NBA Highlights – Search for video of NBA plays

[rfrank]

I like the idea, but I'm having some trouble with it. Search results are only from this season, right? A search for Steve Nash showed a Steph Currey highlight as result one for me. More slang oriented searches like "dunked on" or "dunks on" don't really work either. Dunk/Dunks shows up in results, but nothing beyond that. Was looking for one of my all time favorite highlights, Baron Davis dunking on Kirilenko [1]. For me this type of thing would be pretty awesome with some sort of stats element. A 'visual box score' vs. 'highlights search engine.' ie show the box score for a game, and clicking in any particular field shows video of the plays that produced those stats.

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tYpwjB0IzoU

[microtherion]

> A search for Steve Nash showed a Steph Currey highlight as result one for me

Presumably because Nash is on the warriors coaching staff.

[rlau26]

Where is all the footage from? Is this allowed by the NBA? The quality of the footage is quite good.

This seems to be just searching the clip title. For example, if you search 'curry 3' ('curry three' returns nothing), it'll return things like "Curry 2' Finger Roll Layup (6 PTS) (Iguodala 3 AST)" or "Curry REBOUND (Off:0 Def:3)". If it could match the search query with play-by-play data, now THAT'd be cool.

[iamatworknow]

>Is this allowed by the NBA?

The NBA may be the only US pro sports league that actually doesn't mind having highlights compiled and shared online. In fact, the current commissioner has said, "We’re incredibly protective of our live game rights, but for the most part highlights are marketing."[0]

[0]http://www.si.com/nba/2015/03/01/mit-sloan-sports-analytics-... (number 30)

[eaganr]

My site (http://eaganr.com/nba/) used to do this. But they changed up their video URLs, wondering how Matetricks gets the new URLs.

[orthoganol]

"All NBA Plays"?

For example, this well circulated failed dunk attempt by Curry from earlier this season is not there: https://streamable.com/mntc

[alwayseasy]

Found it. The queries have to match the naming of the video so I searched "Miss Curry Lakers": https://3ball.io/miss-curry-lakers/0021600238_233

[nodesocket]

I'm a big basketball fan (mostly college). Where are you sourcing the videos? Also, are you manually tagging each video with player names, teams, and keywords or is there some magic happening on the backend?

[slyfocks]

Just from a cursory glance at the results, it seems like they're simply providing a naive search on the play-by-play descriptions that the NBA provides (e.g. http://data.nba.net/data/10s/prod/v1/20161212/0021600366_pbp...). No computer vision behind-the-scenes magic, unfortunately.

[prawn]

Would be great if it could learn which were most likely to be highlight plays based on the number of times they were clicked. And then give those priority in the results list. Also, maybe prioritise a player's involvement in the play.

e.g., if I search "westbrook dunk", I probably don't want the normal dunks first, or the time he passed to someone else who then had the dunk. Show me the great Westbrook dunks first, then the normal ones, then the assists to other dunkers.

[pmontra]

If you search for a player's name and the word pass you get all the videos with that player and that word in the title. That includes the ones where the pass was made by somebody else and the ones marked as bad pass, which are probably not what I'm interested in.

A suggestion: limit the search to the substring of the title between commas. It seems to always match a player with his play.

[nodesocket]

I can't say for sure this is what 3ball is using, but here is an XML file from NBA.com listing videos with associated titles, descriptions, thmbnails, and video urls.

http://www.nba.com/sitemap_videos_0001.xml

However it appears outdated since the dates only go up to 8/4/2016.

[derimagia]

For all the people asking where it's from, quick google brought up http://www.nba.com/sitemap_videos_0001.xml and changing it to 0002 seemed to work. It's just an index of something from nba.com and nothing is hosted on the site.

[shaunpud]

You can get all the sitemaps here; http://www.nba.com/video_sitemap_index.xml

[laxatives]

I tried like 8 queries and none of them yielded a single relevant result. Most of them didn't yield a video at all. Granted, they were difficult/obscure, but didn't make a great impression.

If this needs some special syntax or keywords, you should let the user know.

[LAMike]

Searched for "Kobe pass"

0 results lol

[rfrank]

Would be pretty hilarious if the only result was the 81 point game.

[esturk]

Typed in "5x5", found nothing. However rare of a performance, Draymond pulled it off last season so it should be relatively recent.

[m_myers]

This site appears to only have clips of individual plays, so neither a 5x5 nor a triple double would appear except as a long set of highlights. And not every play is a highlight; I checked a recent Russell Westbrook game and it had every assist but only about half of his scoring plays.

[lintroller]

This is a fascinating tool but I can't imagine this will exist much longer after the NBA's lawyers find it.

[shigawire]

The NBA is usually pretty good about letting fan videos of their content exist.. compared to the NFL at least.

Also videos of every play are available as clips on the NBA site, this just seems like a more searchable version.

[failedstoic]

How I can find who made this? Would love to work w/ him/her on a project.

[krrishd]

http://twitter.com/canzhiye

[14sbhargava]

also @notzhipan

[djKianoosh]

cool stuff...

every letter search becomes a new route.. yikes that is awful for going back

also, I searched for ginobili assist but it found all plays with ginobili and any assist.

good start and the video quality is pretty strong on mobile