Matchup Level Stats expected to be incomplete?

[ktshah04]

I am not sure if this is a known issue/feature of the ESPN API, but recently I was working on pulling some of my fantasy basketball league data and was trying to look at the player stats for all the matchups in 2024.

It pulls the player stats from the week 1 matchup and the final week's matchup for all the teams in my league, but all matchups in between, it returns empty data/False. Is there any way to pull all of that missing data? I checked a few years from 2019 to now and it only had the data for all matchups in 2025

[cwendt94]

That is currently expected, on the initial league load that API call only returns player stats for the 1st and last but doesn't give all data. To get all of the players stats you can use the player_info functionality which should have every matchup data filled out. Wiki gives a quick overview.

[ktshah04]

The issue I am running into is that when I try to get the home/away lineups for a matchup in a past season, it returns an empty list. If I check the espn website, those box scores/player stats are still available on the website. If I can't get the lineup data for the matchups, it isn't clear how I could pull the matchup data for the players at a large scale automatically.

And could you explain a bit more on how to use the player_info functionality to get the matchup data? From what I see, the player_info method returns a Player object for a given player, but it doesn't seem to have any concept of the matchups. I was under the impression that we needed a BoxScore object to get the matchup stats for players.

Thanks in advance!

As an example, this is the code I am running when I see the empty lists for lineups (but if I put the first or last matchup period it does return some data)

league_test = bball_league(league_id, 2020, espn_s2, swid, debug=True)

for m in league_test.box_scores(5):
    print(m.home_lineup)
    print(m.away_lineup)

And this is how I was getting the player_info

kd = league_test.player_info(playerId=3202)

[cwendt94]

Got it, that makes sense. I didn't realize you were looking for if the player was in a lineup and matchup for a certain week. Thats strange its not showing for past seasons. I wonder if you have to alway pass in the scoring period for the matchup.