nbadatar

nbadatar loads NBA play-by-play, possession and lineup data covering 30 seasons (1996-97 through 2025-26), for both the regular season and the playoffs. The current season is updated daily.

The data is hosted as Parquet files at ramirobentes/nba_data, which also documents the tables and their columns.

Installation

# install.packages("pak")
pak::pak("ramirobentes/nbadatar")

Usage

library(nbadatar)

pbp <- load_pbp(2025)
dim(pbp)
#> [1] 592259     61

Seasons are labelled by the year they end, so 2025 is the 2024-25 season. Pass a vector to load several at once, and use season_type for the playoffs:

playoffs <- load_pbp(2023:2025, season_type = "playoffs")
dim(playoffs)
#> [1] 117355     61

The same arguments work for the other two tables:

load_possessions(2025)
load_lineup_stats(2025)

Caching

Downloads are cached for the rest of your R session, so loading the same season again is instant. Call clear_cache() to force a fresh download, which matters during the season when the current season’s files change daily.

Notes on coverage

The NBA’s feeds changed over the years, so some columns only exist for part of the range. Every file has every column, with NA where the source didn’t provide one. See the nba_data README for the details.