Visualising the most-watched NBA moment of all-time
What is the most-watched NBA moment of all time? In celebration of the playoffs, which kicked-off last week, we worked with design incubator Polygraph to examine hundreds of thousands of uploaded NBA videos to identify the most-viewed moment from this season and previous decades, right back to the 1980s.
See where Jordan’s final shot, Kobe’s 81 point game, or LeBron’s many game-winners rank here, in an interactive, explorable site.
As Matt Daniels from Polygraph points out, there’s a lot of data to dig into.
I’ve found myself re-watching Reggie Miller’s 8 points in 9 seconds. Or Jordan’s last shot. Or Ray Allen’s miracle turn-around 3 from the last minute of the ’13 NBA Finals, Game 6… After identifying every NBA video on YouTube, we filtered the data to videos with at least 10,000 views
The interactive is simple to use: click on a moment to see each each video and compare it with others across decades.
These are the biggest moments from this season and from all-time:
Top 3 most-viewed from this season:
2. Westbrook scores record 42nd triple double
3. Steph Curry sets record with 13 3s
Top 3 most-viewed, all-time:
Be sure to check out the site after each playoff series, as we’ll be announcing the most-viewed moment for the ‘16-’17 NBA season after the Finals end in June.
Check out Matt’s Medium post, complete with progress sketches that showed how the Polygraph team created it. They began by mocking up possible directions:
One that leaned more into the passive video experience (inspired by our work with Billboard) and one that encouraged data exploration (inspired by the Rocky project by Fathom).
This project is just the latest in our year long series of data visual experiments as part of the News Lab. It’s our 4th project with Polygraph, preceded by The Year in Language, The Geography of Oscar Nominees, and How YouTube watched Trump and Clinton.
Working with Alberto Cairo and some of the best designers in the world, we are creating visualisations designed to work well on mobile and showcase innovative new ideas in presenting data. You can see how the world searched for the US election with WorldPotus; how we scour the web for food with the Rhythm of Food or how Donald Trump’s inauguration speech compared to his predecessors.
And next week we have some visual explorations coming from the Datasketches team.
Simon Rogers is Data Editor at the News Lab and director of the Data Journalism Awards. Want to work with us? Just get in touch.
