Sports bring out a lot of emotion from different people, and these emotions are captured in their rawest form in post-game interviews and press conferences. Fresh off major wins and losses, players and coaches are subject to media questions and their feelings on the game and how it was played (among others) is put into light. For this project, I analyzed post-game interviews from both players and coaches to see if there were any interesting patterns and differences between how a certain player and a certain coach show emotion after a high-pressure game.
In this project, I analyzed the 9 NBA Finals series that LeBron James was a part of: 2007, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, and 2018. Within these series, I compared the sentiments of the interviews held with LeBron and each of his four coaches in those seasons: Mike Brown, Erik Spoelstra, David Blatt, and Tyronn Lue. I gathered transcript logs from ASAP Sports performed text frequency analyses, sentiment analyses, and topic modeling to understand the effect of results, experience, and opponent on a player's post-game interview.
For more information, find the full report at: NBA Finals Post-Game Interview Analysis