The problem is with the headers. Every so often, there’s a change in the headers required to scrape from the NBA stats site.

You can replace the headers= ... line with headers = {'Host': 'stats.nba.com','Accept': 'application/json, text/plain, */*','x-nba-stats-token': 'true','User-Agent': 'Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 6.0; Nexus 5 Build/MRA58N) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/109.0.0.0 Mobile Safari/537.36','x-nba-stats-origin': 'stats','Origin': 'https://www.nba.com','Referer': 'https://www.nba.com/','Accept-Encoding': 'gzip, deflate, br','Accept-Language': 'en-US,en;q=0.9}'} and that should make the scrapes work.

There appears to be inconsistency, likely due to some restriction on scraping (i.e. you make too many calls in a short amount of time). Not sure if I ran into that problem in the past, and if so I’m not sure if I had a workaround for it as I haven’t messed with the API in a while. Sometimes this means that the first few calls to requests.get work, but the code breaks down somewhere in that loop on players and gets stuck forever. You can see this happening if you add prints to the code.

But I was able to run pass_web('GSW','2016-17','AST') at least once which created a passing network that looked like my examples in this article.

Sorry, all of the code used to scrape the data is in the Github file but I do not have the preprocessed data separated.

Dear Ahmed, is it possible to access the preprocessed data? I saw your github folder but I can’t find the data. I am researcher who would like to use the data to test some methodology. Thank you, Anna

Glad you enjoyed it! I’d be interested to see what you do with it in R, let me know!