Shot Analytics Give Data Viz Shot Charts a Home
By Jason Bisnoff
Dylan Burkhardt has had an entrepreneurial spirit since his time at the Stephen M. Ross School of Business at The University of Michigan. His first venture was UMHoops.com, a site dedicated to the Wolverines basketball team he rooted for so passionately during his formative and college years. That project, which he started in the final days of 2007 while a sophomore at UM, was inspired by a lack of niche sites that did in-depth coverage of the Michigan basketball program.
Burkhardt would often check larger reaching outlets like Rivals, Scout or even ESPN but they would merely glance over the Maize and Blue and move on to more general interest stories. His efforts have led to a successful site and following including being followed on Twitter by President Barack Obama and Sport Illustrated writer Richard Deitsch.
Nearly seven years and 12.4 thousand followers later, Burkhardt has turned his focus to a new startup, that was birthed in 2011 and launched this week online.
“I loved Kirk Goldsberry’s work with shot charts in the NBA and wanted something similar for college basketball, specifically to help me cover Michigan,” said Burkhardt about the start of his newest project Shot Analytics. “There wasn’t really anything out there at the time so I decided to build it.”
The site aims to take the practice of using the visually stimulating and game changing shot charts that have grown popular at sites like Grantland and Hoop-Math and create a database for players and teams in the NBA and NCAA.
“I’m always looking for tools to help explain the game more clearly. Shot charts and advanced statistics aren’t everything, but they are important because they are tools that empower writers to explain the game,” said Burkhardt.
In order to view the extensive and still growing reference book of shot charts that is Shot Analytics, a user has to sign up with email and password as well as pay for the $14.99/year basic package or $74.99/year pro package. A basic package will get a user access to NBA shot charts for all 30 teams, NCAA shot charts for over 100 teams, nightly shot chart updates, NBA & NCAA leaderboards and metrics by team and player as well as game breakdowns and visualizations.
For the pro package you also get access to the shot 360 visualizer which allows a deeper level of interaction to “slice and analyze shot chart data with ease.” Or as he described it, “It provides an easy interface to slice through shot data that anyone can use. Filtering by different dimensions with the click of a mouse is useful, but being able to visualize all of those dimensions at the same time and then filter is empowering.”
As with most entrepreneurial conquests, there is also an eye to the future and the pro package includes the promise of first access to new and developmental features.
“We just launched the site last week so we are still taking things slowly. We’ve received positive feedback from some people and some great suggestions. Our plans throughout the season are to keep building off of those suggestions.”
