Proposal of Kai's IST719 (Information Visualization) final project about visualization of historical data in NBA league.

1. Kai’s InfoVis Final Project:
NBA in historical context
Kai Li
10/28/2013

2. Dataset
• A number of datasets from Basketball-reference.com are consulted
for this visualization project:
• NBA & ABA Most Valuable Player Award Winners: http://www.basketballreference.com/awards/mvp.html
• NBA & ABA Coach Directory: http://www.basketball-reference.com/coaches/
• NBA & ABA Team Index: http://www.basketball-reference.com/teams/
• Basketball-reference.com is one of the most comprehensive sources
for basketball data online. But the information about their data
sources are not discusses in detail on their website.

3. Audience
• Laymen who are interested in NBA games and basketball researchers
are the top two targeted user groups identified for this project:
• NBA game fans:
• Having different level of interests in the games, who may or may not get access to
related data and facts
• This project will be a source for them to get the data, digest the meaning in a easier way,
and have fun
• Basketball researchers:
• Getting access to a large number of data
• This project tries to offer them better perspectives on the relationships between the
data and how to present these information in a more meaningful way

4. Questions
• 1. What are the histories of all the NBA teams?
• 2. Who are the greatest coaches in NBA history, and how are their
performances?
• 3. Who are the greatest players in NBA’s history?
• 4. How does MVP award reflect a player’s real performance?
• 5. How long distances are there between current players and
historical records holders?

5. Sketch #1: A history of all NBA teams
• X-axis: years
• Y-axis: list of NBA teams
• Color (of the brackets): each
team’s winning rate by year
• Star (inside the brackets):
who got the championship
that year

6. Sketch #2: The best NBA coaches all
time
• X-axis: winning games / years
• Y-axis: list of (selected)
coaches
• First part of bars: winning and
losing records for each of the
coaches
• Second part of bars: his
winning rates by year

7. Sketch #3: The best NBA MVP player
• X-axis: Player efficiency rating
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pla
yer_efficiency_rating
• Y-axis: Win Share
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wi
n_shares
• Each item in this matrix
represents the MVP player in a
given year, marking six aspects
of his performance that year

8. Sketch #4: How hard it is to become alltime leader?
• Y-axis: historical records

9. Thank you!