I’ll preface that I am a noobie working on a little sports analytics project. I’m trying to take NHL player statistics from an API and I’m having difficulty accessing the values of the dictionary to pull specific metrics. I am able to load the API properly and access the gamelog but cannot find a way to extract the values from the gamelog.

Here is what the dictionary looks like:

"gameLog": [
        {
            "gameId": 2023021306,
            "teamAbbrev": "EDM",
            "homeRoadFlag": "R",
            "gameDate": "2024-04-17",
            "goals": 0,
            "assists": 0,
            "commonName": {
                "default": "Oilers"
            },
            "opponentCommonName": {
                "default": "Coyotes"
            },
            "points": 0,
            "plusMinus": -2,
            "powerPlayGoals": 0,
            "powerPlayPoints": 0,
            "gameWinningGoals": 0,
            "otGoals": 0,
            "shots": 2,
            "shifts": 20,
            "shorthandedGoals": 0,
            "shorthandedPoints": 0,
            "pim": 0,
            "toi": "17:44",
            "opponentAbbrev": "ARI"
        },

With multiple keys like this for each game played. I am trying to access specific metrics like ‘goals’, ‘points’, etc. sum them up and divide them to get averages.

I have tried:

for key in player_data_json['gameLog']:
    goals = 0
    for val in key:
        if key == 'goals':
            goals += key[val]
    print(goals)

But returns zeroes every time.

Any help is greatly appreciated!