

Where the Heat and the Thunder Hit Their Shots - akharris
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/06/11/sports/basketball/nba-shot-analysis.html

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marknutter
Not sure how many of you are basketball fans, but if you have even a cursory
interest in the sport I suggest you check out this year's NBA finals. It is
widely regarded as one of the most anticipated match-ups in many years. OKC's
stars are all under the age of 24 which means they should dominate for years
to come. We have literally watched these guys grow up before our eyes and they
finally get their shot at the title this year.

LeBron James has been lambasted for leaving his hometown team to try to win a
championship with the Heat which has evaded him so far. The Heat are the most
hated team in the league. By contrast, the Thunder is led by the league's
leading scorer Kevin Durant who's appears to be one of the most humble
superstars in the league. It's the ultimate good guys vs. bad guys matchup.
LeBron, likely fueled by all the criticisms about his ability to perform in
the clutch and his will to win, appears to be on a mission to prove everybody
wrong and finally win his first championship. To put it in perspective, facing
elimination in game 5 versus the Celtics, LeBron put on one of the best
playoff performances in history scoring nearly half his team's points
(<http://www.nba.com/games/20120607/MIABOS/gameinfo.html>).

The series will be on ABC so you don't need cable to watch it. Catch at least
one game.

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Goladus
> The Heat are the most hated team in the league.

I'd say Heat and Thunder are tied for most hated team.

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jwallaceparker
I'm a die hard NBA fan and have never heard of anyone hating the Thunder.

Why do people hate the Thunder?

I can see the argument that some Seattle fans would resent that the team left,
but I think their anger would be directed toward the owners involved or David
Stern - not the team itself.

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lotharbot
For Seattle fans, it's not merely _that_ the team left, it's _how_ they left.
Some of Clay Bennett's e-mails got leaked, and they make it clear that while
he was publicly promising to try to keep the team in Seattle (which was a
condition of the original sale) he was privately saying he'd move the team to
OKC ASAP. As long as Clay Bennett is involved with the Thunder, the majority
of Sonics fans are going to be against them.

Also remember that of current Thunder players, only Nick Collison was on the
team before Clay Bennett arrived. Kevin Durant played one year in Seattle but
it was already common knowledge that the team was going to leave, so fans
didn't really take to him much. All of the other rotation players were added
after the move. So there aren't any beloved players left on the team to
mitigate the anger coming out of Seattle.

It's similar to LeBron being thought of as a villain. It's not _that_ he left
Cleveland, it's _how_ he left Cleveland. To a lot of fans in both cities, it
felt like their guy/team lied about wanting to stay, left under dubious
circumstances, and disrespected the fans and the city on the way out.

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philwelch
The Sonics don't have _any_ beloved players still in the league, but Gary
Payton outspokenly refused to have his number retired by the Thunder.

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jredwards
The source of this is: <http://courtvisionanalytics.com/>

Kirk Goldsberry does these. He's been doing this for a while. The NYT may have
developed the library that they're using here (I'm not sure), but the idea and
the data visualization concept are his.

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davidfischer
Goldsberry was great at the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics conference[1]. The
charts really highlight a player's strengths and weaknesses. A quick look at
Ray Allen's chart (in Goldsberry's conference paper) shows how much better he
is when he goes to his right. Kobe really needs to cut down on those 12-15'
baseline jumpers that he seems to favor.

When I look at the graphics from the NYT article, the player whose chart
really sticks out is James Harden. His efficiency this year is amazing and a
lot of it has to do with shot selection. Most of his shots are 3-pointers or
within 8' which are considered the two highest value shots on the court. Some
team with a Moneyball style general manager (somewhat common in the NBA from
my understanding) will pay him handsomely yet probably still not what his
contribution merits.

[1] <http://www.sloansportsconference.com/?p=6132>

Edit: trivial edit for small error

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aswanson
I wonder how much the quality of the shots he takes are a function of his
teammates and their offensive sets. Would be really interesting if shot
quality could be completely decoupled from the environment.

~~~
ricefield
Yeah, its not the simple - you can't just take a look at the data and tell the
players, "take these shots, not these shots." Generally, you get a sense of
where you're most effective and where you're not, but either the offense
doesn't set you up that way all the time, the defense is doing too good of a
job, and the shot clock is running out.

Bottom line, IMO its really helpful to look at these (I love data
visualization) but you have to be careful not to fall into the trap of
oversimplifying.

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jcromartie
I thought these might be D3/SVG visualizations, but it looks like a custom
chart library developed by NYT themselves, with drawing done in a Canvas
element.

I think a browser might choke on this many visualizations in SVG but I'm not
sure. I've seen libraries take all sorts of approaches, but I'm leaning
towards Canvas for really fluid and precise graphics.

Edit: I'm baffled why someone would downvote this.

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noomerikal
Looking at chart2.js - canvas if the browser supports it with a fallback to
flash.

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yock
How are the statistics from which these visualizations are generated captured?
Does the NBA have equipment on the court or in the arena to track players and
the ball (something like how professional tennis is monitored)? Is it manual,
with a person recording their own observations about player/ball placement?
Post-game video analysis?

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SoapSeller
Not the NBA, but some teams use a system called SportVU[0] that do auto
player&ball tracking.

I used to work on the system, so I can answer (some) questions about it.

[0] <http://www.sportvu.com/basketball.asp>

~~~
hammock
How does it work?

