Alright, so I wanted to mess around with some data related to Kyrie Irving’s time with the Celtics. I’m a huge basketball fan, and that whole period was… well, let’s just say it was interesting. So, I decided to dig into the numbers myself.
First, I needed to find the data. I started by looking for game logs. I wanted to pull every game Kyrie played for Boston.
I mean every number: points, rebounds, assists, steals, blocks, turnovers, field goals made and attempted, three-pointers made and attempted, free throws made and attempted… you get the picture. I wanted it all!
I thought, “Okay, let’s grab this, I want to do this myself”.
I poked around, and it was easy to find.
- Started with the basics: points per game.
- Then I moved on to efficiency: field goal percentage, three-point percentage.
- Then I got into the playmaking stuff: assists and assist-to-turnover ratio.
- And of course, I had to look at the defensive stats: steals and blocks.
Then I wanted to see how his stats changed over the two seasons he was in Boston. Was he better in the first season? The second? Did he have any significant hot streaks or slumps?
I started pulling all that data into my file. It took a little while to get everything formatted correctly.
After getting the basic stats, I thought it would be cool to compare his Celtics numbers to his stats with the Cavaliers and the Nets. How did his role change? Was he scoring more or less? Was he more or less efficient?
It took me a bit of time because I wanted to arrange data.
I also looked at some team-level data. How did the Celtics perform overall when Kyrie was on the court versus when he was off the court? I was checking to see wins, losses, and point differential.
After a few hours of playing around with the data, I started to put together some tables and visualizations. I wanted to see everything.
The results are good. The goal is to see that period in more detail.
