There is now a Players page which lists players for every match we have a scoresheet for. Clicking a player name will take you to a page showing all matches they’ve taken part in as well as their totals & averages. Hovering over the points column in the matches played table will show a breakdown of the type of baskets and periods in which they were scored.

Filters can be used to narrow down the results and table header columns can be clicked to sort the rows. These features provide a lot of flexibility for viewing player information. For example, viewing a player’s home records against a particular opposition team or comparing points per game in a competition.

To make these developments possible some groundwork was needed.

During the 2019/20 season I started publishing top scorers from matches as basic updates. It was originally done by compiling player scores from scoresheets using pen and paper. It progressed to using spreadsheets to simplify the task but I wanted to find a better way. In January last year I began building the functionality into the website Content Management System (CMS).

The goal was for there to be a way to get all information from a scoresheet to into the CMS and stored in the database, allowing automatic calculation of box scores for matches as well as comparisons of player scores across fixtures and seasons.

After a few months I had a working interface for inputting each team’s players and scores by period, essentially mirroring the format on the scoresheet. The result of this is that a scoresheet can be fully entered into the CMS within a few minutes and is immediately published to the website.

I wanted to ensure that every scoresheet we had from past seasons was entered in this way. The first SBL season was 2006/07 but there are no copies of scoresheets until 2012/13 and it took a couple of years before every scoresheet was routinely saved. There were 522 scoresheets to input and it took 44 hours in total, over the course of many months.

It’s unfortunate we don’t have access to every scoresheet from when the SBL began but at the time of writing we have over 10 years’ worth of past records. And having a quick and easy method for inputting fixture information means we should have a complete data set going forward.

With the historic data entry complete, attention turned to creating a public view of the information on the website. The first stage of this was completed in July with the addition of detailed box scores to fixture pages. These show tabular player information with scores per period, as well as a breakdown of team scores per period and basket type.

The final tasks were to create individual player pages and a players page. That work is now complete and the result is a big improvement to the website, adding another level of detailed information.

The data that can be gleaned from scoresheets is not player stats in the traditional sense. Shot attemts are not recorded as part of the scorekeeper’s role, neither are rebounds, steals, turnovers, assists or other categories. These new features provide a limited view of a player’s contribution to a match and their team. It’s useful to keep in mind other aspects of the game that are less easy to quantify.

Another thing worth noting is that there may be mistakes. If, for example, a basket is assigned to the incorrect player number during a match, unless a correction is made prior to the sheet being signed by coaches and officials, we must use the information on the scoresheet as submitted.

Mistakes made during data entry, discrepancies with the scoresheet, can and will be corrected if they are noticed. There are currently some player names that I know are not correct and I suspect more will arise in the future. If anyone notices an error, for example incorrect name spelling, please let me know.

It’s been a good amount of work putting this together but having done so it will be straight forward to maintain in the future. I hope these new features will be used and enjoyed by the community.