Online Demo
Data Source
The NBA teams and players' data:
- Source: 2014-15 Reguluar Season Traditional Team Stats and 2014-15 Reguluar Season Traditional Player Stats.
- The original data is grabbed from the web page and it is transformed to the CSV files.
The U.S. geographic data:
Methodology and Design
The U.S.map is shown with two colors to distinguish the East and the West.
Each team is located at its home court in a certain city and it's represented by a circle which the radius and opacity vary differently due to different winning rate. And both radius and opacity have a linear relationship with the winning rate.
Move over a circle, logo and exact winning rate of the represented team will appear.
Click on a state to zoom in to get a clearer view.
Select a team to generate pie slices as lengths extending outward to the edge. The names of the relevant data are specified in the center. They are "Points", "Assists", "Rebounds", "Blocks", "Steals" and "Turnovers". Both lengths and widths of the pie slices are affected by each player's stats. The length indicates the proportion of the highest value in the current league while the width reveals the proportion in a team.
When more than one team is selected, a radar chart which compares the data mentioned above between the selected teams will be displayed. Exact values of all stats have a linear relationship with the team's relevant ranks. Additionally, Click again to reverse.
Click the "Show" button in the bottom to exhibit the bar chart of the whole league. Hover over a bar to obtain one data's name of a certain team.
The chart has multiples mode and stacked mode. What's more, weight of each item can be assigned and click the "Show" button again to create a new one.
Insights and Findings
- In the original map, there are more big circles appears in the West, which reveals teams in the west have higher winning rate and the imbalance between Western and Eastern Conference.
- Interestingly, there are four California teams and three Texas teams. Therefore, the atmosphere of basketball is great as well as competition is relatively intensive in these two areas.
- From the pie charts, take Memphis Grizzlies as an example, its score mainly depends on Marc Gasol, Mike Conley and Zach Randolph. Scoring abilities of them three are above average in the current NBA league. And so on, for the other five statistics.
- Regarding to the above given radar chart which compares the overall levels of the Golden State Warriors and the Dallas Mavericks, the level of the Warriors' defense is much better but has more turnovers than Mavericks. We can infer that the key factor of which team is going to win is defensive performance because the offense of the two teams are both top level in NBA and almost equally capable.
- Finally, as it is shown in the bottom part, the variable weights of different data enable the evaluation of the overall strength and competitiveness of one team. Here I speculate comprehensive strength(weights:10,5,10,5,3,3) of Golden State Warriors is the top at present and have the highest chance to win.