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SoapSeller
Short version: Using a number(six) of dedicated video cameras around the venue
and (a lot of) image processing.

There is a nice article in wired about it(include a picture of one of the
cameras and the view from another) [http://www.wired.com/playbook/2011/04/nba-
data-revolution/al...](http://www.wired.com/playbook/2011/04/nba-data-
revolution/all/1)

~~~
jevinskie
How is the system calibrated? Are the cameras at fixed angles or mounted to a
base that measures their angles?

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SoapSeller
The angles are important, but also the position relatively to the court(which
is different in every venue).

The calibration is done by matching(automatically or manually) known world
points to pixels from the cameras. (This is a very common practice in image-
processing systems)

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jere
I looked at the team graph and thought it wasn't going to be very informative,
but was surprised to see some of the very distinctive player patterns (e.g.
Battier).

The graphics are brilliant. Is the image -> graph effect part of some library
I haven't heard of?

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idoh
Shane Battier is one of the smartest players in the NBA, and you can see it in
action by looking at his shot chart.

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wisty
There's a massive (old) article on Battier -
[http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/15/magazine/15Battier-t.html?...](http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/15/magazine/15Battier-t.html?pagewanted=all)

Apparently, he's such a good team player (picking good positions, herding
opponents into weak positions, doing things which are bad for his stats but
good for the team) that he can almost shut down Kobe. OK, Kobe still scores a
lot when he's guarded by Battier, but only because Kobe always gets the ball.

He'll memorize every one of those heat maps (along with every other dataset
his coach can get him), and use that knowledge to mess up his opponent's
attacks.

~~~
idoh
Great article!

"Battier’s game is a weird combination of obvious weaknesses and nearly
invisible strengths."

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Nimi
Please forgive me for bringing up something not directly related to this
particular series, but economics professor Dave Berri ran some linear
regressions on the box score stats of basketball games, and claims he can
accurately measure how much wins per season each player is responsible for.
(e.g. Team A won 40 games last season, player 1 produced 15 wins, player 2
produced another 10, player 3 produced another 8, and the remaining wins
divide among the other players). He has a (sort of official) blog:
<http://wagesofwins.com/> I'm bringing this up because I think this may be of
interest to the HN community. I, for one, was fascinated with his claims and
their implications, hope this will interest some of you :-)

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ereckers
I saw this posted earlier under a different title. The word "stunning" was in
there referring to the use of images. Just interested in why you changed it
and if there was any observable improvement in views/votes from the change.

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TylerE
Anyone else think the granularity is a bit too high on these? Neat concept,
but I have to wonder if they wouldn't be a lot easier to interpret with about
half the point density.

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corry
Is there a publicly available data source for basketball stats like this?
Curious where these datasets come from...

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salman89
No publicly available that I've seen. Most companies use STATS inc

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jimmytucson
For those of you wanting to dive deeper into the data, try basketball-
reference.com's PlayIndex+: [http://www.basketball-reference.com/play-
index/plus/shooting...](http://www.basketball-reference.com/play-
index/plus/shooting.cgi?&player_id=bryanko01&year_id=2011)

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bearwithclaws
Do yourself a favor before watching the NBA finals -- check out this 5 minutes
preview of the finals: [http://www.bballbreakdown.com/2012-nba-finals-preview-
heat-v...](http://www.bballbreakdown.com/2012-nba-finals-preview-heat-vs-
thunder/)

Best analysis I've seen yet.

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Shoomz
This is pretty awesome. I love solid data, but it seems to me that this might
be too much data and too few substantial takeaways...but the graphs are still
fun to look at.

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zachwill
Incredible visualization. Seriously one of the best I've seen all year.

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mfringel
I like how it shows where a player is comfortable and good (red clusters), and
where a player is just comfortable (light green clusters).

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optimus
Does any one know where to get access to the raw data? Does the NBA provide
them "upon request" or did the author compile them manually?

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spenrose
As best I can tell it does not include free throw attempts. If that is
correct, the data and therefore the visualization is seriously incomplete and
misleading.

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RobAtticus
A player's free throw ability does not need any real visualization. It comes
down to number of attempts, and percentage made. Adding them would skew these
visualizations and wouldn't tell you anything you couldn't easily figure out
by looking at a player's stats.

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spenrose
Hhmm. I was assuming the purpose of such a visualization was to understand the
offense, which can't be done without including free throws. Perhaps it serves
some other purpose, like employing "front-end developers".

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harlanlewis
Visualizing the ratio points from the line vs the rest of the floor could be
interesting, but it doesn't say much about how they run their offense.

As others noted, free throws occur at the same place every time and would
seriously skew the chart - especially for lowpost/longrange players like James
Harden.

Maybe a step closer would be showing where a player was fouled that led to
shots from the line.

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mkramlich
Please no random sports fan chit-chat here. This is Hacker News folks. We have
lots of other mainstream places for that sort of thing. Thank you.

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joering2
Very cool. Now all you need is bunch of robot-basketball players with this
data plugged in, and those guys' asses are kicked to high heaven, lol!!

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DeanCollinsNYC
For those of you watching the game tonight there is a live fan chat running
from 9pm at - <http://www.LiveBasketballChat.com/go/17762>

