I wanted to present a quick update about the fervor surrounding the 2017-18 NBA season with text analysis (check some of my previous wordcloud & sentiment analyses here & here).
Sentiment Analysis of NBA Twitter on Upcoming Season
Despite NFL having its generally prominent month of September, fans seem to be chomping at the bit for some NBA action!
The “scores” are generated given preset textual recognition from the get_nrc_sentiment command in the syuzhet package in R. The program isn’t privy to all the nuances of our language; it can miss sarcasm at times, but it’s a fair estimation.
Given some text scraping, it’s pretty clear and encouraging that hoops fans are prepared for training camp.
You could contend that fans’ tweets concerning the upcoming NBA season are replete with joy and positivity.
Barplot of NBA Twitter Keywords
Here we can see popular keywords that fans associate with the NBA:
Some of the largest tallies include the words “best” & “dominant”. Also, as this was the day of ESPN’s player salary depreciation article, there were many references to Zach Lowe, Brian Windhorst and the concept of profitability.
NBA Twitter Banter Wordcloud
Additionally, as drama has unfolded a bit, NBA fans have been name-dropping (as of 9/19) but have also discussed NBA MVP, NBA as it relates to the NFL, and great duos (as evidenced by the top left corner of the following word cloud).
Larger words have higher frequencies, ignore falsenanaa.
Other inferences: Fans seemed to talk about the Chicago Bulls a decent amount, as well as players’ flaws (though to a lesser extent).
