How Basketball Reference became the internet’s leading resource for the NBA’s most trivial subject: Nicknames

There’s a checklist Sports Reference employees use when entering new athletes into their database, one which identifies each player’s most important biographical information.

It’s everything you would expect: date of birth, college, height, weight, position. But, atop every player’s page, behind the player’s legal name but ahead of the rest, there’s one more thing that employees check for and enter, something that now has life of its own. It’s the nicknames.

Sports Reference, the internet’s most prominent sports statistics company, is most known for cold, hard numbers. Its websites track every pitch, yard, attempt, and save for players and teams alike, covering five sports professionally and collegiately. That’s what draws the page views. But, often, the nicknames draw bemused attention, especially on social media, that has itself turned into a phenomenon.

“(It’s) any time we enter a new player into the system,” says Mike Lynch, the company’s executive director of data. “It’s obviously not as important as (knowing) height, weight, what position. But it’s part of the process. Nicknames are one of those things (we check).”

On Basketball Reference, there are, of course, the nicknames you know: Kevin Durant has KD, Nikola Jokić has Joker, Shaquille O’Neal has Shaq. You may know O’Neal has many more: The Big Aristotle, Shaq Fu, Diesel, Superman, Shaq Fu, Shaq Daddy, Warrior, The Big Cactus, The Big Shamrock. Those are all listed, too. But, delving deeper, there are countless random gems to mine. Channing Frye’s lone listing comes to mind. Under his name, there’s this one: Buffet of Goodness.

When Lynch first joined Sports Reference, Frye’s nickname was the first that he vividly remembers stumbling upon. “Nobody has ever called Channing Frye ‘the Buffet of Goodness’,” Lynch says, laughing “I follow the league pretty closely. I wasn’t aware of that one.” When he dug into it, though, Lynch found a papertrail for its origin. It was, in fact, a direct quote from Frye, describing his own game, that online fans sprung upon because of how strange and apt it seemed. Even Frye’s mother referred to it.

It just wasn’t, however, the type of nickname that Basketball Reference had first intended to canonize.

In the mid-2000s, when Sports Reference was just beginning, it sourced nicknames from many of the same places as their stats. This was back when Baseball Reference, the company’s first site, was updating statistics only at the end of every season, back before Basketball Reference even listed a player’s position. The databases were built from media guides, newspaper articles, and almanac-style reference books that leagues often put out every season, resources that Sports Reference employees were actively scouring for new numbers to record. Many of those resources also listed nicknames for the athletes, ones that players used among themselves. But alongside that information reaching public consumption for the first time, the internet culture of sports was being stamped, too.

It turns out that message boards and, later, social media are ideal breeding grounds for fans to crowdsource, improvise, and up-one each other with sports nicknames. And, according to Neil Payne, who worked at Sports Reference full-time between 2009 and 2013, it was determined that the company wanted to be a living document for those types of monikers, too.

Payne, known for his data-driven work at FiveThirtyEight and, currently, his Substack, recalls he was actually tasked with this. “My mandate was to find things that, you know, fan forums or various other sources were calling someone,” Payne says. “There was an understanding that it couldn’t be too ridiculous, but to err on the side of adding it if you think it’s cool or fun.” Lynch credits much of the company’s “easter egg” culture for adding wacky, internet-based nicknames to Payne; Payne told me he felt it had started even before he arrived.

“If you’re a fan of a particular team and maybe only you and your fellow, say, Phoenix Suns fans knew about (Channing Frye’s) nickname, you would see it on Basketball Reference,” Payne says, “and you’d get a sense of authenticity from it.”

So that’s why Frye has been coined the Buffet of Goodness, why Robert Williams III will forever be known as Time Lord, why Nuggets fans can claim the Count of Monte Assist/TO being listed on Monte Morris’ player page as something they minted for him during his time in Denver, why our DNVR Nuggets show turned ‘Mr. Nugget’ into documented term of endearment for Aaron Gordon.

Thunder backup Aaron Wiggins can explain why he’s called The Man Who Saved Basketball, although in his own words, it’s a quick story. “I had a good game in college one day,” Wiggins says, “And there was a tweet that called me that. I didn’t think it’d be that today, but I just kind of ran with it.” When he got to the Oklahoma City Thunder three seasons ago, the team’s social media team played along with it, and later so did he. Before last year’s Finals, Wiggins was even asked, directly, if he’d like to see Basketball Reference add it to his page.

