A Data Visualization on Basketball

The NBA playoffs are quickly coming to an end. The other night the Miami Heat tied the series at 3-3 with the Boston Celtics to bring it to a game 7. The winner will go on to play the Oklahoma City Thunder. Recently we finished our first Data Visualization class at the University of Cincinnati and the course was a great success. We had 45 students work very hard in a short period of time and I was very impressed as I watched them progress, learning the basics of data visualization, moving to interactive visualizations and ultimately creating their own Tableau Viz for their final project.

The visualization below was created by 3 students at the University of Cincinnati, Dilip Kotlapati, Swetha Vemuri and Sanghavi Iyer. The students did not have much exposure to Tableau prior to taking this class and they created this visualization in just a few weeks. With their permission, I’ve adapted their Tableau Viz into Tableau Public so that I could publish it out.

The “Game Summary” tab embeds an Excel chart that they created and some images, team logos and scores to create a nice summary page of the game. The “Game Details” tab uses an image of a basketball court and the students plotted the game on the court with x/y coordinates and color coding the various types of shots, misses and assists. They made it interactive, one of the requirements for the final project, based on selecting players, teams and quarters. While there are certainly ways to improve this visualization, it was great to see what the students learned and were able to accomplish in such a short period of time.