Alright, let me tell you about this “orlando box score” thing I was messing around with today. It all started with me just wanting to see the stats from last night’s Magic game – you know, classic sports nerd stuff.
First, I fired up my browser and started scouring the internet. There are a gazillion sports sites out there, but I was looking for something specific. I wanted the raw data, the nitty-gritty numbers, not just some recap article. So, I stumbled upon a site that had an API – basically a way to get all the stats in a nice, organized format.
Then I had to figure out how to actually use the API. It involved a bit of code – nothing too crazy, just some basic requests in Python. I had to mess around with the URL, figuring out which parameters to pass to get the exact box score I wanted. There were a couple of times I screwed up the syntax and got error messages, but after some debugging (aka staring blankly at the screen and then realizing I missed a comma), I finally got it working.
Once I had the data, it was a huge mess of JSON. That’s basically computer language for “a jumbled pile of stuff.” So, I needed to wrangle it into something I could actually understand. I used Python again, looping through the different players and their stats – points, rebounds, assists, all that jazz. I stuck it all into a dictionary (another Python thing) to keep things organized.
Next up, I decided to make it look pretty. Just staring at raw numbers is boring. So, I used a library called “tabulate” to print the data in a nice, clean table. It’s super easy – you just feed it the data and it does all the formatting for you.
Finally, I exported the whole thing to a text file. Now I can just open it up whenever I want to check the box score without having to go back to the website. It’s not fancy, but it gets the job done.
Here’s a simplified version of what the final output looks like:
- Player: Franz Wagner
- Points: 24
- Rebounds: 6
- Assists: 4
- Player: Paolo Banchero
- Points: 20
- Rebounds: 8
- Assists: 5
And so on… for all the players.
It was a fun little project. I learned a bit about APIs, data wrangling, and making things look presentable. Plus, I got to see how my favorite players performed. Win-win!
