NBA Game Results: 2013-2014

The NBA preseason is in full swing! For those of you who like to fool around with data, I have prepared a CSV file with game-by-game results for the 2013-2014 season. The data was downloaded from basketball-reference.com using Power Query and cleaned up (see below).

• Click here to download NBA 2013-2014 game results in CSV format.
• Click here to download NBA 2013-2014 game results in XSLX format.

The format is simple:

• Date = When the game was played
• Visitor = three letter abbreviation of the visiting team
• VisitorPts = visiting team score
• VisitorSeasonWins = number of wins by the visiting team for the entire season
• Home = TLA of home team
• HomePts = home team score
• HomeSeasonWins = number of wins by the home team for the entire season
• WinMargin = HomeSeasonWins – VisitorSeasonWins
• Margin = HomePts – VistorPts

I include the number of wins for each team in the files because I wanted to see how often good teams beat bad teams. The diagram below plots the difference in total wins for teams against the margin of victory. I have used the trendline feature in Excel to verify that while (by definition) good teams beat bad ones frequently, the variability is quite high. Notice the R^2 value.

The intercept for the trendline is 2.5967, which represents the home court advantage in points. In a future post I hope to use this data to make some predictions about the upcoming NBA season.

Enjoy!