Okay, so today I wanted to dig into some NBA data. Specifically, I was curious about the player stats from a recent Detroit Pistons vs. Golden State Warriors game. I’m a bit of a stats geek, and I love seeing how players perform against each other.
First, I needed to find a good source for the data. I mean, you can just Google it, but you get a million different websites, and I wanted to make sure my data was reliable and, hopefully clean.
So, I started looking around. There were several places I have used in the past, but I ended up just grabbing the data from the official NBA site. It seemed like a good bet for accurate box scores.
Once I found the box score data, I could have just looked at it on the website, but where’s the fun in that? I decided to write simple code to get a better view.
The Process
- Find the data. I tracked down the game on a website, that has historical box scores.
- Look at the numbers. I examined the player data. Things like points, rebounds, assists, steals, blocks, turnovers – the usual stuff.
- Compare and contrast. I started to compare the stats of key players. I also looked at team totals to see how the teams performed overall.
It was really interesting to see some player have really good stats and that made me happy.
It’s a pretty simple thing to do, grab some data, and look at it, but sometimes it’s the simple stuff that’s the most fun. Plus, now I have a better understanding of how that game went down, player by player!
