Get Play-By-Play NBA SportVU Data

Update 06/14/16: It appears has taken down the SportVU logs. However, neilmj has posted logs from the 2015-16 season on github, for games through January 23.

SportVU is a video system made by STATS Inc, used by teams to track movement of players and the ball on the court. I looked, but couldn't find anywhere describing how to get play-by-play data, so did some investgating myself. The great has every game here. Clicking on any of the linked values in the table brings up a popup with an option 'Movement':

NBA play-by-play SportVU data

Inspecting the network request that goes out when clicking on Movement shows us that fires off an AJAX request to We can infer that eventid=2 refers to field goal attempts, and gameid=0021500003 likely refers to the third game in 2015. Indeed, changing the gameid to 0021400003 returns data for a game dated October 28, 2014, between the Rockets and Lakers.

Once you get the eventid of the type you want, you could theoretically enumerate all the games in a season this way, or across multiple seasons. The response comes in JSON format, and Savvas Tjortjoglou nicely detailed that in this post. Happy number crunching!