Who Steps Up When the Star Sits? NBA Analysis Blocks for WordPress
The short version
When Cade Cunningham missed 18 games last season, Daniss Jenkins played all 18 of them. His minutes went from 15.6 to 33.9 a night and his scoring from 6.7 to 17.3.
That’s the kind of thing NBA readers search for on injury news days. And it usually takes someone an evening with a spreadsheet to answer.
Sports API Hub 1.3.11 adds four basketball blocks that answer it on their own:
- Schedule Grid – every team’s week on one grid: back-to-backs, light nights, rest days
- With / Without – how every teammate played in the games a player missed
- Starter / Bench – each player’s numbers as a starter and off the bench
- Role Trends – whose minutes and usage are rising or falling right now
All four are built from data the plugin already imports: the schedule and the box score of every finished game. Nobody types anything in. You can see all four on one page on the demo site: livescoreapi.com/nba-analysis.
A note on seasons: 2026/27 tips off on October 20, so it has no finished games yet. The Schedule Grid shows 2026/27. The other three show the 2025/26 regular season, and they fill in with 2026/27 as games are played.
Schedule Grid: who’s on a back-to-back this week
Opening week is uneven. Tuesday has 3 games and Thursday 2, then Friday has 12. Philadelphia plays four times, and the last two are a back-to-back: Milwaukee on Saturday, Detroit on Sunday.
The grid shows the whole league’s week at once: one row per team, one column per night, the opponent in each cell (@ for away). Light nights and the second night of a back-to-back are highlighted, and three columns count games, light-night games and back-to-backs per team.
A second view, Rest & edge, lists every game with each team’s days of rest and the better-rested side (“MIN +1”). For a preview piece or a “who’s tired tonight” post, that’s the table.
It only needs the schedule, so it works from day one of the season and for every sport the plugin imports. Set it once with the league ID and it moves on to the next season by itself:
[anwphub-schedule-grid sport_id="1" league_id="132"]Docs: Schedule Grid
With / Without: who gets the minutes when a star sits
Pick a player who missed games, and the table shows every teammate’s minutes, usage, points, rebounds, assists, threes and steals plus blocks, in the games with him and the games without him. Each cell shows the change and both values, so “+18.3” sits right above “15.6 → 33.9”.
Three examples from 2025/26:
Pistons without Cade Cunningham (18 games). Jenkins is the story, but not the only one. Paul Reed played 16 of those games, his minutes went from 11.9 to 19.7, and his scoring from 6.6 to 11.4.
Warriors without Stephen Curry (39 games – nearly half the season, so this is a real sample, not a few nights). Gui Santos went from 12.9 to 27.7 minutes and from 4.8 to 13.3 points over 35 of them. L.J. Cryer and Pat Spencer each picked up 14 to 16 more minutes a night.
Nuggets without Nikola Jokić (17 games). Nobody replaces Jokić, so Denver split his minutes. Jalen Pickett went from 10.4 to 27.1 minutes, Zeke Nnaji added 13.8, and Jonas Valanciunas doubled his scoring (8.1 to 16.8) and nearly tripled his rebounds (4.5 to 12.0) in the 5 games he played without him.
A few things make this safe to put in front of readers:
- Small samples are greyed out. A teammate with fewer than 3 games on either side keeps his numbers, but the changes turn grey. A big jump over 2 games is a hint, not a trend, and the legend under the table says so.
- A missed game only counts when the plugin can show the player was on the team. Traded, signed or waived mid-season, the count starts and stops at the right games. A mistake makes the sample smaller, never wrong.
- Regular season only. Playoff rotations are shorter and would skew the minutes.
- Readers can switch players. The dropdown lists everyone who played for the team that season, sorted by minutes.
And the part a news site will like most: while the season is running, the table opens on the team’s injured player who plays the most minutes. Injury status comes in with the team rosters, so switch on roster sync (every 3, 7 or 14 days) and hit Update Rosters on the Import screen when big injury news breaks. From then on the block opens on the player your readers are asking about.
It also comes as a block on every team page, so each team’s page gets one without any setup. On a single post, add the shortcode:
[anwphub-with-without season_id="80229" team_id="3424" player_id="1133854"]Docs: With / Without
Starter / Bench: the same player, two roles
Every player page has a Splits block. In 1.3.11 it gets a fourth tab: Starter/Bench, next to Home/Away, Monthly and Wins/Losses.
