Okay, let’s talk about the Oklahoma City Thunder back in 2015. That season was something else, wasn’t it? I remember it pretty vividly, mostly because it was such a rollercoaster, and I actually tried to do a little project around it.
So, the big story early on was Kevin Durant getting hurt. That foot injury just lingered, and he ended up missing most of the season. Everyone kinda thought, well, that’s it for the Thunder. But then Russell Westbrook just went nuclear. It was insane. He was playing like a man possessed, putting up triple-doubles like it was nothing.
My Little Tracking Project Idea
Watching Westbrook go off like that, I got this idea. I thought, “Man, someone should really be tracking this historic run in a simple way.” Official sites had the stats, sure, but I wanted something basic, just focused on his crazy numbers, maybe specifically those triple-doubles during that stretch.
So, I decided I’d try and build a little something myself. Just a simple webpage. Nothing fancy. My web skills were, let’s say, very basic back then. Barely knew HTML, maybe a tiny bit of CSS.
Getting Started (and Stumbling)
- First, I started just jotting down his stats after every game. Literally pen and paper, then maybe typing it into a text file. Real high-tech stuff.
- I checked box scores every morning after a Thunder game. It was kind of a ritual.
- Then I thought, okay, let’s make it a webpage. I opened up Notepad, started typing out some basic HTML tags I remembered.
<p>for paragraphs, maybe an<ul>list for the games where he got a triple-double. - I tried to make it look okay. Fiddled with some basic CSS I found online, trying to center things or change colors. It looked pretty bad, honestly.
- The big hurdle was getting the data automatically. I had zero clue how to do that. I looked around a bit, saw stuff about APIs and web scraping, and it just went way over my head. It seemed like way too much work for my little hobby project.
- So, the plan became: manually update the simple HTML file after every game Westbrook played.
What Happened Next
Well, life kind of happened. Keeping up with manually updating the page after every single game, even for just one player, turned out to be more tedious than I thought. Some days I’d forget, other days I just didn’t have time. The initial excitement wore off a bit.
Plus, Westbrook was putting up numbers so fast, my simple list started getting long! It was impressive to watch as a fan, but a bit annoying for my manual updating process.
Ultimately, that little project just fizzled out. The HTML file probably still exists on an old hard drive somewhere, half-finished. The Thunder ended up missing the playoffs that year by one game, which was a gut punch after Westbrook dragged them so close.
Looking back, it was a fun little experiment. Didn’t really result in anything useful, but the process of trying to build that simple tracker, even manually, while watching Westbrook’s historic 2015 performance? That was pretty memorable. It was just a wild season to follow as a fan, and trying to capture a piece of it myself was my own little way of engaging with it all.
