The dataset was web scraped from RealGM's general board's current 5500 pages.
Does putting LeBron in your topic title increase your view count?
LeBron James is a no-doubt top three player in the NBA all-time no matter who you ask. The other two that could be in this conversation retired over 20 years ago. However, LeBron James started playing 20 years ago and is still playing in the league at a high level.
RealGM was founded in 2000 so it has seen the entirety of LeBron's career. LeBron dominates headlines, but does he dominate RealGM boards compared to the population?
Topics with "lebron" in the title had a mean view count of 2022.664.
All topics had a mean view count of 1965.05.
Yes, LeBron does have a higher average view count, but I wanted to conduct a t-test comparing the means to see if it was a significant enough change.
I set the alpha to 0.05 so the p-value of the t-test score needs to be lower than 0.05.
However, the p-score came out to 0.0835 so we cannot definitively say that LeBron's scores are higher than the total population.
Who is the GOAT (Greatest of All Time) of views on RealGM? LeBron or Jordan
Remember when I said LeBron is consensus top three all time? Well, Jordan is his main competitor for the number one spot.
Off the court, which player gets more views?
As we know, topics with "lebron" in the title had a mean view count of 2022.664.
Topics with "michael jordan" or "mj" in the title had a mean view count of 1879.21.
Lower, but again I decided to conduct a t-test to see if it was significantly different. I kept the alpha at 0.05.
The p-value was 0.0008880342 so it is definitive to say that LeBron James is the RealGM GOAT of views.
Which words in topic titles are most frequent?
If you've ever browsed social media, you may see the same topics brought up over and over. RealGM is no different. Lets see which topics get discussed to death.
To do this, I will be splitting the topics into separate words and counting how many times they show up. I also took out any generic words like "the", "to", "in", "a", etc. Basically, if its not a basketball related term, I don't want it to show up.
Most of these words are still "generic" terms when it comes to basketball, but they show some of the topics that may be discussed on the General Board. RealGM loves to talk about the Lakers (with or without LeBron), they love to declare players or teams as the best, and they love to compare players or teams with "vs".
And of course, as we've seen LeBron is a hot point of discussion.
Which teams have the most views per word?
In 2024, the Boston Celtics won the NBA Championship. However, which team all-time has the most engagement every time they are brought up.
As a Cavaliers fan, can I consider this an NBA championship? We may not get discussed very much, but when we do, we make good discussion.
Sadly, the Pelicans are cemented as the least engaging team by RealGM fans.
