Okay, here we go! Here’s my breakdown of messing around with Klay Thompson’s stats – just a little fun project I tackled.
Diving into Klay Thompson’s Data
So, it all started because I was bored, alright? I was scrolling through basketball highlights, and Klay Thompson popped up. Then, I thought to myself, “I wonder if I could actually DO something with all those stats floating around.” I’m no NBA analyst, just a regular dude who likes to tinker. I thought, “Right, let’s dig into some data!”
First, I grabbed a bunch of his game logs. I found some online, manually copied a small set to start (think box scores, points, rebounds, assists, the whole shebang). It was tedious. Next time, I’ll look for an API, swear to God. Data cleaning was next; you know, getting rid of those weird characters, making sure the dates were actually dates, the kind of stuff that makes you question your life choices. It took a little while to clean, organized it all nicely in a spreadsheet.
Then, the fun part began! I decided to visualize how his scoring changed over his career. I used some basic charting tools – nothing fancy, just the stuff built into my spreadsheet program. I plotted his points per game over each season. I immediately saw that upward trend when he first came into the league. I also noticed a big dip after his injury. That was expected, but seeing it visualized was pretty cool.
After that, I wanted to get a little fancier. I calculated his shooting percentages (field goal, three-point, free throw) and compared them across different seasons. I tried to see if there was any correlation between his three-point percentage and his overall scoring. I didn’t find anything super groundbreaking, but it was still interesting to see the numbers laid out like that. I just wanted to see if there was a connection there. Spoiler alert: There wasn’t!
Then, I decided to mess with averages. I wanted to see if Klay performed better against certain teams. So, I filtered his game logs by opponent and calculated his average points, rebounds, and assists against each team. Turns out, he does have a couple of teams he consistently lights up – which is kinda cool! Nothing statistically amazing, but hey, it’s a fun fact.
Learned a little bit about data manipulation and visualization. Now, I’m thinking about trying to build a simple model to predict his scoring output based on things like opponent, rest days, and maybe even home/away games. This might be a stretch, but hey, gotta try! Maybe using Python next time, that would be cool.
So yeah, that’s my little dive into Klay Thompson’s stats. Nothing earth-shattering, but a fun way to kill some time and learn a thing or two about data. I think the coolest thing I did was finding the teams that Klay goes off against. It makes me think about how useful all this could be to an actual team in the NBA!
- Grabbed the data.
- Cleaned the data.
- Visualized scoring trends.
- Compared shooting percentages.
- Calculated averages against different teams.
All in all, pretty fun and now I’m ready to do another player!
