NBA Tableau Dashboard

Project Introduction

I absolutely love basketball, the NBA, and my hometown Utah Jazz. In fact, one particular Halloween costume featured myself as "The Ultimate Utah Jazz Fan".

I've always enjoyed memorizing stats, tuning into the Jazz by radio or TV, and learning more about the game from experts in the industry. I've been fortunate enough to write about the Utah Jazz and host a podcast on the team.

Staying on brand, I've developed a Tableau dashboard of metrics and visualizations for the league and each team to inform fans and ease the data collection process for my projects.

Situation

This passion has driven me to blend my data career with my hobby for basketball. Throughout my experience as a fan and blogger, I've discovered there's a gap in the industry between traditional stats that aren't the whole picture or advanced metrics that lack transparency for interpretation.

This leads fans and some media to either incorrectly measure winning value or become disenchanted with the "analytics", along with those who use them.

Task

I'm a firm believer that data and human observation work best together. I've found data to be an excellent way to monitor the whole while people are good at observing the detail.

I set off to create a tool to monitor the NBA and its teams with the goal of supporting how we watch and talk about what's happening. This tool must address that gap, targeting interpretable data points related to the ultimate goal: winning.

Action

I set off creating the concept of each data point, tracking down their source, creating a transformation tool, collecting years worth of data, designing the visualizations, and creating a tableau dashboard to interact with it.

I settled on an overarching concept: generating advantages. I approached the subject via efficiency advantages (shooting better than your opponent) and volume advantages (getting more shots than your opponent).

Theoretically, this is about all sports, business, etc., really is. Do you get opportunities and how often do you capitalize on them?

I designed the tool to evaluate these advantages for the entire league and each team, offering various attributes to manipulate, like "Game Date", "Opponent", "Season", "Season Type", etc.

Result

The result is a spectacular tool right in your browser. It's interactive, beautiful, and accessible. One can easily understand the measures and manipulate them per their interest. Check out demos of the tool below and visit them yourself here

There's still plenty to accomplish, like automating the data wrangling and conducting additional research about how the measures impact winning on a per game and season basis.