What is this?

During the All Star Break, I posted the first results from my attempt to scrape all the posts / comments from r/NBA this season, where I found out which teams have the most fans, comment the most, swear the most, complain about the refs the most, and more. Today, I want to share another fun little set of graphs: an analysis of this season’s r/NBA’s [Highlight] posts!

So far, I’ve saved 5,858 total posts with ‘[Highlight]’ or ‘[Lowlight]’ in the title. I’ve also written some regex to detect the names of the most commonly occurring player names (including nicknames like Wemby, AD, Joker, Beef Stew, etc, and making sure to differentiate between players with similar names like “Mitchell” or “Williams”), so that I can classify each post by which players were involved. Once I’ve done that, I can analyze by player to see whose highlights are most popular, most controversial, and more!

• Note: my scraper sadly did go down for like a week without me noticing. I tried to backfill as best I could but it’s very difficult with reddit’s API, so just a caveat that this analysis might be missing a handful of highlight posts from the week immediately after the ASB.

How this works exactly:

• First, I’m taking all 5,858 of the [Highlight] and [Lowlight] posts in my data, and classifying them each by the players whose names appear in the title. To be included, it has to have the “[Highlight]” or “[Lowlight]” text in the title, and at least one player’s name / nickname.
• Then, I’m grouping and summarizing by each individual player to get an overall view on how this sub reacts to their highlight plays.
• The biggest thing to note here is that I’m not trying to distinguish between positive and negative highlights for each player. That means I’m not going to try to do any fancy sentiment analysis to determine if the player in question was the one doing the highlight dunk, or the one getting dunked on. People don’t really use the [Lowlight] tag consistently / very often either, so I’m not going to try to use that for this purpose.
  • If you want to see something more like that, check out this other post from the ASB where someone did sentiment analysis using data from last season.
  • I did try a few AI/ML/Whatever Silicon Valley Wants Us To Call It These Days style sentiment analysis approaches with this data, but I was not satisfied at all with any of them. They really struggled with any kind of sarcasm or subtlety (i.e. reading a title like ‘Draymond Green displays his natural shooting motion’ as a positive, etc). To get anything worthwhile, I would have had to basically go back through and manually check every row anyway, which I didn’t really feel like doing because despite what this post may suggest, I do actually have a full time job and like a life and stuff to do.
  • In the end, I felt that the sample sizes here are big enough that the raw results work pretty well on their own for my purpose. It also makes the data more open to interpretation and discussion, which is more fun if you ask me.
  • There are a few players who are posted as highlight victims so overwhelmingly often that it really does throw things off, which I’ll note later on.

For example, this title:

[Highlight] Victor Wembanyama with the unreal block on Cade Cunningham’s floater attempt, as Stephon Castle makes the corner 3 at the other end, to the delight of Wemby (with replays)

counts as a highlight for Victor Wembanyama, Cade Cunningham, AND Stephon Castle. This can distort the results slightly, but Cade has enough other highlights where he’s doing something good that it all shakes out in the averages. To help make sure that’s the case, I’m also limiting this to only include players with at least 20 highlights in the data.

The results

Volume: most highlights posted

Let’s start by seeing who has the most highlights posted on r/NBA so far this season:

CHART 1: Total Highlight / Lowlight posts so far this season (Alt link)

• I was not surprised at all to see Wemby at the top of this list. He and the Spurs have been fantastic this year, and every other game it seems like he does something nobody else in the league can do. His highlight lead is even bigger than I expected though – the only players who have even half as many as Wemby are Jokic and Luka.
• Next we’ve got a few MVP candidates from this year, a few MVP candidates from yesteryear, and then Cooper “I sometimes completely forget he’s a rookie” Flagg. Luka, Jokic, SGA, LeBron, KD, and Steph are all people I expected to see up here, but him being top ten on the list speaks volumes to how high Flagg is flying already for the Mavs.
  • VJ Edgecomb isn’t too far behind him, with an impressive and on-brand 76 highlights. However, I was really surprised to see that Kon Knueppel hasn’t even cracked 40 yet. He’s currently leading Flagg in ROTY odds as I’m writing this, so I guess that just shows to go ya.
• Remember that this isn’t an exhaustive list – I had to write a regex string for each player I wanted to include, so I only did so for the top ~70ish players who I expected to see in the results. If I missed anyone important, please let me know and I can give you their numbers as well!

Most upvoted: highest avg. scores:

Next, let’s dig in a bit deeper. We’ll start by seeing whose posts had the highest average scores. Note that:

• I mapped the total number of highlights to the alpha / color of each bar: darker = more highlights total.
• Showing up high on this list means that r/NBA loves upvoting highlights featuring this player – though you’ll immediately notice that it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s because they love that player:

CHART 2: Highlight / Lowlight posts so far this season by Avg. Score (Alt link)

• The results are in: r/NBA’s favorite player is Lu Dort! Or at least their favorite player to hate.
  • I doubt I have to explain what’s going on here, but a look at the titles of Dort’s [Highlight] posts reveals that these are almost universally plays where he is the victim of the highlight, or where he’s doing something r/NBA disapproves of.
  • He only has 29 highlights in the dataset, no less than four of which clock in with scores over 10,000, and they’re almost all negative. In fact, three of the top 9 Dort [Highlight]s are just different angles of the hip check incident with Nikola Jokic from the other day. Here are the top 10 in full:

• Draymond Green is, unsurprisingly, in the same boat here; almost all of his highly upvoted highlights are negative plays for him. The fact that they’re both in the top 3 shows you just how many of these highlight posts are negative / critical in nature on r/NBA this season.
• LeBron is still the King of getting highlights upvoted it seems! Him, Luka, and Austin Reaves all clock in above Wemby, which is kinda shocking to me. They’re benefiting from having a smaller sample size than Wemby for sure, but this makes sense given how many Lakers fans are on this sub.
• Wemby still showing up so high on this list is really impressive though – an average score over 1,300 on that volume is pretty crazy.
• A few of these guys are being propped up by one or two outlier posts – Ja Morant is only as high as he is because of one 21k point post of Klay Thompson shitting on him (in response to Ja calling him “a bum”), for example.
• Special shoutout to Scottie Barnes. He has impressed me personally more than almost any other NBA player this season just in pure basketball terms and I’m happy to see him with an average score of over 1,000 here.