“That would be pretty cool,” Wiggins said before last year’s Finals. “Hopefully, they do it.”

Now, when you look, it’s official.

Oklahoma City’s locker room also represents another amusing dynamic. The league’s reigning MVP, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, has only a single moniker listed: SGA. His teammate, Alex Caruso, a fantastic role player but someone nowhere near Gilgeous-Alexander’s accolades, has seven: Bald Mamba, Bald Eagle, Carushow, GOAT, A.C., White Mamba 2.0, The Accountant. Even if these are rather redundant, it’s amusing how some players just seem to trigger the creative zeitgeist.

The working theory, so far, is that large markets spawn more aliases. I asked Raptors forward Garrett Temple, a 13-year veteran without a single Basketball Reference nickname, if he has any. “G-Temp, Temp, that’s what most people call me,” he said. “(You get more) if you’re extra popular or even semi-popular, which I’m neither.” Toronto doesn’t have the same attention as Los Angeles or New York. Just ask Bismack Biyombo, currently spending his 15th season in the NBA with the San Antonio Spurs, who was incensed when his preferred nickname, garnered during his time with the Raptors, wasn’t listed.

Biyombo’s officially recorded nicknames, per his Basketball Reference page, are Biz, Black Panther, and La Pantera, which means The Panther in Spanish. (“I was a killer in Spain,” Biyombo explained.) But during the 2015-16 season, Biyombo’s lone season with the Raptors, Drake once dubbed him Big Bizness.

“You’re missing the best one,” Biyombo told me when I read the nicknames his page had listed. “Drake started it for me. You missed that one.”

It happens the other direction, too. Kelly Olynyk, also with the Spurs this season, had never before heard his only recorded nickname, Lunch Lady, which we can safely deduce is a playful nod to a hairstyle’s appearance. “Who said that?” Olynyk asked when told about it. “Nobody calls me that, or maybe they do and I don’t know.” For the record, Olynyk prefers The Klynyk, marrying ‘clinic’ with his name’s spelling.

For as long as there have been nicknames, there has been slander, too. While Olynyk’s nickname is harmless, “We’re definitely more careful about (adding) nicknames that could have a negative connotation to them,” Lynch says. “The bar that they need to reach to be added is higher, and some popular ones we just don’t add.” Russell Westbrook’s player page, for example, doesn’t include Westbrick, a mean-spirited epithet he has publicly condemned. Still, some nicknames are so ubiquitous it’s just factual to record them, like Anthony Davis and Street Clothes, which appears as one of his seven pseudonyms.

For what it’s worth, Lynch says, he believes harsh nicknames used to be far more prevalent. To his point: Take a look at Joe Barry Carroll’s page, or at Bill Cartwright’s.

Sports Reference’s nicknames have earned something near a cult following, and employees constantly receive emails suggesting new names that should be added. It requires discernment to suss out if these nicknames are from fans trying to coin them, hoping to earn official recognition for a bespoke group chat joke, or if they’re suggesting something that truly has reached ubiquity within a broader fandom’s in-groups.

“The Buffet of Goodness one, right?” Lynch says. “I don’t know how I would handle that now if it came through. Once it was up, I didn’t feel it was something we should take down, certainly.”

Lynch recalls seeing emails requesting that Baseball Reference add a nickname to Boston Red Sox hitter Travis Shaw, claiming he was referred to as The Mayor of Ding Dong City. At first, Lynch felt there weren’t enough references to it online to justify it. But Lynch started seeing it used on blogs and on social media, and more and more emails requesting it, finally reaching a critical mass that Lynch felt deserved to be recognized officially by the site.

“We don’t necessarily want to be part of the process of it becoming a thing,” Lynch says. “But now, this was actually a thing, and so we put it on his page.”

It’s proof that Basketball Reference will honor any nickname if they spread widely enough, and that they can come from anywhere, even a sports reporter’s interview about the very subject. Towards the end of our phone call, as Lynch named some of his favorite monikers, like Kyrie Irving’s World B. Flat and Brandon Ingram’s Slender Man, I mentioned that Cooper Flagg’s page was nicknameless. The Maine Event, I offered, was the nickname that had the most traction.

When checking Cooper Flagg’s player page the next day, I noticed, right below his name, that The Maine Event now appears there.