Big data from NBA official website

National Basketball Association (NBA) is a professional basketball league. NBA games are popular worldwide. From the perspective of data, NBA is a totally data-driven company. Every game day, this company generates numerous data, including players, teams, games and so on. They dig deeply into these data and apply them to the marketing, training, drafting… all kinds of related activities and events. (Official Website: NBA Stats)

The homepage of NBA stats would be like this:

It’s SAP group who helped NBA build up this database.

NBA Stats contains ALL the statistical data (more than 65 years of seasons and games) which are totally open to the public. Basketball fans can interact with these data freely. For example, I can retrieve playoff records of LeBron James with a few clicks.

A subset of playoff records for LeBron James:

##     Season Points Rebounds Assists
## 1  2016-17   32.8      9.1     7.8
## 2  2015-16   26.3      9.5     7.6
## 3  2014-15   30.1     11.3     8.5
## 4  2013-14   27.4      7.1     4.8
## 5  2012-13   25.9      8.4     6.6
## 6  2011-12   30.3      9.7     5.6
## 7  2010-11   23.7      8.4     5.9
## 8  2009-10   29.1      9.3     7.6
## 9  2008-09   35.3      9.1     7.3
## 10 2007-08   28.2      7.8     7.6
## 11 2006-07   25.1      8.1     8.0
## 12 2005-06   30.8      8.1     5.8

The topic of NBA games is usually about the statistics. For instance, The Warriors have a 3-1 lead over the Cavs again, and the 3-1 lead jokes are back. Because the last season, Cavaliers trailed 3-1 and forced the 7th game and won the championship finally. And experts and fans have already know that in the NBA history, no team can come back from a 0-3 deficit and finally win the championship. “laws” like this abound in the game reports and related analytics. It is just the correlation between game results and some other conditions. However, people are obsessed with these statistical results. It has become an integral part of NBA games.

According to Kaiser Fung’s framework, big data is observational, lacking controls, seemingly complete, adapted, and merged. It seems the statistical data from NBA Stats accord with all the above five aspects.