Welcome to another edition of The Friday Five! Every Friday I cover a topic related to basketball gaming, either as a list of five items, or a Top 5 countdown. The topics for these lists and countdowns include everything from fun facts and recollections to commentary and critique. This week’s Five is a list of five ways to improve the great resource that is Basketball Reference.

Since it was launched in April 2004, Basketball Reference has become an essential destination for hoops fans. Whether you’re looking for player statistics and bio data, league records, team rosters, or pretty much anything else you’d ever want to know about the NBA, ABA, WNBA, and other leagues, the site has you covered. Over the years, Basketball Reference has constantly added features and data to become an even more valuable and entertaining resource. It’s also powering the basketball version of Immaculate Grid, a fun daily grid-based trivia game that I really enjoy.

Needless to say, Basketball Reference has also become an essential resource when creating roster mods for basketball video games. No matter whether you’re making a current roster or retro season mod, there’s no doubt that you’ll be browsing Basketball Reference for the information you need. It’s certainly quicker than the old methods of looking up almanacs, magazines, trading cards, and previous video games, as we did in the early days of our modding community! However, there are a few ways that Basketball Reference’s resources could be made even better, especially for people creating rosters. If it’s at all possible, I’d love to see these additions and enhancements.

1. Include Inactive Players in Roster Listings

Let’s begin with one of the most important ways that Basketball Reference could improve its already impressive and handy resources; particularly for roster modders, but also anyone in general. The year-by-year roster listings are certainly useful in their current form, but there’s one problem: they don’t include players who were on a roster but remained inactive all season. Tim Hardaway is a great historical example. Tim Bug missed the entire 1994 season due to a knee injury, but was still on the Golden State Warriors’ roster. This is (kind of) apparent on his player profile, but apart from the list of player salaries, it’s not exactly clear on the Warriors’ 1994 season page.

Given that the salary listing includes retired and waived players who were still on the payroll – see Michael Jordan on the 1994 Bulls page – it’s not a reliable guide in lieu of complete roster listings. To that point, for the purposes of modding and curious research alike, it’d greatly improve the roster listings if they included players like Tim Hardaway on the Warriors in 1994, Adam Morrison on the Bobcats in 2008, and Ben Simmons on the 76ers in 2017, along with a note that they didn’t play all year. On a related note, a “final roster” listing, or dates beside players indicating when they left or arrived on the team, would help paint a picture of who actually played with whom.

2. Fix & Complete Transaction Histories

Generally speaking, Basketball Reference is a comprehensive and accurate resource. As someone who’s gotten plenty of use and enjoyment out of it, the last thing I want to do is to disparage the hard work and passion that’s been poured into it. With that being said, I have encountered a few gaps and inaccuracies in the transaction listings. When I was researching Stacey King’s phantom stint with the Sacramento Kings – as seen in NBA Live 98 – I was left puzzled by his Basketball Reference page, which doesn’t note any transactions beyond signing a 10-day contract with the Mavericks in April 1997. I had to look up his RealGM profile to confirm the missing transaction.

I’ve also encountered a few listings of players being waived by teams that they never played for or even signed with, as well as conflicting or otherwise incorrect dates. I wouldn’t say that it’s particularly common, and there are probably more examples of training camp and other brief offseason signings (like Stacey King with Sacramento) that are missing than listed information that is flat out wrong. All the same, it would definitely improve those resources if transactions that are currently unaccounted for were added, and those incorrect listings – which I’m guessing are the result of some data entry typos – were cleaned up. Perhaps there could be a facility to report them.

3. More Wikipedia-Like Redirects

Much like a Wishlist for NBA Live or NBA 2K, this is one of those suggestions that are easy to throw out there because I’m not the one who has to make it happen from a technical standpoint! Anyway, it may be difficult to accomplish with the software that’s being used – and I can certainly relate to that – but I’d love to see Basketball Reference use more Wikipedia-like redirects. What I mean by that is terms that you can enter in the search box that will get you to where you need to go, even if they aren’t the precise name of the page. This is something that already happens, but it’d be handy to have even more shortcuts when navigating the site using the search box.

