Okay, so let me tell you about this little project I tackled – I called it “nba tour”. It was a way for me to kinda mess around with some NBA data and try to visualize a cool road trip hitting up a bunch of arenas.
First things first, I needed data. I spent a chunk of time scraping team info, arena locations, and schedules. I’m not gonna lie, web scraping can be a pain, especially when websites change their layouts. I used Python with Beautiful Soup and Requests – pretty standard stuff. Got all the team names, their GPS coordinates (latitude and longitude), and a rough idea of when they usually play home games.
Next up, figuring out the route. This was the tricky part. The goal was to hit as many arenas as possible in the shortest distance. I didn’t want to spend a month on the road. I played around with different algorithms, like trying a simple “nearest neighbor” approach (go to the closest arena next), but that ended up being pretty inefficient. It would zigzag all over the place. I then dabbled with some stuff that was too complicated, something about TSP or other things that I forgot.
Then I tried something dead simple that worked: I roughly knew the order, I started on the east coast and went west, then back east. I made sure the home game dates aligned roughly with my “travel” dates. I prioritized teams with a game during the period of my travel. It wasn’t perfectly optimized, but it was good enough for my purposes.
Visualizing the damn thing. I used Google Maps API for this. It let me plot the arenas on a map, draw the route, and even add some basic info pop-ups for each location. It was kinda cool to see the whole trip laid out. You get a line snaking across the country. I’m happy enough.
What I learned? Turns out, planning a cross-country trip, even a virtual one, takes time. Also, data is messy! I spent way too long cleaning up inconsistencies and dealing with weird formatting issues. I also realised my math skills are not as good as I think they are, and optimization is a real bitch!
The final product? It was nothing fancy. Just a map with pins and a line, but it was a fun little exercise. I could see myself refining it someday, maybe adding real-time game data or letting users customize their own tours.
Anyway, that’s the gist of it. Simple, kinda dumb, but it got me using some tools and messing around with data. Worth it!