Okay, here’s my take on sharing my “76ers Celtics” practice, blog-style:
Alright folks, let me tell you about this 76ers Celtics thing I’ve been messing around with. It’s been a journey, let me tell ya!
So, it all started when I was just chilling, watching some old NBA games. You know, getting nostalgic. I saw a 76ers vs. Celtics game and thought, “Hey, that would be a cool thing to kinda simulate or visualize.” Not like a full-blown game engine, mind you, more like a cool data visualization thing.
First things first, I needed data. Lots of data. I figured I’d start simple, just box scores. Points, rebounds, assists, all that jazz. Scraped some old box scores from a few different seasons – gotta have some variation, right?
Next up was deciding how to actually show this stuff. I was thinking maybe a basic court diagram, kinda like the ones you see during game broadcasts. I grabbed a picture of a basketball court outline and started messing around with positioning.
Then came the code. Ugh. I decided to use Python, because why not? It’s what I know best. I started by creating some data structures to hold the player stats for each team. Dictionaries everywhere!
- Player Name
- Points
- Rebounds
- Assists
Okay, so I had the data, I had the court, now I needed to actually get the data onto the court. I started by just placing the players on the court based on their positions. Like, I’d just assign spots – guards near the top of the key, centers near the basket. Super rough, I know.
Next I added some code to display the points each player scored. I used little circles above each player, the size of the circle was proportional to their points scored. The more points, the bigger the circle. Pretty simple, but it worked!
Making it More Visual
But it looked kinda… boring. So, I thought, “What if I could show the flow of the game?” I started working on drawing lines to show assists. Like, if Player A assisted Player B, a line would connect them.
This was tricky. I had to figure out how to track who assisted whom. It was a lot of trial and error, but eventually I got something working. It wasn’t perfect, the lines sometimes looked kinda janky, but you could get the general idea.
Problems I ran into:
- Data cleaning was a pain. The box scores weren’t always consistent.
- Figuring out the best way to visualize the assists.
- Making it look… good. I’m no designer!
What’s next? Well, I’d love to add more data. Maybe shot charts? Fouls? Also, I really want to make it more interactive. Like, you can click on a player and see their stats. It’s a work in progress, but I’m having fun with it.
It wasn’t easy but I learned a bunch along the way. Hope this was interesting! Catch ya next time!