Jenkins again: 17.2 points and 7.4 assists in 19 starts, 6.5 points and 2.6 assists in 53 games off the bench. That 10.7-point gap was the biggest in the 2025/26 regular season among players with at least 15 games in each role. Second was Gui Santos, the Warriors’ fill-in for Curry: 14.8 points as a starter, 4.7 off the bench. When a team blog asks “what happens if he starts?”, that’s the answer.
The tab shows up by itself once a player has at least 2 games in each role. It follows the season and stage pills like the other tabs, so it’s regular season by default with playoffs one click away.
Role Trends: whose role is growing
Role Trends compares each player’s last 7 or 14 days with his season and ranks the league by the change. Readers pick the stat (minutes, usage, points, 3-point attempts, steals plus blocks, true shooting), the window, the baseline and the direction from four dropdowns.
On last season, it shows who got the minutes down the stretch. In the final 14 days of the 2025/26 regular season, Rayan Rupert’s minutes went from 16.7 to 36.1, Micah Peavy’s from 14.9 to 30.6, Leonard Miller’s from 15.5 to 30.0. All three are 24 or younger and got a long late-season look. Going the other way, Immanuel Quickley dropped from 31.9 to 19.2.
During the season this is the “whose role is growing” table that fantasy players and team blogs check every week. Deep-bench noise is filtered out: a player needs 3 games in both windows and real minutes in at least one of them. That keeps the 9-to-25-minute breakout in and the garbage-time cameos out.
It doesn’t have to wait three weeks into a season either. Until a season has 21 days of games, it compares the new season’s games with last season instead. By the end of the first week of 2026/27, it will show who’s playing a bigger role than last year.
[anwphub-trends season_id="80229"]Docs: Role Trends
Where the data comes from
Nothing on this page is entered by hand. Sports API Hub imports the NBA schedule, the results and the full box score of every game from the API, then calculates everything above from those box scores. The demo site holds 1,255 games and 27,242 player box-score rows for 2025/26, and that’s the data behind every number in this post.
New games come in automatically during the season, so the tables update themselves after every game night. Readers see the numbers as of last night’s games, not as of whenever someone last updated a spreadsheet.
What it costs to run
There are two parts: the plugin and an API subscription.
The API is a RapidAPI plan from the provider. For an NBA site there are two choices:
- BasketAPI1 – $9.99/month. Basketball only, 15,000 requests a day. Past the daily quota it keeps answering and bills $0.0001 per extra request: 10,000 extra requests cost $1.
- AllSportsAPI2 – $19.99/month. Every sport the plugin supports, unlimited requests. Take it if you also cover baseball, American football or ice hockey.
Who this is for
- NBA news sites that write injury and rotation stories and want the numbers on the page instead of in a screenshot of someone else’s site.
- Team blogs covering one team every night. The team page already has With / Without, and the Schedule Grid shows what’s coming this week.
- Fantasy and betting content. Role Trends and the Rest & edge view are built for “who should I pick up” and “who’s tired tonight”.
FAQ
Why do three of the blocks show last season?
Because 2026/27 starts on October 20 and has no finished games yet. They’re built from box scores, so they need games. The Schedule Grid only needs the schedule, so it already shows 2026/27.
When will they show 2026/27 data?
Role Trends after about 3 games per team (late October), because it compares the new season with last season at first. Starter / Bench as soon as a player has 2 starts and 2 bench games. With / Without once a player has missed 3 games. On team pages it switches by itself.
Do I have to set anything up for team pages?
No. With / Without is part of the default team page layout. You can move or remove it in the Layout Builder.
Is this NBA only?
With / Without, Starter / Bench and Role Trends are basketball only. They work for any basketball league with box scores, not just the NBA. The Schedule Grid works for every sport the plugin imports.
Can readers change what they see?
Yes. With / Without has a player dropdown, Role Trends has four dropdowns, the Schedule Grid has week arrows and a second view. None of it reloads the page.
Get Started
The season starts tomorrow. Every game adds another box score, and every one of these tables gets more interesting from here.
See all four blocks on one page: NBA Analysis on livescoreapi.com
