Site Features: Check Out the Play Index!
Posted by Neil Paine on January 26, 2011
This is just a quick reminder for everyone to check out the Basketball-Reference Play Index. In case you don't already know about the PI, it's a set of research tools that allow you to create customizable queries on our database, save the results, and share them with others. With the PI, you can:
- Use the Player Season Finder to search through all NBA, ABA, & BAA players' regular season and playoff statistics for performances that match your criteria.
- Use the Player Game Finder to search through NBA players' regular season and playoff game logs (since 1986-87) for games matching your criteria.
- Use the Head-to-Head Finder to search for games in which two selected players played against each other.
- Search for player and team consecutive-game streaks that match your criteria using the Streak Finders.
- Search for team performances that meet your criteria with the Team Season Finder and Team Game Finder.
- Use the Draft Finder to search through every NBA/BAA draft for picks that match your criteria.
- Use the Player Comparison Finder to compare the stats of up to four players through (or in) a given season.
And best of all, these features are 100% free to use!
So go ahead, give them a try, and you'll wonder how you ever got along without them.
January 26th, 2011 at 1:39 pm
These are awesome tools, but I find the Player Season Finder to be a bit limited. For example, the other day, I was thinking of trying to figure out which (good) players regressed the most from last year (that is, have played the poorest this season as compared to last season). I'm thinking of Troy Murphy - was good last year, terrible this year. So I thought I'd try to use Player Season Finder. What I'd like to do is: PER(last season) - PER(this season), for all players who were PER > 15 last year. Can't do it with Player Season Finder...
January 26th, 2011 at 2:07 pm
I've probably spent more time tooling around on the play index here (and the previous names it's been called) than any other site on Al Gore's world wide webosphere.
January 26th, 2011 at 6:26 pm
Hi, Neil Paine!
I find the "Play Index" section very useful, so I want to give you a suggestion to improve the researches:
Could you insert in "Player Game Finder" a form with Year(of player's career) and his shortcuts -Any, Rookie, First 5, Last 5- like that in "Player Season Finder"?
Thanks.
January 26th, 2011 at 7:43 pm
I can no longer search for teams, i.e. "1993 Mavs". It's now only a player name search. I can't see where to search for teams. What tomfoolery is this?
January 26th, 2011 at 9:39 pm
Don't know what I'd do without this site.
In player season finder, under qualified for, MP/G Leaderboard is posted twice just letting you know.
And in player comparison, when you choose combined seasons, it adds up the rookie season up to the one you choose. You should be able to choose which season to start/end at (for example if I wanna calculate Kobe post-Shaq til now).
Keep up the great work
January 27th, 2011 at 8:37 am
Stephg wrote:
I can no longer search for teams, i.e. "1993 Mavs". It's now only a player name search. I can't see where to search for teams. What tomfoolery is this?
Sorry, that should be working again.
January 27th, 2011 at 11:31 pm
Some of the new features on the searches are fantastic.
For instance, we can now see that Wilt Chamberlain was the tallest player in the league for virtually his entire career, with of course a young Kareem (Lew Alcindor) coming into the league at the very tail end of Wilt's career. We can also see the trend that teams started having towards drafting seven footers in the late '60s, perhaps with the hopes of creating another Wilt (which failed) or just for the purposes of trying to slow Wilt down, although of course Wilt also elected to slow himself down by that time. We can also see that he was the tallest player in NBA history at the time of his debut. It kind of reinforces the notion that his strongest competition was Bill Russell, Walt Bellamy, Nate Thurmond (his teammate for a while), and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.