Okay, so yesterday was kinda wild. I was messing around with some NBA data, trying to see what I could dig up. You know, just your average Saturday night. Then, I got this crazy idea: what if I tried to find all the instances of a player scoring 70 points or more in a single NBA game?
First things first: data. I hopped online and found a few different sites that had NBA game stats. Some were cleaner than others, and a couple were straight-up garbage. Eventually, I settled on one that seemed pretty reliable. I started scraping the data – basically, writing a little script to automatically pull the game scores and individual player stats.
It took a while. I mean, we’re talking about decades of NBA history here. My script kept crashing because I’m not a pro coder, just a dude trying to have fun. Had to tweak it, add some error handling, the usual. Learned a bit more about web scraping along the way, which is always cool.
Once I had all the data in a format I could actually use (think messy CSV files that I later cleaned up in a spreadsheet), the real fun began. I started filtering. I told my spreadsheet to show me every instance where a player’s points total in a game was greater than or equal to 70.
The results? Not as many as you might think! It’s a pretty rare feat. I saw Wilt Chamberlain’s name pop up a bunch – surprise, surprise. Kobe Bryant’s 81-point game was there, of course. David Thompson, Elgin Baylor… a few other legends.
Then, I started digging deeper. I wanted to know the context around these games. Who were they playing? What was the final score of the game? Was it a close game, or a blowout? Did the player’s team win or lose? All that good stuff.
- Wilt Chamberlain was a total monster, unsurprisingly. He owns a huge chunk of these high-scoring games.
- Kobe’s 81 was just insane, especially considering the era.
- It’s interesting to see how the game has changed over the years. You don’t see as many 70-point games in the modern NBA, probably due to better defenses and more team-oriented play. Or maybe players are just sharing the ball more.
What did I learn? Well, besides reinforcing the fact that Wilt was a freak of nature, I learned a lot about data analysis. How to scrape data (badly, but effectively!), how to filter and sort it, and how to draw meaningful conclusions from it. I also got a better appreciation for just how difficult it is to score 70 points in an NBA game. It’s not just about being a great scorer; it’s about having the right circumstances, the right matchup, and the right night. And a little bit of luck.
It was a fun little project. Now, I’m thinking about what to tackle next. Maybe I’ll look into the highest-scoring games where the player’s team lost. That could be interesting…
