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Center Court

by @bretthopper

I worked at a sports company forever ago, and ever since then, I've wanted to build my own NBA scores + stats site. After a few false starts over the years, I have a new concept called Center Court that I'm so excited about. It's primary purpose is for live boxscores because all of the major sports sites have terrible UI/UX experiences. I always defaulted to ESPN.com but it's so slow and awful. Center Court is basically a bridge between espn.com (or nba.com) and more advanced stat focused sites that don't offer a good live experience. The technical implementation behind it is quite novel in this space too. Instead of storing computed statistics in a database, I store raw play by play payloads immutability and everything else is derived from those and can be trivially rebuilt so the event log is a derived cache of the payloads. Every stat on every page is a pure fold over the event log at request time; no derived number is stored. This enables some powerful features like being able to re-derive a game's entire state at any point of the game (or even a time range). Example game to try out: https://centercourtlive.com/game/0022600197 The site is meant to be extremely fast. It's all server-side rendered with progressive JS enhancements. URLs are immutable and cached behind a CDN. https://centercourtlive.com/

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