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.
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 |
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 |