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Feature Watch: Daily Leaders

Posted by Neil Paine on September 29, 2009

Have you ever wanted to know who the league's leading scorer was on December 13, 1986? Or the leading rebounder on March 11, 2003? Or the leading assist man on November 28, 2004? Et cetera?

Well, you're in luck, because of the Daily Leaders tool we have recently added to the frivolities section of the site. Using the daily leaders feature, you can select any (regular-season) date since 1986, and immediately see all players' single-game stats from the games that were played that day. The stat lines are presented in the same format that you see on individual player game log pages, so the formatting should familiar: all of the usual stat categories are present, including John Hollinger's Game Score formula, an attempt to put together all of a player's box score contributions into a single number. By clicking on the category labels in the header row of the table, you can sort by any stat -- for instance, on January 10, 1997, you can easily find that Glenn Robinson led all players in field goals made with 16, Wesley Person tied Clyde Drexler for the lead in 3-pointers with 5, Patrick Ewing made 11 of 13 FT, Dennis Rodman pulled in an impressive (even by his standards) 26 boards, Kevin Johnson doled out 13 assists, and John Starks turned the ball over 8 times (hey, I didn't say they were all good categories to lead the league in).

You're also able to see who the player's opponents were that day (Big Dog's 35 points were especially impressive vs. the Bulls, the league's 4th-best defensive team), and directly link to the boxscore of the game in question by clicking on the game result ("W" or "L"). Using this tool, you can find some cool "this day in NBA history" trivia items if you want, or just look up dates, random or significant (on my 5th birthday, Hakeem Olajuwon torched the Hornets for 39 points and 20 rebounds... who knew?). So go ahead and have fun with the Daily Leaders feature, and as always, send us your questions, comments, and suggestions.

4 Responses to “Feature Watch: Daily Leaders”

  1. leopardsbreasttuft Says:

    very nice feature and quite useful as right away i was intrigued by seeing P.Ewing rank #1 in GameSc while D.Rodman was tied for 5th with a rating 4.6pts lower while having and incredible stat line that produced 10 more possessions than Ewing tho Rodman drew less fouls and scored less over more minutes but in general i'd prefer my team have Rodman's line than Ewing's as his efficiency was so high and created more attempts to score. is GameScore in general more favored towards points? and is this a normal criticism others have had. i'd love some further perspective her in the comments. thankyou

  2. Jason J Says:

    GameScore is one of Hollinger's models (http://www.basketball-reference.com/about/glossary.html). You can see that Hollinger likes to rate rebounds at .7 and .3 x the value of point for offensive and defensive respectively. So like PER it does tend to rate points pretty highly.

  3. KD Says:

    Is it sad or pathetic or sadthetic that I knew the Rodman game was against the Bucks even before clicking the link to double-check?

    Jason Caffey had a nice two-handed reverse dunk in that game and I'm ... I'm just going to stop now.

  4. Daniel Bui Says:

    Nice feature. It's pretty cool and really helpful.