I was all prepared to proclaim this a valuable resource for anyone interested in professional basketball statistics, but I actually have no idea what I would do with all that information presented as hard-to-read text files. No doubt it's useful for someone, who could import the data into some other kind of program or something, but I'll stick with basketball-reference.
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Databasketball
30 Jul 2007 10:59 am
Comments (8)
Sorry, I should have written this in my comment.
Just do a google search for Importing Comma delimited text files into excel, and any number of tutorials will appear.
I'm a fan of basketball-reference myself, Justin does a great job with the site, but if you want to see what's out there CountTheBasket.com has links to a bunch of different stats sites.
Stats people refer to these as flat files. They're an easy, uniform way to exchange data with a minimum of formatting. And yes, they are not meant to be read directly, but instead imported into some sort of stats package (SAS and S-Plus being popular options, though Excel can handle the import as well).
I'm guessing these files are for statisticians and other people who actually want to analyze broad trends in the data, rather than observe individual data points.
Yes - it's patently obvious that the files are for machine consumption, not human.
Here's how easy it is to "import" the data into Excel: change the ".txt" into ".csv", and then double-click on it.
There is a searchable and sortable online database at bballsports.com that I use sometimes when being a severe nerd and picking a Whatifsports team. If I need a list of players who average 10 points, 5 rebounds, and 5 assists in less than 20 minutes per game I can easily sort every player that ever played in the NBA (and ABA) to come up with a list.
I was going to try to load it up into my online NBA basketball simulation game but my virus scanner flagged the zip file for malware. Anybody else run into that?
Here's the game for anybody interested ...
http://www.kesslerfreedman.com/classichoops/
Revise that - the warning was for the http://www.databasebasketball.com/favicon.ico file (win32 nimda drp).
Comments closed August 13, 2007.
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Heads in the Sand
It is very easy to import the data into excel. I don't know what I would do with such data, but the process of importing it into Excel, Access or another spreadsheet or DB program is really simple.
Posted by tomboy | July 30, 2007 11:17 AM