Okay, so I’m gonna walk you through how I tracked Tremont Waters’ schedule and results. It was a bit of a deep dive, but totally worth it for my fantasy league!
First things first: Data Sources. I started by scouring the official NBA website. They usually have game schedules and box scores pretty up-to-date. But, sometimes their search function is a pain. So, I also hit up ESPN’s NBA section. ESPN is pretty good with real-time updates and breaking news. I also checked a couple of sports news aggregators, just to make sure I wasn’t missing anything.
Next, I figured I couldn’t rely on just looking at the NBA site all the time. So I decided to try some sports data APIs. These things let you grab structured data that you can actually use in your own code. I signed up for a free trial with one (I won’t name it) to see if it was worth it.
Scraping Time (the not-so-fun part): When the API thing didn’t pan out as easily as I hoped, I reluctantly dipped my toes into web scraping. I used Python with Beautiful Soup and Requests. I basically wrote a script to pull the data I needed from the NBA and ESPN sites. It’s kinda messy ’cause the website layouts always change, so I had to keep tweaking the code.
Data Wrangling: This is where the magic (or the boredom) happens. I had a bunch of messy data, and I needed to clean it up. Think fixing typos, standardizing date formats, and making sure player names were consistent. I mainly used Pandas in Python for this. Pandas is seriously a lifesaver when it comes to working with tabular data.
Building My Own Schedule & Results Table: Okay, so now I had clean data! I built a simple table with the game date, opponent, and the result (win or loss). I also added a column for Tremont Waters’ stats (points, assists, rebounds, etc.). I used Google Sheets at first, just to visualize everything. But eventually, I moved it all to a local SQLite database. Just felt cleaner.
Automating the Process: Manually updating this stuff was a total time-suck. So, I set up a cron job to run my Python script every day. It would automatically fetch the latest data, update my table, and send me a notification if Tremont Waters had a crazy game.
Visualizing the Data: Numbers are cool, but charts are cooler! I started using Matplotlib in Python to create some simple graphs. Things like points per game over time, shooting percentages, etc. It helped me get a better feel for Tremont’s performance trends.
Fantasy League Domination (hopefully): All this work was ultimately to help me make better decisions in my fantasy league. I could quickly see when Tremont was on a hot streak, who he performed well against, and use that to my advantage.
- Challenges: Website layouts change constantly, so my scraper kept breaking. Data cleaning is tedious but crucial. API costs can add up quick.
- Learnings: Web scraping is a useful skill, but it’s also a constant game of cat and mouse. Pandas is your best friend for data analysis. Automation is key to saving time.
Hopefully, this gives you a sense of how I tracked Tremont Waters’ schedule and results. It was a fun project, and I learned a lot along the way. Now, time to go win that fantasy league!
