Sunday, April 26, 2015

An Interactive Visualization of NBA Teams Winning Percentages Over The Course of a Game

I found an interesting article at FiveThirtyEight Sports that had an excellent example of an interactive graph. It is a graph that shows all 30 NBA teams and their percentage chance of winning their game, on average, at different times in the game. Every team starts out at 50 percent at the start of the game, but as the graph continues onward, teams go in all different directions. At any time in a game, a team's winning percentage can be calculated based on the current score and how much time is remaining. I think that it is a fairly easy graph to use if you understand what the numbers are meaning. In the graph, you can highlight any team that you want, and scroll your mouse left or right to find their percentage chance of winning at any time in the game. For example, if I highlight the Washington Wizards, I can find that on average at halftime of every game this season they had a 56% chance of winning, and by the start of the fourth quarter they had a 60% chance of victory. The drawback to this chart is that it may be too small for how much data is on it, making it challenging to focus on one particular spot.

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