Python Sports Analytics Made Simple (Part 1) — Creating a public sports API

Python Sports Analytics Made Simple (Part 1) — Creating a public sports API

Python Sports Analytics Made Simple (Part 2) — Pull any sports metric in 10 lines of Python

Welcome to this two-part series where I demonstrate how to pull thousands of sports metrics with just a few lines of Python.

In the first part, I detail the steps I took to create a public API to make this possible. For those looking to dive right into the code, you can skip straight to the second article linked above for installation instructions and code samples.

In the beginning…

As a budding Software Engineer and sports enthusiast, I found myself wanting to marry these two passions of mine while studying in college. To achieve this desire, I dreamt up a project of a machine-learning algorithm that could predict the outcomes of college basketball games better than a human could. My idea was quickly thwarted, however, at the starting point of all data science projects — finding a good data source.

Everyone has a different definition of “good”, especially when it comes to these kinds of projects where success is measured almost exclusively on how “good” the data is. Being a cheap college student who scoffed at…