We know that Elgin Baylor had 26 triple-doubles in his regular-season NBA career. However, for many years we have only known the particulars around 25 of the 26. We knew we were missing details on one in the 1962-63 season, but we weren't certain which one. We are happy to announce that we have discovered that this 'missing' triple-double occurred on March 1, 1963 in a game at the Chicago Coliseum against the Chicago Zephyrs (now known as the Washington Wizards). Baylor finished the game with 33 points, 15 rebounds and 10 assists. With the addition of this data, we now have the details on 3,450 of the 3,475 known triple-doubles in NBA history. Of the 25 triple-doubles we are missing details on, 14 of them belong to Bob Cousy. We know Cousy had 33 triple-doubles, but we have details on just 19 of them. If you have access to official scorer's reports for older NBA games, please let us know!

The official scorer's report for this game is attached below.

Below is the list of known triple-doubles for which we are missing details:

BOB COUSY MISSING TRIPLE-DOUBLES
1950-51 2
1951-52 1
1952-53 5
1953-54 1 (PROBABLY 11/1/53)
1955-56 4
1957-58 1

JOHN HAVLICEK MISSING TRIPLE-DOUBLES
1967-68 1

BILL RUSSELL MISSING TRIPLE-DOUBLES
1962-63 1

JERRY LUCAS MISSING TRIPLE DOUBLES
1968-69 1

DAVE DeBUSSCHERE MISSING TRIPLE DOUBLES
1965-66 1 (PROBABLY 12-14-65)

GENE SHUE MISSING TRIPLE DOUBLES
UNKNOWN (57-62) 2 (BOTH WITH PISTONS)

RED KERR MISSING TRIPLE DOUBLES
1965-66 1 (PROBABLY 12/14/65)

DICK McGUIRE MISSING TRIPLE DOUBLES
UNKNOWN (58-60) 1 (WITH PISTONS)

MEL HUTCHINS MISSING TRIPLE DOUBLE
1955-56 1 (PROBABLY 12/10/55)

MAURICE STOKES MISSING TRIPLE DOUBLE
1957-58 1

FRED SCHAUS MISSING TRIPLE DOUBLE
1951-52 1 (PROBABLY 3/16/52)

Thanks to the efforts of our data intern Maddy Brown and our engineering intern Clare O'Dwyer, Basketball Reference has compiled and added descriptions for gap years for WNBA players. Similar to what we display for NBA players, these show career interruptions where a player misses a whole season due to injury, retirement or other circumstances. Some good examples are Sue Bird (who missed 2013 and 2019),  Sheryl Swoopes (2001, 2009, 2010), Elena Delle Donne (2020) and Lisa Leslie (2007).

We hope you enjoy these additions.

Earlier in the week we added All-Rookie voting for the 2023-24 season to Basketball Reference on our Award Voting page and player pages. We also took this opportunity to flesh out most of the history of the voting for this honor thanks to the research efforts of NBA historian Todd Spehr. Read the rest of this entry

Exciting news! We've just added our newest discovery tool to Stathead Basketball: the Team Season Finder for college stats.

The Team Season Finder gives you the ability to search College Basketball Reference's vast and mighty database of men's and women's team stats. Search stats including basic stats like wins, points, assists, and rebounds, as well as advanced stats like offensive and defensive rating and pace. You can find information like:

1. Most wins in a season for a Men’s team
2. Fewest wins in a season for a Women’s Team that won the National Championship
3. Worst record by a team that made the men's Final Four
4. Fastest women's team by pace factor since 2002-03

Coverage for some stats goes all the way back to 1947-48 for men's teams and 1987-88 for women's.

