By brianestadt on

So, after using Drupal for work I'm wondering if it'll work for play. I suspect it's very very likely far too much work for my one fantasy hockey league with 10 teams, but, well, we're geeks and it'd be nice to drop Yahoo sports for a custom league home. Only thing is, it'd only be feasible if the process of importing stats could be automated. I'm willing to put in the work to set up the site, but want to have fun during the season -- I'm not willing to be bogged down with the culling/importing of data nightly.

Anyone have familiarity with this? Can a site be set up to import starts from nhl.com or other sports sites?

⋅ Categories: Drupal 4.7.x

Comments

maxpower’s picture

maxpower commented

I'm managing a fantasy football website (not yet with drupel) and I would be very interested in managing it with drupel if there was a way to import stats from an outside source instead of me manually inputing the stats every week.

Let me know too if this is possible.

mrtunes’s picture

mrtunes commented

i'm doing quite a bit of research on this and i dont think any of the stats services are offering stats as granular as we need(ie a feed for each player's individual stat). the top sports insiders sites don't cater to this need from what i can tell.

cablesurfr’s picture

cablesurfr commented

Did anyone get anywhere with this, I am very interested in this as well.

Thanks
Dana

Rob T’s picture

Rob T commented

I remember reading about the SportsML open-source feed format. It seemed way too intense once I realized that the feeds essentially provide just the box scores. I'd have to provide the platform to sift, filter, and process the data from these events (box scores).

http://www.xmlteam.com/ provides such data, but it costs $$$.

I'd like to hear if anyone has other information regarding sports statistics.

jpatterson’s picture

jpatterson commented

http://myffl.net/

home page says they are currently down, but will return "in the summer of 2008". Perhaps an email to the site owner will let us know if they provide the data in the format you need. I notice that the top right of the home page says: "Free Fantasy Football Stats...

KingMoore’s picture

KingMoore commented

for a project in the past I wrote a crawler/parser that pinged an NFL site for the given week and imported all offensive stats for the week. So it is possible, but it can be a bit of work and you need to find a website that posts the data in a format that is useful to you.

Here is a rough workflow of how I did it:

- find statistic pages that house consistently formatted and updated stats
- fetch the entire HTML page with php
- trim out all file contents above and below the table containing stats
- parse stats table into a multi-dimensional array
- store the data in a db (probably have to do some player matching which will require you have a player table already populated with all players you want to store stats for)

braddieus’s picture

braddieus commented

The MySTATS sports stats service is an excellent alternative. Stats feeds are available in CSV or XML format, and are quite affordable.

Check it out at http://mystats.beacontender.com.

KingMoore’s picture

KingMoore commented

That looks great. Do you know of anywhere similar for NFL stats?

braddieus’s picture

braddieus commented

XML Team is the closest I can think of, although they're more expensive and not nearly as flexible. MySTATS won't be supporting football for another year or two at least.

KingMoore’s picture

KingMoore commented

thanks. I am looking at their pay per document option now. looks intriguing, but these guys are all so vague about their prices. really want to get you on the line with a sales guy.