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Braden Smith

Assist Tracker

Methodology & Sources

Transparency matters. Here's how we source, compute, and update Braden Smith's assist totals and pace toward Bobby Hurley's NCAA Division I career record.

Source: ESPN JSONUpdated 11/14/2025, 1:05:29 AM

Data Order of Operations

  1. ESPN public JSON – Primary ingestion uses the same endpoints that power ESPN's player and team pages (no private APIs, no scraping).
  2. ESPN HTML fallbacks – If JSON temporarily lags (common within minutes of the final horn), we retry with light HTML parsing.
  3. NCAA.com backup – As a last resort we pull box scores via the NCAA stats portal to ensure assist totals remain current.

Ingestion & Caching

A secured cron (Vercel Cron or Cloud Scheduler → /api/ingest) runs every five minutes during Purdue games, hourly for six hours after the final horn, and once daily at 12:00 a.m. ET otherwise. Each run refreshes the game log, season splits, standings, and persists a snapshot in managed storage (Firebase Firestore in production, JSON fallback locally).

Every request logs the data source in the UI badge. If ESPN returns stale or incomplete data the site automatically serves the last known good snapshot until a fresh ingest succeeds.

Computation Details

  • Career totals sum every Purdue game in the ESPN log (regular + postseason) and cross-check season splits.
  • Assists-to-goal, completion percentage, and pace math use Bobby Hurley's 1,076 benchmark.
  • Rolling averages compute per-game assists over the most recent five contests (career-wide).
  • Conference flags derive from opponent IDs mapped to Big Ten membership.

Fair Use & Compliance

The project honors ESPN and NCAA terms by limiting calls to documented public endpoints, applying sensible TTLs, and offering proper attribution. If you plan to fork or extend the tracker, keep the polite rate limiting and badges intact.