your payment.
5. Your message and links will be visible on the page after we approve them (usually in less than 24 hours).

And who knows, if you're clever enough, your message might end up on lists like these.

I am pleased to announce the launch of College Football at Sports-Reference.com, the latest addition to the Sports Reference family of web sites. We have had plans to launch a college football site for quite some time, but for one reason or another we always ran into roadblocks, most of them data-related. However, we now have a college football database that we believe to be second-to-none. Let me tell you a little bit about what the site does (and does not) have:

Read the rest of this entry »

One of the things we pride ourselves on at Sports-Reference is that we respond to every e-mail and comment that users send us. Justin has done that for H-R since the site launched in 2008, and I do that now in my capacity as User Affairs Coordinator. Unfortunately, we just discovered that our technology has been letting us down for the past few months. When investigating a separate feedback problem at Baseball-Reference, Sean discovered another 150 or so messages stuck in our spam filter, many of which were related to Hockey-Reference. Those were just from the past month, so it appears we've been losing a lot of legitimate messages to our spam filter for at least five or six months. We believe we have fixed the problem going forward, but if there is something you sent us that we did not respond to, please accept our apologies and resubmit it here: https://sr.fogbugz.com/