Okay, so I’ve been messing around with basketball stats lately, specifically from the Olympics. It’s kinda cool to see how different countries stack up against each other, you know?
I wanted to see all the stats for myself, and I wanted something I could easily play with. So, here’s what I did:
Digging for Data
First, I needed to find the data. I mean, you can’t analyze what you don’t have, right? I spent a bit of time poking around different websites.
Wrangling the Data
Once I got some good data, the next problem was getting it into a usable format. It was messy, all kinds of different tables and layouts.
- First step, cleaning. I spent a good chunk of time cleaning things up. Getting rid of weird characters, making sure the numbers were actually numbers, that sort of thing. Basic data cleaning stuff.
- Then, organizing. I decided to put everything into one big spreadsheet. Made it easier to compare stats across different games and teams.
Checking Out the Results
After all that work, I was finally able to do some real analysis. I made some simple calculations and could see it!
It was a good learning experience, no doubt. I got my hands dirty with some real-world data, figured out how to clean it up, and pulled some interesting insights from it. Might dive deeper into this later, maybe look at individual player stats next time!
