Alright folks, let me tell you about my little adventure trying to wrangle some data from a recent Spurs vs. Mavericks game. I was just messing around, seeing what I could pull together, not trying to build the next big thing, just having some fun, ya know?
First off, I grabbed the box score data. I used a pretty standard method to scrape it from a sports website. Nothing fancy, just some good ol’ HTML parsing. I mean, it was kinda messy, the website’s HTML was a rat’s nest, but I got the key stuff: player names, points, rebounds, assists – the usual suspects. It took me a hot minute to clean it all up so it wasn’t a total disaster.
Then, I dumped all that cleaned data into a spreadsheet. Yeah, I know, not the most elegant solution, but it’s quick and dirty. I just wanted to visualize some basic trends, see who was hot, who was not. Plus, it’s easy to share with my buddies if they’re interested.
Next up, I started playing around with the data. I calculated some basic stats like points per minute, assist-to-turnover ratio, that kind of jazz. I even tried to figure out each player’s usage rate just for kicks, though that was a bit of a headache. All the data I used were from the data I scraped.
After that, I built a couple of simple charts. Just some bar graphs showing the top scorers, rebounders, and assist guys. I also made a scatter plot to see if there was any correlation between points scored and minutes played. Spoiler alert: there kinda was! The top of the bar graph was so clear to see.
Finally, I wrote down some of my observations. Like, man, Luka was on fire! But also, the Spurs’ bench really stepped up. It was cool to see the story of the game unfold through the numbers. I saved all the charts and observations in a document for later. I decided to keep the document for future reference.
All in all, it was a fun little project. Nothing ground-breaking, but it kept me entertained for a couple of hours and I learned a thing or two about data manipulation along the way. Maybe next time I’ll try something a little more ambitious. Who knows? I might even share it if it turns out cool.
