Grantland: How Basketball-Reference Got Every Box Score

Not baseball…but Pfander’s keepers is pretty darn neat.

Last week, Justin Kubatko made an announcement that, on the first reading, didn’t make much sense. Kubatko, of Basketball-Reference.com, wrote that the site now had the box scores for every game in NBA history — from Wilt’s 100-point game, to when Havlicek stole the ball, to everything in between. Visitors to the site could search for every game from 1946-47 to the present day through its database.

The question that beckoned was: “How?”

“A few years ago, someone had pointed us in the direction of this guy named Dick Pfander, who lives in Michigan,” Kubatko said. “They said, ‘You’ve got to get in touch with him. He’s undertaking a personal project going through old microfilm and making scans of every box score in NBA history.’ Of course, we were intrigued by that.”

Dick Pfander is a 77-year-old Department of Defense retiree who splits his time between Michigan and a doublewide near Winter Haven, Florida. He started collecting box scores while in grammar school in the late 1940s, he says. After a friend’s father finished with his copies of the Sunday New York Times, he would pass along the sports section to Pfander. “I read the articles,” Pfander said. “But what I really liked, were the box scores.” The hobby continued into high school. When a teammate learned of Pfander’s interest in statistics, he asked his grandmother, who lived in Minneapolis, to start sending box scores from the local papers. The Minneapolis Lakers were the dominant team of the time, and with her help, Pfander began extending his collection past the local papers and large national outlets.