How to get NBA play-by-play data with real time stamps
Plus, what time is the game?
On Wednesday night, the Golden State Warriors defeated the Oklahoma City Thunder. It was a great game that earned the national TV treatment it received from ESPN. Mike Beuoy’s handy preCap tool had it as the most exciting game of the night.
The only problem was that it didn’t start until almost 17 minutes after it was scheduled to begin. We know this because the NBA maintains a dataset that contains the actual time stamps for every action that occurs in a given game. The game was scheduled for 10:00pm but didn’t start until 10:16pm (and 52 seconds).
A near 17 minute delay is not entirely unusual. Earlier that night, Knicks vs. Nuggets started 14 minutes after its scheduled start. But that’s par for the course for ESPN. They run behind schedule more than any other broadcaster that shows NBA games.
The chart below shows the average amount of time (in minutes) between when a game was “scheduled” to start this season and when it actually started. I’ve broken it out by broadcaster to show you just how much of an outlier ESPN is.
On average, ESPN starts their games about 14 minutes after they’re scheduled to start. Over on TNT, the delay is about half as long. Meanwhile, ABC, NBA TV, and League Pass games tend to get underway about ten minutes after they’re scheduled to begin.
Who cares? I do. If a game is supposed to start at 7:30pm I don’t want to watch 15 minutes of a pregame show with commercials.
Adam Silver recently floated a half-baked idea of shortening NBA quarters to ten minutes to push actual game time under two hours. Not a bad idea! But the better idea is to start games on time, which they can start doing tomorrow if they so choose.
How To
Let’s get the data and recreate the chart above using R.
We’ll start by loading our packages and setting up a custom theme for our chart.
library(tidyverse) # for all purpose wrangling
library(jsonlite) # for getting data
library(httr) # also for getting data
library(janitor) # for data cleaning
library(prismatic) # for chart colors
library(paletteer) # also for chart colors
library(ggchicklet) # for rounded corners