nbasense

nbasense is my set of software tools for basketball analysis. This project focuses on providing informational and easy-to-use tools for the entire range of NBA enthusiasts, from professional scouts and coaches to the casual fan. My approach is a bit different than traditional methods of merely crunching numbers and performing raw statistical analysis.

Raw information is great, but ultimately ineffective without an easy way to record, calculate, interpret, report on, and visualize that information. Providing that for end-users has been my area of expertise throughout my career, and the NBA is one of my passions, so combining the two was a natural fit.

The first and most important function of nbasense is to provide documentation, code, and usage for my NBA API PHP Library. This is an open-source library on GitHub. In addition to standard documentation, I provide a suite of tools for every request. You can copy/paste code, run examples, and even submit forms that will filter each request as you see fit, while also auto-generating the code and URL endpoints for you and showing you the results.

The second tool in my software suite deals with Draft Pick Trade Values. Inspired by ESPN's Kevin Pelton's trade value columns, I created a tool with several features:

• Provides an unlimited number of trade value charts per user, with versioning
• Displays each trade value chart with an automated line graph of the values
• Perform trade value chart comparisons, both with raw numbers and on a combined line graph
• Run draft pick trade simulations and compare the value received vs. the value returned, to help make smarter trades

History

The NBA and software development are two of my greatest passions. nbasense is about merging those two passions together into a website that provides tools and information to others.

After spending a few hundred hours on an open-source library to retrieve NBA analytics data, I didn't want to just release it out into the wild and force users to fend for themselves. I also know that a lot of analytics-minded people are not software developers by nature. That is why I built an entire suite of tools around the library, which turned into nbasense.

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