A Journey Into the Heart of Sports: Data Viz with Daren Willman

Radar Wars and the Theory of Sports Data Visualization

One of the first basketball analytics projects I ever did, like all great inventions, was born of a desire to procrastinate on something ostensibly important (this was three years ago; I was in college, so you know how that goes). I was in the middle of my first semester of data science classes, and I figured at that point, the entire world was at my fingertips. So, I decided to use that newfound power to try and compare NBA players to other historical stars. I did some fancy machine learning (and spent a lot of time on Stack Overflow), got some outputs, and thought to myself about the best way to view the results.

I had played my fair share of Madden at that point, so my mind went straight to using radar plots. I thought it was a perfect fit, providing some geometric definition to a wide range of metrics, a template across which to compare multiple players at once.

A visualization of Klay Thompson’s statistics against his closest historical comparisons

I posted my article, tweeted it out, a bunch of folks clapped and pressed the “like” button, and I felt validated. That’s how my basketball analytics career started…