So I finally hammered down the code to parse team possessions from the NBA's event-driven API. With that done, I was able to write out the logic to identify streaks according to the limitations I set forth in my last post on "Scoring Run Analysis".

I'm not happy. Out of 720 games, only 58 games feature at least one streak. Worse, only three games featured multiple streaks. That does not sound right in the least. From my personal experience, swings of momentum are just so much more common in the NBA. Every game should feature at least one streak in order to make sense.

My conditions were too restrictive. Let me try reworking the initiation logic. I thought it made sense that a streak should only start when one team starts jobbing up the score on three consecutive possessions while the other enters a dry spell...but maybe I need to stop being afraid of false positives. Maybe I need to just loosen up.