A while ago I found this fantastic post about NBA shot charts built in Python. Since my Python skills are quite basic I decided to reproduce such charts in R using data scraped from the internet and ggplot2
.
Getting the Data
First we need the shot data from stats.nba.com. This blog post from Greg Reda does a great job explaining how to find the underlying API and extract data from a web app (in this case, stats.nba.com).
To get shot data for Stephen Curry we will use this url. The url shows the shots taken by Curry during the 2014-15 regular season in a JSON structure. Note also that Season
, SeasonType
and PlayerID
are parameters in the url. Stephen Curry’s PlayerID
is 201939.