One example that springs immediately to mind is looking up old Supersonics pages. You can enter the term “1997 Supersonics“, and it’ll save you some clicks, but if you enter “1997 Sonics”, the abbreviated name won’t be recognised. It may sound like I’m nitpicking, but if we’re looking for ways to make an already fantastic site even better, this is one of them. Similarly, if there’s a way to account for people making mistakes with teams that have changed their names (e.g. forward a search term such as “2005 Thunder” to the 2005 Sonics page), I’d suggest it’d maker the search engine just a tad user-friendlier. Even some redirects for common misspellings could be helpful here.

4. Playoff Seed Numbers in Season Summaries

The individual season pages provide a concise overview of the campaign in question, from standings to statistical leaders to the results of the NBA Finals. They also serve as an effective index for the season, with links to further information from the full schedule to transaction listings. For the most part, there’s not much that I’d suggest should be changed about their layout. One suggestion I will make however is to add the seeds of each team to the Playoff Series listing on each season page. If you look at the 1997 NBA Season page, you’ll notice that the seeds aren’t listed for each series. The series are also listed in alphabetical order, rather than representing the brackets.

Granted, if you go to the Series Stats pages, you’ll see more detailed information for both teams, including their seeds. The way the results are laid out in the season pages do represent who advanced, and in how many games. Still, my suggestion would be to represent the brackets and list the seeds in the summary, just to have that extra detail available and obvious at a glance. In fact, that needs to be added to the pages for the Playoffs Summaries as well, as you can see from the 1997 listing. Representing it in a table as Wikipedia does would be ideal, but even if it’s just a listing that makes the brackets clear and notes the number of each team’s seed, it’d be more informative.

5. Complete Jersey Number History on Player Pages

As I said, Basketball Reference has continued to improve over the years, adding a ton of fun and useful details to its resources. A small detail that I really appreciate is the at-a-glance listing of all the jersey numbers a player has worn, in the form of a row of jerseys that represent the teams and their uniforms. It gets the job done, but there are a couple of ways it could further improve. Currently, when you mouse over the jersey images, it displays the years that the player wore that number. That’s great, but with players who changed their number back and forth, or had a couple of return stints with a particular team, the figures can be unclear. I’d like to see more specific dates listed.

Furthermore, while the jersey number listings on all the player pages are technically complete, some players’ listings are more complete than others. That is to say, all of their permanent numbers at the pro level are recognised, but some players have extra information that others don’t. As of writing, Michael Jordan‘s college, Team USA, and even his high school jerseys are recognised, but Shaquille O’Neal‘s are not. James Worthy‘s page notes the time he wore #00, but MJ’s lone game in #12 isn’t listed (though it once was). It’s a great idea to list the one-off games in different numbers and their jerseys at other levels, so I’d like to see the listings completed for all players.

Honourable Mention: Be More Discriminating About Listed Nicknames

So, this suggestion was originally on my shortlist for this article, but I decided that it was less important than the aforementioned five. Still, since I’m not above sneaking a sixth item into The Friday Five, I’ll throw it out there as an honourable mention. Now, I do love that the player pages on Basketball Reference actually bother to list all their nicknames. Beyond helping out with searches, this is useful information to know. It’s more data that can be added to roster mods, and it’s also just fun to look up a player and find out if they had a nickname. Basketball Reference has made a point of adding as many nicknames as they can find to each player’s page, in the name of completion.

This is commendable, but with all due respect, there have been some – shall we say – overzealous additions. For example, one of Ben Simmons‘ listed nicknames is “The Yank”: a derisive moniker that was coined for him when there were questions about his commitment to the Australian Boomers. A number of Charles Barkley‘s apparent nicknames are insults he’s drawn rather than being “official” nicknames, while Scottie Pippen was apparently nicknamed both Batman and Robin. I’d suggest that you could probably have a list of these “unofficial”/funny/insulting nicknames somewhere, but it’s jarring to see them listed alongside their most famous nicknames and official info.

What’s your take on these ideas to improve Basketball Reference? What other ideas do you have that could make an awesome site even better? Hopefully there’s a way to provide such feedback, so share any ideas you have in the comments below, and as always, feel free to take the discussion to the NLSC Forum! That’s all for this week, so thanks for checking in, have a great weekend, and please join me again next Friday for another Five.