Who starts each quarter?

[Ori]

Hi everyone,

I'm pulling raw play by play data from nba.com and then parsing it. However, I've run into one big error. There is no way to know who the 10 players on the court are at any given time from the pbp data. They don't list who starts each quarter, so I don't know if there was a sub after the 1st quarter until he does something to show up in the pbp data. Anyone know how to get around this?

Thank you,
Ori

[J.E.]

In almost all cases a player that plays the entire quarter does something that shows up in the PBP, even if it's just fouling. Simply scan the (quarter of the) PBP for player names, while keeping a list of those that were substituted in. This means you'll most likely need an addition pass of parsing, but it's doable