Retrieves and parses the Last Two Minute officiating report for a single NBA game from official.nba.com. A report is published for any game that is within 3 points (5 points before 2017-18) at any point in the last two minutes of the 4th quarter or overtime – not only playoff games. JSON reports exist only from 2019-01-01 onward. Port of the scraping logic in atlhawksfanatic/L2M (MIT, (c) 2019 atlhawksfanatic).
Arguments
- game_id
character or numeric. A single all-digit NBA game id of at most 10 digits; zero-padded to 10 digits automatically (e.g.
42500405becomes"0042500405"). Anything else errors before any request is made.- proxy
Optional proxy: a URL string (e.g.
"http://host:port") or a named list ofhttr2::req_proxy()arguments (url,port,username,password,auth).NULL(the default) falls back togetOption("hoopR.proxy"), then thehttp_proxy/https_proxyenvironment variables.
Value
Named list of hoopR_data tibbles:
calls – one row per graded play. decision is normalized to
CC/CNC/IC/INC (NCC->CNC, NCI->INC, trailing *
stripped; a real INC stays INC, while a blank or "Undetectable"
grade becomes NA and is never counted as INC). game_id is a
10-char zero-padded string. Player and team names are kept verbatim
(no ASCII folding).
| col_name | types | description |
| game_id | character | 10-digit zero-padded game id; joins to game and stats. |
| period | integer | Period number from period_name (4 = fourth quarter, 5+ = overtime). |
| period_name | character | Raw period label, e.g. Q4, or Q5 for the first overtime. |
| pc_time | character | Raw game clock string, MM:SS or MM:SS.t. |
| seconds_remaining | double | Seconds left in the period, parsed from pc_time. |
| call_type | character | Raw "Call: Type" label, whitespace untouched. |
| call | character | Upper-cased part of call_type before the colon, e.g. FOUL. |
| type | character | Upper-cased part of call_type after the colon, e.g. SHOOTING. |
| committing | character | Player, team or coach committing the graded action. |
| disadvantaged | character | Player or team disadvantaged by the graded action. |
| decision | character | Normalized grade: CC, CNC, IC or INC. |
| decision_raw | character | Raw grading code before normalization. |
| comment | character | Grader's free-text explanation of the ruling. |
| difficulty | character | Grader's difficulty rating, e.g. Observable or Difficult. |
| video_event_id | character | Report video event id (source field VideolLink); not a play-by-play event number. |
| pos_id | integer | Report possession id; rows sharing it belong to one possession. |
| pos_start | character | Game clock at the start of the possession. |
| pos_end | character | Game clock at the end of the possession. |
| pos_team_id | integer | NBA team id of the team in possession. |
game – one row of game metadata.
| col_name | types | description |
| game_id | character | 10-digit zero-padded game id; joins to calls and stats. |
| game_date | Date | Game date from the report's local tip-off timestamp. |
| season_type | character | Season type from the third digit of game_id, e.g. playoffs. |
| home_team_id | integer | NBA team id of the home team. |
| away_team_id | integer | NBA team id of the away team. |
| home_team_abbr | character | Home team three-letter abbreviation. |
| away_team_abbr | character | Away team three-letter abbreviation. |
| home_team_name | character | Home team nickname as published in the report. |
| away_team_name | character | Away team nickname as published in the report. |
| home_score | integer | Home team final score. |
| away_score | integer | Away team final score. |
| l2m_comments | character | Report-level note from the league; NA for almost every game. |
stats – 3 rows of error-count stats (Calls, Errors in Favor,
Possessions in Favor).
| col_name | types | description |
| game_id | character | 10-digit zero-padded game id; joins to calls and game. |
| stat_name | character | Statistic: Calls, Errors in Favor or Possessions in Favor. |
| home | integer | Value of stat_name for the home team. |
| away | integer | Value of stat_name for the away team. |
Errors
Raises a classed condition instead of returning on failure. Both classes
inherit from hoopR_error, so one handler can catch either:
hoopR_no_data– the game has no L2M report (common for regular-season games, games that did not reach the final two minutes, or very recent games): official.nba.com answers 403 with an S3AccessDeniedbody, or 404s the request.hoopR_fetch_error– the fetch failed (network error, rate limit, Akamai WAF block, any other HTTP status), or a 200 response is not a report: not valid JSON, JSON that is not an object, a payload without a one-rowgametable (an empty object or an error envelope, say), agame,l2morstatstable of the wrong shape, or a field the parser cannot read.
An invalid argument is an ordinary error, raised before any request.
See also
Other NBA Officiating Functions:
nba_l2m_games(),
nba_referee_assignments()
Examples
# \donttest{
try({
l2m <- nba_l2m(game_id = "0042500405")
head(l2m$calls)
})
#> ── NBA L2M calls (official.nba.com) ──────────────────────── hoopR 3.1.0.9000 ──
#> ℹ Data updated: 2026-10-07 16:31:14 UTC
#> # A tibble: 6 × 19
#> game_id period period_name pc_time seconds_remaining call_type call type
#> <chr> <int> <chr> <chr> <dbl> <chr> <chr> <chr>
#> 1 0042500405 4 Q4 01:54.0 114 Foul: Sho… FOUL SHOO…
#> 2 0042500405 4 Q4 01:31.6 91.6 Foul: Sho… FOUL SHOO…
#> 3 0042500405 4 Q4 01:29.2 89.2 Turnover:… TURN… 24 S…
#> 4 0042500405 4 Q4 01:18.0 78 Foul: Sho… FOUL SHOO…
#> 5 0042500405 4 Q4 01:07.4 67.4 Foul: Sho… FOUL SHOO…
#> 6 0042500405 4 Q4 00:55.7 55.7 Foul: Per… FOUL PERS…
#> # ℹ 11 more variables: committing <chr>, disadvantaged <chr>, decision <chr>,
#> # decision_raw <chr>, comment <chr>, difficulty <chr>, video_event_id <chr>,
#> # pos_id <int>, pos_start <chr>, pos_end <chr>, pos_team_id <int>
# }