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Today, we're rolling out a new feature on the site that I think you will all love: the NBA Milestone Watch. On that page, you can select one of 11 different statistical categories (Games Played, FG, 3-Pointers, FT, Offensive, Defensive, & Total Rebounds, Assists, Steals, Blocks, and Points) and track current players' progress toward certain milestones in that stat. On the left side of the page, you'll see the race for specific round numbers in each category, and on the right side there's a table showing where the top active players rank in NBA history, including how many of that stat they need to accumulate to move up in the all-time rankings.
So go ahead and take a look at it -- it's updated daily along with the rest of our stats, so you'll be able to track your favorite player's assault on history all season long.
When we updated the site a while back, some things slipped through the cracks in the transition. I mean, when you have a site as sprawling as this one (and I'm not tooting our horn here, either -- for better and for worse, it's "sprawling"), it can be easy to lose sight of some little features here and there, so you don't end up missing them until you need a particular tool, you look for where it used to be, and it's not there anymore. Which is a sad moment.
This tool has been live on the site since the preseason of 2008, but I'm not sure many people are aware of it yet... It's called the Simple Projection System, and it's a pretty unique feature as far as basketball projections on the internet are concerned. Plenty of other sites have projections, of course, but most of them are either completely non-scientific (read: "guesswork") or based on heavily-guarded methods so secretive and requiring so much proprietary data that no layman could possibly hope to recreate them for themselves. The SPS, though, was borne out of the same spirit that had led sabermetrician Tom Tango to create the Marcel projection system for baseball, so named because it was simple enough that a monkey (in this case, Ross Geller's pet monkey on Friends) could replicate its results. Similarly, our SPS at Basketball-Reference doesn't need to use fancy similarity scores or umpteen-thousand obscure variables in order to spit out a series of projected per-minute rates for every player who played a game the year before. Instead, it simply uses past results, a heavy regression to the mean, and a simple aging adjustment, creating surprisingly credible results with this no-frills approach.
Recently, you may have noticed that we updated the "Leaders" page here at Basketball-Reference, adding a "Progressive" column to both the regular-season and playoff leaderboard menus. It was a feature we had intended to add for a long time, and one we now share with our sister site Baseball-Reference. In fact, it's proven to be a popular page over at B-R, so today I'm going to let you know what the progressive leaderboards can do for you here as well.
After guiding Baseball-Reference's users through the player splits yesterday, we thought it would be a good idea to apply the same treatment to the player splits here at BBR today. Granted, our basketball splits are not as intensive as their baseball counterparts (yet), but they still can really help you dig deeper into a player's stats for a particular season or his entire career.
Everyone knows how we love to talk about underrated players... but how about underrated Basketball-Reference tools? Because in my opinion, one of the most slept-on features on the site is the simple but amazingly useful Linkify Tool. What does it do? The name says it all -- it "linkifies" your text.