Haven't tried Stathead yet? What are you waiting for? It's your all access pass to the Basketball Reference and College Basketball Reference databases and your first month is on us. Upgrade to Stathead today

Games Started have been officially tracked as an NBA statistic since 1970-71, but comprehensive season-level data on games started is only currently in the public realm back to 1981-82. Thanks to old media guides we have been able to flesh out this coverage for some players and teams (most notably the 76ers due to the legendary efforts of Harvey Pollack). Basketball Reference is happy to announce that we have added regular season starts for the Knicks back to the 1964-65 season. So, for instance, we are now able to present that Willis Reed started 613 of his 650 Knicks games and that Walt Frazier started 666 of his 759 games with the franchise. It is also interesting to note the pattern of the number of starts for Bill Bradley and Cazzie Russell during the Knicks glory years of the late 60s and early 70s. This information is thankfully printed in the Knicks media guide and we should be able to add playoff starts for the franchise back to 1954, as well. Though starts have only been 'officially' tracked since 1970-71, obviously it was something that teams could reliably compile for earlier years, as the Knicks have done. Additionally, we have recently found games started for the Chicago Bulls back to 1970-71, so we hope to soon have an extra decade of starts coverage for the Bulls.

Huge news for college hoops fans! You can now search D1 college basketball stats, both men's and women's, in Stathead Basketball.

Our first college discovery tool is live. It's the Team Game Finder, which gives you the ability to search through team stats from a single game or across multiple games. This will be an especially useful tool to use this week, as you can use the Team Game Finder to build out your bracket. Read the rest of this entry

We've added a very cool new features to Stathead that we're excited to share with you. On all Game, Streak, and Span Finders for all five Stathead sports, there's a new way to search timeframes. Read the rest of this entry

Here at Basketball Reference we take our frivolities very seriously. So seriously that we have made a new addition to our Frivolities section: season-by-season breakdowns of how the Eastern and Western Conferences have fared against each other.

You can see, for instance, that the West has the upper hand thus far in 2023-24 after the East won the series for each of the last two seasons. Before those two seasons, the West won the series in 12 straight seasons and 21 of the previous 22. You can also see how dominant the East was from mid-50s through the 60s, and also for all of the 1980s.

One technical point to bear in mind with this data is that before the 1970-71 season, the NBA was split into Eastern and Western 'divisions' instead of 'conferences.'

If you peruse the NBA Guide (the name of the NBA's official record book produced before every season) you'll notice that most team scoring records for quarters are restricted to 'since 1954-55', which is when the NBA first introduced the shot clock. Before that, games tended to be lower scoring, particularly in late and close situations as teams held out for possession of the ball at the end of the game. It is also often hard to find record of how much was scored in a given quarter before the shot clock as the league was generally less popular and recaps, let alone box scores, were less thorough. However, at Basketball-Reference we view it as important to attempt to preserve as many recordable facts about these games as possible. We are frequently making minor improvements to our box scores in the 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s and 80s. Thanks to some help from NBA research ace Todd Spehr, we have recently added quarter-by-quarter scoring to the vast majority of the BAA and NBA games from 1946-47 through 1953-54 that were previously missing these details. Before this recent work, we were missing these details on 709 games. We were able to add complete data for 569 of them and partial data for 62 of them. This leaves fewer than 100 games completely lacking scoring breakdowns. For instance, what the NBA considers the first game in the history of the league (though it was actually a BAA game) between the Knicks and Huskies on November 1, 1946 now has a complete scoring breakdown, with the Knicks winning despite coming up with just six points in the third quarter. Chicago Stags home games in this era might be particularly fun to look at because, as a marketing tactic, they decided to play 15-minute quarters in several home games such as this, this and this. Minutes played were not yet an official statistic, so it's unclear if any Stags were averaging over 50 MPG for some home games. We hope you enjoy these new additions.

Basketball Reference has added assistant coaches to our WNBA team pages and also created pages for these assistant coaches and added assistant coaching stints to pages for head coaches. We would like to thank one of our 2023 summer interns, Alison Gilmore, for her exhaustive research in tracking these down. This information was difficult to find in many cases, but she was able to add over 1,000 datapoints. If you notice that we're missing any of these coaching stints, please let us know.