WNBA referee assignments for a given date — wnba_referee

Retrieves the referee crew assignments and replay-center officials for every WNBA game on date, from official.nba.com's internal get-game-officials endpoint (the same feed used by the NBA officiating pages). That endpoint returns NBA and G-League blocks in the same payload; this function extracts only "wnba". Port of the scraping logic in atlhawksfanatic/L2M (MIT, (c) 2019 atlhawksfanatic).

Usage

wnba_referee_assignments(date, proxy = NULL)

Arguments

date: Date to fetch: a single Date, POSIXct/POSIXlt, or "YYYY-MM-DD" string. Date-times are formatted in their own time zone, so a late-evening POSIXct keeps its calendar day.
proxy: Optional proxy config. NULL (default) falls back to getOption("wehoop.proxy"), then lets libcurl honor the standard http_proxy / https_proxy / no_proxy environment variables. A single URL string (e.g. "http://host:port") is forwarded to httr2::req_proxy(url = proxy). A named list is spread as keyword args into httr2::req_proxy() (url, port, username, password, auth).

Value

A named list of two wehoop_data tibbles.

officials – long format, one row per game x filled crew slot (WNBA crews have three officials, so slot 4 is usually absent):

col_name	types	description
league	character	League slug; always "wnba".
game_id	character	10-character zero-padded game id.
game_date	Date	Game date.
season	integer	Season (the START year of the feed's season code; one calendar year for the WNBA). NA when the code is missing, not 5 characters, or its year is not numeric.
season_type	character	One of preseason / regular / all-star / playoffs / play-in / nba-cup-final, from the season code's leading digit. NA when the code is missing or the digit is unknown.
game_code	character	official.nba.com game code (`YYYYMMDD/AWAYHOME`).
home_team_id	integer	Home team id.
home_team_abbr	character	Home team abbreviation.
away_team_id	integer	Away team id.
away_team_abbr	character	Away team abbreviation.
crew_position	integer	Feed slot order (1-4); slot 1 is inferred to be the crew chief.
official_id	integer	Official id.
official_name	character	Official display name.
jersey_num	character	Official jersey number.

replay_center – one row per replay-center official per game date:

col_name	types	description
league	character	League slug; always "wnba".
game_date	Date	Game date.
official_id	integer	Replay-center official id.
official_name	character	Replay-center official display name.

A date with no WNBA games returns zero-row tibbles carrying this schema, not an error. A field the feed omits comes back as NA; it never drops the row or the column.

Details

crew_position (1-4) is the feed's slot order; slot 1 is inferred to be the crew chief – official.nba.com does not label crew roles in this feed. The feed encodes the season as <type digit><START year> (e.g. "22026" is the 2026 regular season). season is that START year: a WNBA season sits inside one calendar year, so no end-year conversion is applied. season_type decodes the leading digit.

Failures are signalled as classed conditions, both inheriting wehoop_error:

wehoop_no_data – HTTP 404, or HTTP 403 with an S3 <Code>AccessDenied</Code> XML body: official.nba.com has no report for date.
wehoop_fetch_error – any other non-200 status (e.g. an Akamai HTML 403 block, or a rate limit / 5xx that outlived the retries), an empty or non-JSON body, JSON without the wnba Table/Table1 rows lists or with a Table row that has no game_id or a Table1 row that has no replaycenter_official name, or a transport failure (DNS, TLS, dropped connection). The feed carries the wnba block on every date, with zero rows on a day without games, so a missing block is never an empty day.

An invalid argument (date or proxy), including an impossible date such as "2026-02-31", is an ordinary error raised before any request.

Statuses 408, 429, 500, 502, 503 and 504 and transport failures are retried (3 attempts in total); 403 and 404 are definitive and never retried.

Author

Saiem Gilani

Examples

# \donttest{
  try(wnba_referee_assignments(date = "2026-06-13"))
#> $officials
#> ── WNBA referee assignments from official.nba.com ───────── wehoop 3.0.0.9000 ──
#> ℹ Data updated: 2026-10-05 19:13:08 UTC
#> # A tibble: 12 × 14
#>    league game_id    game_date  season season_type game_code       home_team_id
#>    <chr>  <chr>      <date>      <int> <chr>       <chr>                  <int>
#>  1 wnba   1022600097 2026-06-13   2026 regular     20260613/INDCON   1611661323
#>  2 wnba   1022600097 2026-06-13   2026 regular     20260613/INDCON   1611661323
#>  3 wnba   1022600097 2026-06-13   2026 regular     20260613/INDCON   1611661323
#>  4 wnba   1022600098 2026-06-13   2026 regular     20260613/MINLVA   1611661319
#>  5 wnba   1022600098 2026-06-13   2026 regular     20260613/MINLVA   1611661319
#>  6 wnba   1022600098 2026-06-13   2026 regular     20260613/MINLVA   1611661319
#>  7 wnba   1022600099 2026-06-13   2026 regular     20260613/DALPDX   1611661327
#>  8 wnba   1022600099 2026-06-13   2026 regular     20260613/DALPDX   1611661327
#>  9 wnba   1022600099 2026-06-13   2026 regular     20260613/DALPDX   1611661327
#> 10 wnba   1022600100 2026-06-13   2026 regular     20260613/LASPHX   1611661317
#> 11 wnba   1022600100 2026-06-13   2026 regular     20260613/LASPHX   1611661317
#> 12 wnba   1022600100 2026-06-13   2026 regular     20260613/LASPHX   1611661317
#> # ℹ 7 more variables: home_team_abbr <chr>, away_team_id <int>,
#> #   away_team_abbr <chr>, crew_position <int>, official_id <int>,
#> #   official_name <chr>, jersey_num <chr>
#> 
#> $replay_center
#> ── WNBA replay-center officials from official.nba.com ───── wehoop 3.0.0.9000 ──
#> ℹ Data updated: 2026-10-05 19:13:08 UTC
#> # A tibble: 1 × 4
#>   league game_date  official_id official_name
#>   <chr>  <date>           <int> <chr>        
#> 1 wnba   2026-06-13      101284 John Goble   
#> 
# }