Appendix to report
The website gives us various forms of the dataset, allowing us to choose between different formats, such as Excel workbook or CSV. We settled on using the data formatted as a CSV since it is the format we are the most comfortable with using. The website does not automatically download the data as a file, rather it produces a long string of text representing the data in the CSV format. From this you can copy the data.
Through my command line interface (terminal) I created a CSV file and edited this file using VIM. After pasting the copied data from the website, I opened this CSV file in Excel. We could see that there were unnecessary empty rows or empty columns that held no real data and were present for only formatting. These were easily removed using Excel as we predicted trying to read that CSV file with R may have raised errors / issues.
There were also rows in the dataset that indicated the start / end of each basketball season that would affect our analysis therefore those were also removed. We noticed that our research questions did not rely on exact seasons therefore changing our dataset to include this information was not necessary as each row does include the date of the game which allows us to visualize a timeline for these games if needed in the future.
Our dataset includes NA values because a lot of our variables are numerical values, therefore it would be hard and unnecessary to assign numerical values to NA as they would start to misrepresent the data. For instance, lets consider an example where a player who made a buzzer beater shot does not have data about how many free throws they made that game. We can not assume that value is zero because it could be possible that the player did make free throws but that data was unable to be recorded.
There are player names that include special characters due to the formatting on the website, there is a trend that these characters came after a space after the player’s last name therefore we could split by the space and remove those characters. Similarly there is a ‘p’ after the date of a Game if that game was a playoff game that we can remove in a similar fashion. The Margin column is represented mostly by numbers except when the game was tied before the buzzer beater shot. Therefore we can replace each instance of “tied” with the numerical value 0. Similarly for Distance we can replace “At Rim” with 0.
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$ Player <chr> "Daniel Gafford", "Trae Young ", "Wendell Carter Jr.", "Sadd…
$ Game <chr> "Mar 7 2023", "Feb 26 2023", "Feb 23 2023", "Jan 4 2023", "Ja…
$ Team <chr> "WAS", "ATL", "ORL", "DET", "GSW", "MIA", "CHI", "OKC", "BRK"…
$ Opp <chr> "DET", "BRK", "DET", "GSW", "ATL", "UTA", "ATL", "POR", "TOR"…
$ Margin <dbl> 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, -1, -2, 0, 0, 0, 0, -1, -1, -2, -1…
$ Type <chr> "2-pt FG", "2-pt FG", "2-pt FG", "3-pt FG", "2-pt FG", "3-pt …
$ Assisted <chr> "unassisted", "unassisted", "unassisted", "K. Hayes", "unassi…
$ Distance <dbl> 0, 12, 0, 28, 0, 25, 0, 14, 27, 6, 25, 1, 23, 31, 13, 0, 26, …
$ MP <chr> "24:38:00", "33:48:00", "31:46:00", "28:46:00", "32:25:00", "…
$ PTS <int> 8, 34, 14, 17, 14, 29, 9, 35, 32, 17, 12, 17, 12, 37, 30, 31,…
$ FG <int> 4, 12, 5, 6, 4, 10, 4, 10, 13, 7, 4, 8, 3, 14, 10, 9, 6, 11, …
$ FGA <int> 5, 26, 13, 17, 8, 20, 6, 24, 22, 17, 8, 15, 5, 24, 17, 18, 14…
$ FG. <dbl> 0.800, 0.462, 0.385, 0.353, 0.500, 0.500, 0.667, 0.417, 0.591…
$ X3P <int> 0, 1, 0, 4, 0, 3, 1, 1, 3, 2, 4, 1, 1, 2, 1, 3, 2, 9, 4, 2, 4…
$ X3PA <int> 0, 5, 3, 10, 0, 11, 3, 1, 9, 11, 7, 6, 3, 7, 3, 7, 6, 12, 5, …
$ X3P. <dbl> NA, 0.200, 0.000, 0.400, NA, 0.273, 0.333, 1.000, 0.333, 0.18…
$ FT <int> 0, 9, 4, 1, 6, 6, 0, 14, 3, 1, 0, 0, 5, 7, 9, 10, 8, 7, 2, 3,…
$ FTA <int> 0, 9, 6, 1, 8, 7, 0, 14, 3, 1, 0, 0, 7, 7, 11, 12, 8, 8, 2, 3…
$ FT. <dbl> NA, 1.000, 0.667, 1.000, 0.750, 0.857, NA, 1.000, 1.000, 1.00…
$ TRB <int> 7, 3, 14, 3, 20, 9, 3, 2, 3, 2, 4, 5, 9, 5, 2, 4, 4, 2, 8, 4,…
$ AST <int> 1, 8, 2, 1, 4, 6, 2, 6, 5, 2, 1, 1, 8, 3, 5, 8, 3, 0, 3, 6, 1…
$ STL <int> 1, 2, 1, 2, 0, 2, 2, 1, 0, 0, 1, 1, 2, 1, 0, 1, 3, 1, 2, 0, 1…
$ BLK <int> 1, 0, 2, 0, 1, 0, 0, 2, 0, 1, 2, 1, 0, 0, 1, 2, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1…
$ GmSc <dbl> 7.8, 24.7, 14.3, 11.1, 21.1, 20.9, 9.3, 26.6, 24.0, 8.8, 9.1,…