Controversy: avg. upvote / downvote ratios

I can also see each posts’ upvote ratio – this gives us an idea of who the most controversial players in this data are. This is heavily affected by overall volume, so I again mapped the color of each bar to the total volume of posts, with darker = more.

This was the main plot I wanted to make at the beginning of all this, so I added some extra info:

• A dotted vertical line showing the average for the dataset as a whole
• A green / red number showing that players’ avg. upvote ratio compared to the average
• A small error bar illustrating the confidence interval based on sample size
• Each players’ z-score (σ), or how many standard deviations they were above / below the average.

CHART 3: Highlight / Lowlight posts so far this season, by avg. Upvote Ratio (Alt link)

• I am very pleased with how this chart came out! I envisioned it as a way of ranking how beloved / hated each player is on here, and it seems to have worked pretty damn well. It’s so neat seeing all the yet unhated rookies at the top, and all the players I know r/NBA doesn’t care for at the bottom.
• Unhated rookies aside, I didn’t expect Brandon Miller, Ant, or LaMelo up on the high end of this chart – I tend to think of all three as at least somewhat controversial, but apparently not when it comes to their highlights.
  • Aaron Gordon and Scottie Barnes are both relatively unhated players who I’m not surprised to see near the top.
• Wemby is still above average, but his huge volume of posts makes it very difficult for him to get too high above that. The other very high volume players are all towards the bottom, so this is still a very impressive showing for him IMO.
  • One funny note: you may be wondering why Chet Holmgren is more popular than his other Thunder teammates. The answer is that his numbers are uniquely thrown off by the sheer number of his highlights that also involve Wembanyama. In fact, the top 6 Chet highlights are literally all him getting dunked on / blocked by Wemby specifically! Otherwise, he would be much further down, near SGA and Dort.
• Coming in at just 0.01 standard deviations below the mean, this data suggests that Desmond Bane is the player r/NBA feels the most neutral about. I have no strong feelings on this whatsoever, so I guess that checks out.
• I am very surprised to see Luka, LeBron, and Jokic down in the bottom 15. I guess LeBron has always had his haters, but Jokic is more than one standard deviation below the mean! This kinda tells me that it’s probably not just the volume of posts, and that opinions may have soured a little bit for Jokic and Luka here on r/NBA. I imagine if I could re-do this analysis for last year’s data, they’d both be much higher up.
• I’m pretty sure I could have named the bottom five before I even crunched any of the numbers. But here they are, the top five most controversial players on r/NBA: Deandre Ayton, Draymond Green, Lu Dort, SGA, and Deni Avdija.
  • In my last post, I asked people to guess the two biggest outliers here. As you can see, the answers were SGA and Deni Avdija – though people like Dort and Draymond also put up impressive numbers, only SGA and Deni managed to break 2 standard deviations below the mean on substantial volume. SGA did it on 153 total posts, so we can be very confident it’s not a fluke. And similarly, Deni ended up a whopping 10+% lower than average (a z-score of -3.69) across his 67 highlight posts. These two are in a league of their own when it comes to having a lot of highlights, yet still being a lightning rod of controversy.

Conclusions:

Looking at these results together, here are my takeaways:

• Victor Wembanyama stands out as the clear #1 in this data, both in terms of sheer volume of highlights, and in terms of upvotes / upvote ratios. If I had to name r/NBA’s current favorite player based solely on this data, it would be Wemby by a mile. I am not shocked, personally!
  • To a lesser extent, rookies like Kon Knueppel, VJ Edgecomb, Cooper Flagg, Dylan Harper, Derik Queen are quite popular too, since nobody has any reason to hate them yet. Unlike current ROTY odds, this data puts Knueppel on a tier below Flagg and VJ.
  • There are also a few veterans worth shouting out for their strong popularity numbers: Aaron Gordon, Scottie Barnes, and Anthony Edwards are the ones that stand out most to me across all the graphs.
• On the other end of the spectrum, Shai Gilgeous Alexander and Deni Avdija are far and away the two most controversial players on r/NBA, especially when you account for volume. They make a lot of genuine highlight plays that get posted all the time, but they also tend to be heavily downvoted almost every time.
• I was pretty shocked to find that Jokic and Luka are actually quite controversial as well. They all clock in with a lower avg. upvote ratio than Rudy Gobert! I think this is pretty good proof that the reputations of Luka and Jokic on r/NBA have waned slightly this season, or that Thunder fans and their other ops have stepped up their downvoting game. These numbers are all very open to interpretation, which is one of the reasons I think this is such a fun way to look at the data.
• Lu Dort and Draymond Green are the two most non-controversially hated players in the dataset. They get posted rarely, but when they do, they’re almost always getting clowned on and sent to the top of the page. Judging by the upvote ratios, there aren’t many people out to defend them either.

Do you agree with my conclusions? In any case, I hope you had as much fun reading this as I had making it! And like I said, let me know if I missed any players I should have included!