The internet is a great place for extracting valuable sports-related statistical information.
Here I will put the links to all the awesome websites that I use to extract information from. Now, I was thinking about calling the websites “the bible of… whatever”, but there are two problems with that:
1) It will be boring as fuck to call all the sites “the bible of…”.
2) I’m an atheist. And so, depsite the fact that I recognize the unparalleled influece the bible had on mankind, I prefer to highlight some other books.
Therefore, I will honor the websites with (mostly) my favorite books ever. And yes, this is the place to admit that I’m actually quite a bookworm. So without freddy adu, here we go:
Basketball-Reference
http://www.basketball-reference.com
The “War & Peace” of sports stats. Hands down, THE best website that has to do with NBA related statistics. “War & Peace” is one hell of a candidate for the greatest novel ever written, and my personal all-time favorite – it shares my all-time number one spot with “Lolita”.
And similarly, basketball-reference is one of my all-time favorite websites. I discovered it many years ago, when it was still black & white and next to each player’s season was a legend that said whether the player was an all-star, an all-nbaer (hey, this word is fine with the blog and therefore it should be fine by you as well), and an MVPer during that season. And when I first discovered it, I knew that this was what I’be been looking for all my life. The holy grail of NBA statistics, the el dorado of stats-nerds. And this is exactly how I felt when I read “War & Peace”.
The website changed since then, but it only got better, adding many more cool stats and features such as the season finder. One can spend hours browsing it. Literally. Trust me, I’ve been there.
NBA.com
The “Dan Brown” of sports stats. The heart of the mainstream. However, even though it is the mainstream, I don’t think this is the best the internet can offer. Yes, it is an awesome site, and since I set it as my homepage when I was 14 years old, I keep doing it ever since, for the sake of tradition. But franky, I don’t really like their stats section. True, they expanded it a great deal and now it probably has everything that you can ask for, but the design is cumbersome and I really hate using it. I don’t see why anyone would prefer to use it over basketball-reference. This is similar to Dan Brown books – I used to like them a lot when I was 17-18, and I read all of his first four novels, but during the fourth I got bored due to him using the same plot twists and basically the same formula for all his books. Haven’t read anything he wrote since then. Although I do visit the NBA.com stats page every now and then…
Bill Simmons
http://grantland.com/contributors/bill-simmons/
The “Harry Potter” of sports. Yes, sports and not sports-stats, since this is not a stats website. The comparison to Harry Potter is not done in order to dimish Simmons’ contribution. The “Harry Potter” books are amongst my all-time favorites. I was first introduced to them at age 13, and I can’t count the number of times I read this whole series since then. They have a very special place in my heart. And so does Simmons, but in a different way of course. I really love the way Simmons writes, and his loooong columns were an inspiration to me and reduced my fear of writing long posts myself.
Simmons is my favorite sports columnist, and even though his grantland site is awesome on its own, and I generally check to see what other interesting stuff they have there, Bill’s page is the first one I always visit. His book on basketball is obviously also a great read. Simmons is immensely popular, in the heart of the mainstream, and still I have great respect for him. Copy+Paste that to Harry.
Real GM Basketball
http://basketball.realgm.com/nba/awards
The “A Tale of Two Cities” of sports stats. Why is that? Because I only loved a specific part of Dickens’ classic. I didn’t like the first, I don’t know, two-thirds of the book, but I struggled through it, only to enjoy greatly the last third – which takes place in France, which was really great and very touching.
Real GM’s site works in a similar way. I only use it to extract stats about the various awards the NBA is giving out. They have a very nice “Players of the week” section, for instance, which is better than its analogue on the basketball-reference site, because it gets updated more quickly. And it also offers some other cool stuff too, like draft years and experience in the league of the recipients, etc. So yeah, a cool section which I really like in a website I don’t like in particular.
Track and Field all-time Performances
http://www.alltime-athletics.com/index.html
The “Don Quixote” of sports stats. The most awesome site EVER for track & field results. Much, MUCH better than the all-time lists they have on the official iaaf.org. While iaaf only gives you a ceratin number of best results from the same athlete and then says “fuck it” and shows only one result per athlete, this site shows ALL OF THEM.
It’s design is very minimalistic, almost pre-historic like. One can take this website with him, go back in time and put it on the 1999 internet, and people won’t notice. But hey, why do you need some ultra-modern design? Similarly to “Don Quixote”, anotehr book that is in my all-time top, this site stayed with us for a very long time, and guess what – it still works pefectly.
RSSSF
The ” The Alchemist” of sports stats. This is a site about Football stats, and after I discovered it, many years ago, I spent so much time surfing through its contents… It has all these awesome stats that you wouldn’t even dream of, like “the most competitive leagues ever”… Despite its very simple design (it would also fit nicely on the 1999 internet), It was really THE best site for football stats for me once. But then it stopped getting updated and became really irrelevant, after you already read all the cool stuff that was in it (and there’s a lot of it there!).
I compare it with Coelho’s “Alchemist” because I really fell in love with this book when I read it for the first time. I counted it as one of my top-5 books for several years, before reading it again (and again) and realizing it’s not that great of a read after all… So it has lost its importance over the years, similarly to the RSSSF site.
SwimNews
http://swimnews.com/rank/index
The “Stoner” of sports stats. A relative unknown, this site has everything a swimming enthusiast should want. A rankings of all the best results all-time – by swimmer or by results. “Stoner” by John Williams is also a relative unknown, but this very minimalistic book captured me from its first couple of pages, and I simply couldn’t lay it down. A masterpiece which details the life of an academic who lives a very mediocre life, but the description of it is so touching that you cannot stay indifferent to it. A real suprise it was to me, and so was this awesome website.
Fight Matrix
The “Lolita” of sports stats. Well, not it the sense that it it one of my two favorite websites ever but in the sense of controversy. “Lolita” was a highly controversial book when it came out, and so was MMA in its early days. But nowadays the situation is different. “Lolita” is a must on every top-10 list of 20th century books, and MMA has become a mainstream sport, with events being broadcast on Fox and its top athletes being sponsored by companies such as Nike.
Fight Matrix is an awesome website on almost everything related to UFC. It has lists of many UFC records, such as win streaks and most title fights. AND it offers some general MMA records and statistics. Wanna know who had the longest MMA career in terms of years??? Click and find out!
Now, I had one more MMA-related website on this list, Fight-Metric. It used to be a very good website with lots of information about all kinds of UFC records, such as all-time leaders in takedowns, significant punches landed and total fight time. It was really awesome. But now I checked it after a long time, and I was like Eddy Murphy in “Beverly Hills Cop”: “You changed, man!”. What the fuck happened to that website?! It definitely doesn’t deserve a place on this list anymore…
Anyway, I’ll add more websites to this list if they’ll prove themselves worthy of being included in it.
Michael's Sports Statistics 