Site Description:
This website has been designed to look at data visualizations using NBA statistics and create a data-driven story with them. This is all en route to the completion of a final group project in a data visualization course at the University of Maryland. Visualizations and analysis have been done using different tools and this website serves to present the work completed. More than anything, our group wanted to make tangible. While an application is not quite the same as Tony Stark helming his operating system, a thumb is now mightier than the pen or the sword.
Dataset Description:
The dataset used for this site can be found here. This data was obtained from basketball-reference.com, but is incomplete. This is because the dataset was imperfectly scraped with a focus on breadth. While certain players may be missing that should appear in statistical leader categories, the numbers themselves do belong in the rows of data they appear with; and there is still a story to be told.
Overview
Below are some general visualizations that attempt to encapsulate some general statistics. The portions of this site that contain javascript visualizations appear as seen below, with the interactive visual appearing above a collapsible description.
The chart above displays the top 50 players by games played. Hovering over a given column will display the player name and amount of games they played. Once again, it is important to note that the data used for this site is incomplete; therefor, what is seen above may not reflect actual NBA statistics with 100% accuracy.
The chart above attempts to visualize wins contributed and points per game in a generational fashion. By grouping players by their debut year, it seemed possible to find out which debut years were the best. The negative trend does not reflect
the true skill level of players over time, nor does it account for new franchises that have been added over the years(opening the door for more players to debut, and possibly watering down averages).
Notably, there is a valley at 1998. This is where an NBA lockout occurred, and annotating it has proven beyond the time we have for this project, so hopefully this suffices.
