Archive for the 'Site Features' Category

This is a very cool feature that I think too often gets lost in the crowd of items on the Full Court page: the Player Comparison Finder. We all love to compare players and their stats, so this tool should naturally be right up everyone's alley... It allows you to select up to four players and compare their numbers either in a particular season (say, Cousy vs. Nash at age 30), or cumulatively through a certain season (KG vs. Dwight Howard through age 23, for instance). It also breaks down the statistical comparison in each of four ways that should be familiar to you already from our player and team pages: Totals, Per Game, Per 36 Minutes, and, of course, Advanced Stats. Now, as we all know, when making comparisons between players across widely disparate eras, context needs to be accounted for. But even so, I think it's still fun and useful to be able to isolate the players you want to compare and look at their numbers side-by-side on the same page.

Yes, yes, I know... It's all too fashionable to mock the WNBA these days, to the point that it's tiresome to hear the same complaints again and again ("Except for Lisa Leslie & Candace Parker, they can't dunk!"). Basketball is basketball, as far as I'm concerned, and the ladies of the WNBA are far better basketball players than 99% of the men in the world. If you can play, it doesn't really matter whether you're male or female.

To that end, you should all head over and check out the WNBA section of our site. We've got the same advanced stats there as we have for the mens' leagues, including PER and Win Shares, plus standings, leaderboards, award voting, and more. Now, admittedly, live 2009 updates are not in place at the moment, so you'll have to go to the WNBA's home site for current season numbers, but for any other season in WNBA history, we've got you covered. As my friend Erik would say, Long Live the WNBA!

Okay folks, it's time for a new series (much like that which I'm doing at Baseball-Reference and Pro-Football-Reference) where I take you on a guided tour of one of the lesser-known features on the site. Today's topic will be the Head to Head Game Finder, which is a really awesome tool that is unfortunately tucked away (out of necessity) on the Full Court page. I feel like people would obviously use it a lot more if they knew about it, so let's take you through it for the next few minutes...

Read the rest of this entry »