Last August Basketball Reference extended its coverage of play-by-play all the way back to 1996-97 (the earliest season for which comprehensive, digitized NBA play-by-play data is available). As we teased at the time, we hoped to use the play-by-play to build out other features. In October we added the ability to break down our box scores since '96-97 by the quarter or half. Today we're happy to announce that many features that we've had available back to 2000-01 for many years have now been extended back to 1996-97.

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The 2020 WNBA Draft will take place tonight, with the New York Liberty owning the first overall pick. Basketball Reference continues to gradually expand its WNBA coverage, and in honor of the occasion we've added the league's draft history. In addition to the rookie draft held yearly, we also have the various dispersal, allocation and expansion drafts performed over the league's history, as well as the Elite draft of 1997. As you can see in the 2019 rookie draft table, we also include college or former international team, as well as their career WNBA stats.

If you have any questions or suggestions, feel free to contact us through our feedback form.

One of the coolest things about working for Sports Reference is access to the vast library of historical almanacs, encyclopedias, media guides, record books, etc. And for 50+ years, NBA books of this type have been unified in how they present the 1956-57 statistics for shooting guard Larry Hennessy. They all say the Villanova product played all 21 of his games that season for the Syracuse Nationals. However, thanks to our ever-expanding box score coverage, we noticed that we had record of him playing 19 games for the Nationals, after playing in two earlier games for the Philadelphia Warriors. Hennessy played for the Warriors on November 3 and November 9, 1956 before being waived and then signed with the Nationals on November 15. Accordingly, we have adjusted his career statistics to reflect this.

Basketball-Reference is now utilizing BPM 2.0, an improved version of Box Plus-Minus. Like the original BPM, BPM 2.0 is a statistic created by Daniel Myers which aims to estimate a player's performance relative to league average by using a player's box score information and his team's overall performance. On the site, BPM 2.0 will appear just as BPM did. On player pages it can be found in 'Advanced' section with columns dedicated to OBPM (Offensive Box Plus-Minus), DBPM, (Defensive Box-Plus Minus), BPM (Box Plus-Minus) and VORP (Value Over Replacement Player). OBPM and DBPM, when summed, equal BPM. They are all rate stats. VORP is a counting stat since its inputs are BPM and playing time. As before, these statistics are all available back to the 1973-74 season (though we're hopeful to eventually extend the measure back to 1951), when critical statistics such as blocked shots, steals and offensive/defensive rebounds were first officially tracked. For the nitty-gritty details on BPM 2.0, please see Daniel Myers's explainer.

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After years poring over play-by-plays, watching videos (tough, I know) and reading thousands of game stories in newspaper archives, Basketball-Reference has compiled the first comprehensive list of every buzzer-beating game-winning shot in the history of the NBA and the BAA. To date, there have been 772 such shots in NBA history, including free throws with time expired. I'm defining game-winning buzzer-beaters as successful shots taken with the shooter's team tied or trailing which left no time on the clock after going through the net. These are true game-enders leaving no opportunity for the opponent to respond. As Tim Duncan knows, there are no such thing as game-winning buzzer-beaters that leave even 0.4 seconds on the clock.

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Earlier this season, there was some buzz that LeBron James had lost to Kemba Walker for the first time in their 29 head-to-head appearances. However, did you ever consider who LeBron loses most often to? If you set a minimum of 10 head-to-heads (regular season and playoffs), that would be Patrick McCaw, who is 4-1 against James in the regular season and 8-1 against him in the playoffs.

This is now more easily searchable thanks to Basketball-Reference's new Teammates And Opponents tool, located in the Frivolities section of the site. This will produce a list of either every player your choice, in this case, LeBron, has played against, or played with. As an example of the teammates function, here's a link to every player Russell Westbrook has played with. You may be surprised that among players who've been in 50 games with Westbrook, Hasheem Thabeet has the highest winning percentage with him.

So try out our new Teammates and Opponents tool and see what interesting results you can find! If you have any questions or suggestions, feel free to contact us through our feedback form.

As we continue to make efforts to flesh out as many historical NBA box scores as possible, one of the benefits is being able to capture many of the most outstanding individual efforts in NBA history. A prior example is that we have shooting numbers for all but one 50-point game in NBA history. Recently, we were curious to see how robust our coverage of NBA triple-doubles is. We're happy to report that we believe we have details on 99% of the triple-doubles in NBA history (well, technically it's only 98.6%, but we'll round up).

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Basketball-Reference has added 2019-20 NBA player projections, using our Simple Projection System, which is adapted from Tom Tango's Marcel the Monkey Forecasting System.

Since we're not controlling substitution patterns, all projections are for per-36 minutes statistics. In addition to the full list of player projections linked above, we are also displaying them on individual player pages. Please use these responsibly and enjoy! Also, take the time to check out some other features you may be unaware of in the site's Frivolities section.

Sports-Reference has added a feature to tables that will make it a lot easier to compare teams and players in an easily scannable fashion. Now, when you select a row on a table, a popup will appear with a button: "Show Only Selected Rows". Highlight the rows you want to isolate, and once you're ready, click the button. The site will then fade out the unselected rows so the only rows displayed are the ones you highlighted. If you want to return to viewing the full table, just click on the "Show All Rows" button.

This feature applies to any tables that don't have row summing capabilities. This will work on both desktop and mobile. You can see a video of the feature in action at Baseball-Reference's Twitter account. You can contact us through our feedback form if you have any questions or suggestions.

And then there were five...

Earlier this year when we announced that we'd filled in the final pieces of missing information for our 1984-85 NBA Box Scores, we also printed a list of seven games from the 1983-84 season that were missing bits of info here and there, such as offensive rebounds or turnovers.

We're happy to announce that we've completed two of these games:

The Bulls against the Jazz on November 23, 1983 in Las Vegas. Ostensibly because it was played in a neutral location where newspaper coverage was lacking, full statistical details on this game have never appeared in the public sphere...until now. We would like to thank Kristen Deahl, Matt Scull and Will Weaver with the Chicago Bulls for their assistance in adding this. Thanks to their help, we hope to soon have full box score details on every game in Bulls history up on the site.

The Celtics against the Knicks on March 22, 1984 at Madison Square Garden. Thank you to researcher extraordinaire Sean Burrill for finding the missing details on this game.

As a reminder, we have a box scores with player points, FGM and FTM for every game in NBA history, but we are sometimes missing other categories (especially blocks, steals and turnovers) for games played in 1983-84 and earlier. If you're curious for a more detailed look at our game-by-game statistical coverage, please check out our coverage map here.

If you have further details on any games we're missing any stats for, please let us know.