March Madness Matchup Card
March Madness is typically full with surprises and disappointments. It’s a stage for the underdog to pull off a miracle and the favored squad to defend their title. And trying to build the ideal bracket is one of the most fun experiences for many basketball fans every year. We forecast the outcome by checking data, watching regular season games, or simply being loyal fans, hoping our support team can advance to the next round.
My classmates and I created this matchup card. We want to provide facts, on-court performance, and betting information. The basics on the card are the university name, conference, logo, and regular season record. The radar chart is then displayed on the top outside, including turnover, assists, rebound, possession, 3-point field goal made, and field goal made. Its ranking percentile is based on the performance of the 64 tournament teams. The bar chart on the opposite side displays average points per game, field goal percentage, 3-point field goal percentage, free throw percentage, and assist/turnover ratio. We present two different visualizations to draw attention to the team’s remarkable performance, and we highlight the total number in the radar chart and the percentage in the bar chart since a team with a high field goal percentage cannot be claimed to score more because they may have a low number of field goal attempts, and vice versa.
Following that, we compared the two teams’ shooting tendencies using shot location data from their regular season. We also refer to Bart Torvik, recording the team's star player with the highest PRPG, an abbreviation of Points Over Replacement Per Adjusted Game At That Usage. Though some conferences may lack the resources to collect shot location data, and the plot only shows a few dots, we think the star player’s plot and image can provide simply information about which player fans should pay attention to.
The final section contains betting statistics from Vegas Odds. Which team was favored, and what was the probability that the team would win the championship? Though the single-elimination tournament has a high level of uncertainty, we feel that a probability estimate from a betting expert can provide a different viewpoint on how difficult it is when an underdog team wins. Finally, we gather some fun details about their history, such as which team has never won the Sweet 16 and when their most recent matchup was……
Except for this team project, I did a similar matchup card with RShiny. Users can select a home team and an away team, and the loading takes around three minutes. Though it does not contain stats as much as our team’s one in my shiny visualization, users can create their dream matchup card.
Shiny: March Madness Matchup Card
All the codes are here on GitHub — MarchMadenss
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