Okay, here’s my attempt at writing a blog post in the style you requested, about collecting player stats from a Denver Nuggets vs. OKC Thunder game:
Alright, so I wanted to grab some player stats from the Nuggets-Thunder game. I’m always looking to mess around with data and thought this would be a good little project.
First, I needed to find a source. I mean, where do you even get this stuff? I poked around a bit and eventually stumbled upon a few sites that seemed to have what I needed. It wasn’t like a super-official NBA thing, but it looked legit enough.
I decided to go the manual route. No fancy coding or anything this time. Just straight-up copying and pasting. Yeah, I know, not the most efficient, but hey, it works! I opened up a spreadsheet – good ol’ Google Sheets, my trusty companion.
Getting My Hands Dirty (with Data)
So I started by identifying the players I wanted to track. Obviously, gotta have Jokic and Murray from the Nuggets, and then SGA and Chet for the Thunder. Those are the big guns, right?
I made columns for everything: points, rebounds, assists, steals, blocks – the whole nine yards. Even tossed in field goal percentage and three-point percentage, just to be extra thorough.
- Player Name
- Points
- Rebounds
- Assists
- Steals
- Blocks
- FG%
- 3P%
Then came the tedious part… going through the game stats, player by player, and filling in the numbers. It was a bit of a grind, I won’t lie. Lots of switching between tabs, making sure I didn’t mix up any numbers. My eyes started to glaze over after a while! It’s kinda like, detail oriented and make sure everything is accurate.
Once I had all the numbers plugged in, I did some quick checks. Just some basic sums to make sure the totals matched up with what I was seeing on the game summary. You know, just to be sure I didn’t accidentally give Jokic 50 rebounds or something crazy.
I think the key takaway is just to start, even if it is messy and simple, just do it and try something out.
And that’s pretty much it! I ended up with a neat little spreadsheet of player stats. Nothing groundbreaking, but it was fun to put together. Now I can play around with the data, maybe make some charts or something. Who knows! Maybe I’ll even try to automate this process next time… but for now, I’m happy with my manual, copy-paste victory.
