The Sports Project - Tableau

The INTRODUCTION

In sports, analytics are important because they can provide valuable insights that can help teams and organizations make better decisions. Analyzing data like player performance, team strategies along with other factors allows teams to identify their strengths and weaknesses which will assist stakeholders to make predictions about future performance, informed decisions on players, tactics and training.

Along with team and player based decisions, analytics can also provide insights into the fan experience which leads into revenue streams for the teams and organizations.

Analytics is essential to any sports organization to gain a competitive advantage and make better decisions that can lead to improved performance and financial success for teams and organizations in the sports industry.

In this project, I am analyzing data from the NBA's 2021-2022 season to gain insights into the teams and players and visualizing the findings using Tableau.

The DATA

The data for this analysis can be found here: basketball-reference.com

I needed to export the data from this website for use in Excel. Upon selecting the "Get table as CSV (for Excel" option, it displayed the data as text on screen. Clearly, the data needed a little finessing. Fortunately, Excel has a wonderful function call Text to Columns. I copied over the rows of text and formatted in Excel using commas as the delimiters.

The INSIGHTS

1. The players in the Center position typically have the most number of rebounds. Nikola Jokic - Center, has the highest amount of rebounds in the '21-'22 season.
2. The Point Forward position on the SAC (Sacramento Kings) team has the highest average of 3-pointers at 50% out of all the teams.
3. The team that scored the highest points for the '21-'22 NBA season was the Minnesota Timberwolves, with Karl-Anthony Towns and Anthony Edwards scoring the most points for their team.
4. The majority of assists are attributed to the Point Guard position. Trae Young (Point Guard) from ATL (Atlanta?Hawks) leads the pack with the highest number of assists for the season with 737.

The ANALYSIS

Let's start by seeing how different players performed last season to evaluate for potential free-agent signings.?We can do this by looking at total points, assists and total rebounds and breaking it down by position.

I used a bubble plot chart to show added dimension between the variables:

The players who have higher rebounds are primarily in the Center position. This makes sense because the Center position is typically the tallest player on the court and can get the ball after a failed basket. Regarding points and assists, Nikola Jokic (Center) is an outlier as he ranks in the upper right quadrant among the Point Guards whereas the majority of Centers fall in the lower left quadrant.

Another metric we want to explore is what position is the most efficient at shooting 3-pointers for each team.

We can easily show this using a Heatmap (or Highlight Table).

The data shows that the Point Forward position on the SAC (Sacramento Kings) team has the highest average at 50% out of all the teams. The Small Forward position for LAC (LA Clippers) and the Center position for SAS (San Antonio Spurs) follow close behind.

Next, we wanted to look at the breakdown of total points by team. We can do this using a Stacked Bar Chart:

Using a stacked bar chart, we can rank the teams by total number of points. The Minnesota Timberwolves scored the highest number of points for the season, with Oklahoma City scoring the least.

With a stacked bar chart, we can also weigh the individual player points within the team to show the heavy hitters - for example: The Raptor's high scorers are Pascal Siakam and Fred VanVleet. Reviewing all of the segments, we can see that overall, Joel Embiid from the Philadelphia 76ers earned the largest number of points for their team during the season.

Lastly, we wanted to examine which players had the most assists by position. I used a Treemap to show the breakdown:

From this chart, you can see that the majority of assists are attributed to the Point Guard position followed by the Shooting guard position. We can also cross-reference with the Bubble Plot from earlier to corroborate this finding. Trae Young from ATL (Atlanta?Hawks) leads the pack with assists. Power Forwards and Small Forwards appear to be similar in points.

You can view the Tableau Viz here.

Thank YOU!

This was a fun analysis as I really did not know very much about basketball! As always, thank you so much for taking the time to read this and I welcome any and all feedback as I believe the feedback is a gift! Please follow me?Lisette Mohammed?to stay connected on my data journey!