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logs
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playbyplay
playbyplay
 
 
01-get-game-logs.ipynb
01-get-game-logs.ipynb
 
 
02-get-play-by-play.ipynb
02-get-play-by-play.ipynb
 
 
README.md
README.md
 
 

README.md

Data collection

This folder contains all NBA game logs (since 1950) and play-by-play data (since 1997).

Thanks to Swar Patel and all those who have contributed to the nba_api python package. It makes grabbing stats.nba.com data incredibly easy.

There is one hurdle to the data collection: The API for stats.nba.com is rate-limited, meaning you can only make a certain number of requests in a given time period. (I don't know what the number or the length of time is.) To get around this, I made sure to not to make the same call twice in my python code by checking if the output file existed already. A library like requests_cache for python can also help with this process.

Still, it took a couple of days to get all 27,000-plus data files. So I posted them here for others to use.

The code that gathered the data is in two python scripts.

Game logs

01-get-game-logs.ipynb writes one game log for each season.

For every game, there is a line for each team. Here's what the top of the 2018-19 log looks like:

SEASON_ID TEAM_ID TEAM_ABBREVIATION TEAM_NAME GAME_ID GAME_DATE MATCHUP WL MIN FGM FGA FG_PCT FG3M FG3A FG3_PCT FTM FTA FT_PCT OREB DREB REB AST STL BLK TOV PF PTS PLUS_MINUS VIDEO_AVAILABLE
22018 1610612744 GSW Golden State Warriors 21800002 2018-10-16 GSW vs. OKC W 240 42 95 0.442 7 26 0.269 17 18 0.944 17 41 58 28 7 7 21 29 108 8 1
22018 1610612760 OKC Oklahoma City Thunder 21800002 2018-10-16 OKC @ GSW L 240 33 91 0.363 10 37 0.27 24 37 0.649 16 29 45 21 12 6 15 21 100 -8 1
22018 1610612755 PHI Philadelphia 76ers 21800001 2018-10-16 PHI @ BOS L 240 34 87 0.391 5 26 0.192 14 23 0.609 6 41 47 18 8 5 16 20 87 -18 1
22018 1610612738 BOS Boston Celtics 21800001 2018-10-16 BOS vs. PHI W 240 42 97 0.433 11 37 0.297 10 14 0.714 12 43 55 21 7 5 15 20 105 18 1

Play-by-play

02-get-play-by-play.ipynb grabs the play-by-play data for every game in every season.

The stats.nba.com API is rate-limited, though it remains unclear to me how many requests it takes to hit the limit. This code doesn't hit the API if a file containing that game ID's play-by-play data already exists, to avoid repeated requests.

Here's what the top of play-by-play looks like for the opening game of the 2018-19 season between the Boston Celtics and Philadelphia 76ers:

GAME_ID EVENTNUM EVENTMSGTYPE EVENTMSGACTIONTYPE PERIOD WCTIMESTRING PCTIMESTRING HOMEDESCRIPTION NEUTRALDESCRIPTION VISITORDESCRIPTION SCORE SCOREMARGIN
21800001 2 12 0 1 8:03 PM 12:00
21800001 4 10 0 1 8:03 PM 12:00 Jump Ball Horford vs. Embiid: Tip to Simmons
21800001 7 2 1 1 8:03 PM 11:40 MISS Covington 27' 3PT Jump Shot
21800001 8 4 0 1 8:04 PM 11:40 CELTICS Rebound
21800001 10 2 1 1 8:04 PM 11:15 MISS Tatum 25' 3PT Jump Shot