u/CaptainScuttlebottom

https://preview.redd.it/y00a19qymq0h1.png?width=1071&format=png&auto=webp&s=7ebcd67711f3ddef9eb3a2b9629bc2f6c1dbcd87

Just for fun, I've been attempting to scrape all the comments and posts from r/NBA throughout this entire season, enabling me to calculate fun stats like:

That last report includes the graph in this post: it breaks each game thread down into ten minute chunks, and counts how many comments people left in each chunk. Each one kind of represents a "moment" from the game, and "bigger" moments tend to draw more comments, so it's a neat way to visualize the flow of the game, especially when you break it down by flair.

As you can see, Wemby's elbow in the second quarter of Game 4 is the biggest single spike on the graph. If you look at the y-axis, you'll see that it spike all the way up past 3,000 comments, meaning about 20% of the comments in the whole thread happened in this one ten-minute span. Pretty nuts!

I started wondering what it would look like if I analyzed these chunks across the entire playoffs, to create a kind of "top 5 biggest playoff moments" list and see where The Elbow ranked. The result was the table below, which shows the top 5 chunks by total number of comments:

Table: Top 5 most active 10-minute windows across all playoff game threads

Series	Game #	Round	Comments in 10-min Window	Thread Total	% of Thread	Top Words
Nuggets vs Timberwolves	Game 6	First Round	3,164	15,563	20.3%	jokic, mcdaniels, murray, jaden, series
Spurs vs Timberwolves	Game 4	Second Round	3,119	15,828	19.7%	wemby, flagrant, elbow, call, refs
76ers vs Celtics	Game 7	First Round	3,077	19,359	15.9%	embiid, brown, maxey, net, refs
76ers vs Celtics	Game 7	First Round	2,438	19,359	12.6%	challenge, foul, refs, embiid, lmao
76ers vs Celtics	Game 7	First Round	2,344	19,359	12.1%	embiid, maxey, fuck, brown, lead

Note: the 'top words' column excludes filler words like 'the', 'game', 'lol', team names and nicknames, etc.

I was close, but it turns out that was only the second biggest moment of the playoffs so far! According to this metric, the grand finale of the Nuggets vs. Wolves series barely took first place, with just 45 more comments total in that chunk as people reacted to the Nuggets' demise in real time. You can see the full set of graphs from that series in the original post if you're curious. The other top 5 moments were actually just the final 30 minutes of Game 7 in Sixers vs. Celtics -- that game thread was just insanely busy across the board, especially toward the end.

I will post the full reports from Round 2 when it concludes, let me know if there are any other stats you'd like me to look into in the meantime!

Just for fun, I've been attempting to scrape all the comments and posts from r/NBA throughout this entire season, enabling me to calculate fun stats like which team's fans swear the most? How many Lakers fans are there actually on here? and Which players highlights are most upvoted and most controversial? You can review some of my earlier results at those links.

For the playoffs, I wanted to resurrect a really ancient report template I wrote several years ago for March Madness, which tried to visualize / summarize individual game threads. I spent some time adapting it to summarize an entire playoff series' worth of threads for this sub, and you can see the results for each Round 1 series below.

Round 1 Game Thread Reports:

Highlights:

The Nuggets vs. Timberwolves match up was the highest-engagement series in Round 1, drawing in over 10,000 comments on average to their six game threads. Cavs vs. Raptors was the least engaged, averaging only 3,977 comments per game (and that's despite over 10,000 in Game 7 alone).
The most commonly used swear word so far was "lmao" with 11,156 usages, followed by "shit" (10,368), "fucking" (7,997), "fuck" (7,781), and "ass" (6,509).
Shockingly, the Suns vs. Thunder series had the most comments complaining about the officiating. This regex to capture this is pretty broad (includes anything about 'refs', 'whistles', 'bad/shit call', 'flop', 'refball', 'rigged', etc.) and may capture some false positives (e.g. 'the refs are doing a fantastic job this game, I love them!'), but it does a pretty accurate job in my experience.
The most ref-complaint heavy individual game, though, was Hawks vs. Knicks Game 5, where over 13% (!!!) of all comments included some mention of the officiating, blowing past the 'TOXIC' max rating of my very empirical and official scale I've developed. In that game, comments from Hawks fans alone were nearly 20% ref complaints. I actually didn't catch this game so I'm not really sure what the deal was, but apparantly people were very upset.

Also, please let me know if you notice any errors or think of any additional stats you'd like to see from this. I am planning to post a big final wrap up with each team's final numbers after the finals have concluded, so we can see how each team's fans performed on here throughout the entire playoffs.

Data tools: If you're curious, I have been scraping the data nightly with PRAW (Python Reddit API Wrapper) into a postgres database I host at home (just automated with cron), then doing all the data analysis with R in Quarto documents.

[OC] r/NBA Playoffs Game Thread Analysis: Wemby's elbow in Game 4 drew 3,119 game thread comments in just ten minutes! Only one ten minute window so far in this playoffs has more.