Okay, so today I’m gonna talk about something I dug up from way back – the 2009 Minnesota Timberwolves roster. Why? Well, I was just messing around with some old basketball data, and this team… let’s just say it was a trip down memory lane.
It all started when I was trying to build a little NBA stats app, right? I needed some sample data, and for some reason, my brain landed on the late 2000s. I don’t know why, maybe it’s because I remember watching those games as a kid. So, I started Googling “2009 NBA rosters,” and the Timberwolves just popped up. I thought, “Why not?”
First thing I did was grab the roster information from some old NBA stats website. Copy and pasted that junk into a spreadsheet – names, positions, numbers, all that jazz. It was a total mess, of course, so I spent like an hour cleaning it up. You know, removing extra spaces, fixing typos, the usual data entry nightmare.
Then came the fun part: actually looking at who was on that team. Man, it was a blast from the past. You had Al Jefferson, who was supposed to be the next big thing. And then there was Kevin Love, still a rookie back then, looking all baby-faced. Ryan Gomes… remember him? Corey Brewer running around like a maniac. It was a weird mix of guys.
I then thought, “Hey, I should see how they actually played.” I managed to find some game logs, thank god for the internet archive. Spent a solid afternoon piecing together who played how many minutes, how many points they scored, all that stuff. It was tedious, but I got it done.
After that, I started messing around with the data in Python, using Pandas to get some basic stats. Like, what was the team’s average points per game? Who was the leading scorer? Stuff like that. Super simple, but kinda cool to see the numbers behind what I remembered watching on TV.
The best part? I used these numbers and roster to train my predictive model as a joke. The model was abysmal at predicting anything about 2024 NBA with this ancient data. But, I had a good laugh.
Anyway, that’s pretty much it. A random trip down memory lane with the 2009 Timberwolves. It was a fun little project, and it reminded me how much the NBA has changed since then. Maybe next time I’ll tackle another forgotten team. Who knows!
