u/CaptainScuttlebottom

Just for fun, I've been attempting to scrape all the comments and posts from r/NBA throughout this entire season, enabling me to calculate fun stats like:

• How large is each fanbase on here, and who swears the most, complains about refs the most, etc.?
• Which players highlights are most upvoted and most controversial?
• What have playoff game threads looked like in each series from Round 1?
• How did people react to Wemby's gros coude in real time?

I'm back to share the results from Round 2! Here are the reports from each completed series so far:

2026 NBA Playoffs — Series Reports

First Round

Series
Oklahoma City Thunder vs. Phoenix Suns
Portland Trail Blazers vs. San Antonio Spurs
Atlanta Hawks vs. New York Knicks
Denver Nuggets vs. Minnesota Timberwolves
Houston Rockets vs. Los Angeles Lakers
Boston Celtics vs. Philadelphia 76ers
Cleveland Cavaliers vs. Toronto Raptors
Detroit Pistons vs. Orlando Magic

Conference Semifinals

Series
New York Knicks vs. Philadelphia 76ers
Los Angeles Lakers vs. Oklahoma City Thunder
Minnesota Timberwolves vs. San Antonio Spurs
Cleveland Cavaliers vs. Detroit Pistons

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• To the shock of all, the OKC vs. Lakers series set a new high water mark for ref complaints. Literally over 1/10 comments throughout the entire series had some mention of 'refs', 'flops', 'whistles', etc., making it the only series thus far to earn a rating of 'Toxic' across the board. Also, I first rendered this report while I was bored on a zoom call for work, and had to go off camera when I read the 'most downvoted comment' because I started visibly laughing at how psycho it is lmao, come on fellow OKC flair you're embarrassing me here!

• The Pistons vs. Cavs series finally ended with heartbreaking defeat for Detroit, which is too bad because I was rooting for them. Their fans were clearly upset about it too, because they set a new record for highest swear rate for a single fanbase in a series with fully 2.05% of all the words in their comments being swears of some kind. Interestingly, the highest values for this before now were usually Lakers fans in series where their team wasn't even playing (see Sixers vs. Celtics from Round 1, for example).

• Spurs vs. TWolves has taken the top spot as the #1 most commented on series of the playoffs so far, even though it only went to six games! Outside of the 4-5 quarters where the Spurs just flattened them, this was a very fun and exciting series so I'm not surprised at all. If we're going by comments per game, OKC vs. Lakers takes the top spot.

• The Spurs are also leading in another category here, with Victor Wembanyama firmly in first place on the 'most mentioned player name across all game threads' race. Here are the current top 15:

Player	Mentions so far
Victor Wembanyama	9,887
Nikola Jokić	8,883
Shai Gilgeous-Alexander	7,622
Joel Embiid	6,870
LeBron James	5,909
Austin Reaves	5,575
Rudy Gobert	5,114
Anthony Edwards	4,876
James Harden	4,463
Cade Cunningham	3,733
Julius Randle	3,337
Luka Dončić	3,140
Jalen Brunson	3,042
Karl-Anthony Towns	2,974
De'Aaron Fox	2,819

includes my best attempt at capturing nicknames like 'Wemby' / 'SGA' / 'Joker' / 'Ant' / etc.

Just for fun, I've been attempting to scrape all the comments and posts from r/NBA throughout this entire season, enabling me to calculate fun stats like which team's fans swear the most? How many Lakers fans are there actually on here? and Which players highlights are most upvoted and most controversial? You can review some of my earlier results at those links.

For the playoffs, I wanted to resurrect a really ancient report template I wrote several years ago for March Madness, which tried to visualize / summarize individual game threads. I spent some time adapting it to summarize an entire playoff series' worth of threads for this sub, and you can see the results for each Round 1 series below.

Round 1 Game Thread Reports:

• Hawks vs. Knicks
• 76ers vs. Celtics
• Cavaliers vs. Raptors
• Magic vs. Pistons
• Nuggets vs. Timberwolves
• Lakers vs. Rockets
• Suns vs. Thunder
• Spurs vs. Trailblazers

Highlights:

• The Nuggets vs. Timberwolves match up was the highest-engagement series in Round 1, drawing in over 10,000 comments on average to their six game threads. Cavs vs. Raptors was the least engaged, averaging only 3,977 comments per game (and that's despite over 10,000 in Game 7 alone).

• The most commonly used swear word so far was "lmao" with 11,156 usages, followed by "shit" (10,368), "fucking" (7,997), "fuck" (7,781), and "ass" (6,509).

• Shockingly, the Suns vs. Thunder series had the most comments complaining about the officiating. This regex to capture this is pretty broad (includes anything about 'refs', 'whistles', 'bad/shit call', 'flop', 'refball', 'rigged', etc.) and may capture some false positives (e.g. 'the refs are doing a fantastic job this game, I love them!'), but it does a pretty accurate job in my experience.

• The most ref-complaint heavy individual game, though, was Hawks vs. Knicks Game 5, where over 13% (!!!) of all comments included some mention of the officiating, blowing past the 'TOXIC' max rating of my very empirical and official scale I've developed. In that game, comments from Hawks fans alone were nearly 20% ref complaints. I actually didn't catch this game so I'm not really sure what the deal was, but apparantly people were very upset.

Also, please let me know if you notice any errors or think of any additional stats you'd like to see from this. I am planning to post a big final wrap up with each team's final numbers after the finals have concluded, so we can see how each team's fans performed on here throughout the entire playoffs.

Data tools: If you're curious, I have been scraping the data nightly with PRAW (Python Reddit API Wrapper) into a postgres database I host at home (just automated with cron), then doing all the data analysis with R in Quarto documents.