Towards the end of my graduate studies, I enrolled into a data visualization class, simply for the final project. Luckily, the professor for the class was chill and left the topic of the final project up the student's choosing. 'Perfect! Which sport do I analyze?', was my initial thought. At this point, the Toronto Raptors were on their way to their first NBA championship, and were electrifying the city. Thus, NBA basketball was my choice.
There’s a large number of stats collected in every NBA game that occurs, but I had to narrow it down to a common topic. I wanted to choose an aspect of the game with relevancy to the average fan. One of the most-asked questions from fans is,
“Why do NBA players struggle so much from the free throw line?”
When I searched the internet for an NBA dataset, I found a lot of datasets on Kaggle. And to my suprise, one about Free Throws, the part of the game that I had a lot of questions (and not many answers) about. It spans 10 years (from the 2006-2007 season to the 2015-2016 season), thus plenty of data to use and see some trends with. The result of that class was a PowerPoint presentation, but I've decided to make the analysis a bit more interactive using Bokeh. Some questions I originally hoped to answer include:
Does the player’s position play a factor?
Do better-paid players have better conversion rates?
Are players sharper during close games?
Who are the best / worst FT shooters?
Is there such a thing as ‘home-court advantage’?
Each tab below contains a visualization and additional ways to see metrics related to the topic. Please note that there was an NBA lockout in 2011.
I'll be looking to extend this by extending the dataset (I've posted a comment to the Kaggle page, and intend to keep the parquet file mentioned updated) and providing answers to questions like the following...
Does start time of game matter?
Does geography play a role?
Do players improve over their careers?
If you're interested in this data and would like a chart or metric added, please feel free to email me!