At around 1am (UTC) on 12/3/2020, ESPN reported that former MVP, Russell Westbrook has been traded to Washington Wizards.Russell Westbrook has often been described as a “lighting rod” - those who love him will defend him till eternity and those who hate him will slander him until no words remain. I’ve been consulted to guage how people on twitter are feeling about this trade- are they in love with this trade?

To figure this out, I searched for 5000 tweets with the word “Russell Westbrook” between 2020/12/03 and 2020/12/04

I then looked to answer two questions:

The table below indicates that tweets about the Russell Westbrook trade were just above neutral(mean of 0.8). Although, we did find more positive words as compared to negative words - we can’t draw much conclusion from that since we’re unsure of the strength of those positive words. Ultimately, a better approach would have been to use entire sentences to obtain sentiment scores as opposed to words only (library(RSentiment) has a calculate_score function that analyzes the complete sentence for a representative score)