ESPN vs. CBS Play by Play Logs

[DAnalytics]

I'm working on a parser for the ESPN and CBS game logs, but they have baffling different accounts of the games I've been looking at. Shots, rebounds, and other events are sometimes listed more than 10 seconds apart on the different sources. And, sometimes one log will have an event logged and it will be missing completely from the other log. Has anyone made any sense of this madness?

Note: I've mostly been looking at games from early in the 2009-10 season so maybe that was just a bad patch and maybe they've improved.

[agentkirb]

Well... it seems like the games are logged live and no one bothers to correct any glaring errors afterwards.

I would trust ESPN over CBS because they have a much more advanced statistics team I would think. Like, I've never gone to CBS to look up stats for the NBA.

[J.E.]

ESPN's also go back to 2002, which is nice.

[EvanZ]

One thing that's weird about ESPN's pbp is that sometimes they say:

Ramon Sessions makes 21-foot jumper (Alonzo Gee assists)

But sometimes they just say:

George Hill makes two point shot

I'd love to have those shot distances, but they don't seem to be given consistently.

[tignas]

working on a parser myself for espn pbp data

for missing shot distances you can get x,y coordinates and distances from the shot data page (plus you then get x,y coordinates)

"http://sports.espn.go.com/nba/gamepacka ... ot?gameId=" + game_id

[EvanZ]

Cool, that looks very useful.