Comments on: The Road to the NBA Finals

By: Visualization in Sports « Visualization Blog

Visualization in Sports « Visualization Blog — Thu, 07 May 2009 19:21:34 +0000

[...] More visualization that look like treemaps from – Road to the NBA finals [...]

By: Reading is Great! Thursday’s NBA Rumors, Breaking News, and Blog Links - EmptyTheBench.com

Thu, 05 Jun 2008 18:21:13 +0000

[...] 3 Shades of Blue – If at first one Gasol doesn’t succeed, try try again (with his brother). – The Arbitrarian – The road to the NBA Finals explained in terms of player contributions. – Celtics Blog – “Do [...]

By: Tim

Tim — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 19:55:42 +0000

I don’t get it.

By: Ben

Ben — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 18:02:03 +0000

Hmmm… I’m a Stata man myself, but seeing these graphics makes me pine for more a sophisticated graphics package.

By: rapidadverbssuck

rapidadverbssuck — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 16:00:59 +0000

Mountain: I may try that someday, I do think it would be more… theoretically sound, but it seems like a lot of work, given my current dataset.

Ben: Thanks for the compliments:

1) I use the statistical program R, which in my opinion is THE best program for creating noninteractive statistical graphics. And it’s free!

2) Funny you should ask that: Powe’s only contribution in that game was four of six free throws. No fgas, assists, blocks, steals, or rebounds–which are the components of the coloring algorithm–so we can’t tell what kind of game he played that day, based on his stats, only that he took some foul shots. His fts did helpt the team win, though, so he has the odd colorless box.

3) I haven’t tried Poisson regression, but it’s probably not a bad idea… although I think my weightings are pretty solid as they stand…

Thanks so much for taking the time to comment!

By: Ben

Ben — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 15:30:53 +0000

Brilliant, brilliant post.

I had a couple of questions:

1) How do you make these graphics? I think the presentation is the best part.

2) Why is Leon Powe’s box white in one of the playoff games versus cleveland?

3) Because point differential is integer values, did you ever consider using poisson regression instead of typical OLS?

Thanks and again great work!

By: Mountain

Mountain — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 15:27:25 +0000

Thanks for explaining / using color for the “flavor ” of a player ’s contributions.

“Net BoxScore” (orShare) using either the BoxScore of the counterpart or the minutes weighted average of the counterpart position or a weighting of that and overall opponent efficency could be even better in my view. That would fully capture defense side of things (including shot defense) beyond the defensive elements in the small b “boxscore”. I know you said you were ok with proceeding without it but it is possible to include it, in this way.