Okay, so I’ve been trying to get a better handle on NBA game data. Specifically, I wanted to easily check out what happens in each quarter of a game. You know, sometimes you hear people say a team is a “third-quarter team” or something, and I wanted to see if that kind of stuff was actually visible in the numbers.
I started by just poking around online. I figured there must be some website that already breaks down NBA games by quarter. I mean, it seems like a pretty basic thing, right?
I looked at a bunch of different sports sites, some of the big names and some smaller ones. I could find full game stats, of course, and play-by-play logs, but nothing that neatly summarized everything by quarter.
Digging a bit Deeper
I spent way to long trying to find quarter-by-quarter box scores. I thought, “Maybe I need to calculate this myself.”
So, I found data download. Lots of numbers, rows and columns, I opened it up.
Next, I started thinking about how to group the data. I needed to separate all the events into four chunks, one for each quarter. I figured out how to use them.
- First Quarter
- Second Quarter
- Third Quarter
- Fourth Quarter
I started running some simple calculations. I did points, rebounds, assists for each quarter. It was kind of cool to see the numbers pop up, like seeing if a team really did score more in one quarter versus another.
It’s still a bit of a work in progress. I’m thinking about adding overtime periods, maybe looking at different stats, too. But even this basic breakdown is pretty interesting. You start to see patterns, like how some players really heat up in the second half, or how a team’s defense might get tighter in the fourth quarter.
I’m keeping all my notes and code snippets in a folder. You know I like things to be organized. Maybe I’ll tidy it up and put it online sometime, in case anyone else wants to mess around with this kind of NBA data.
