Team Shooting Stars: Proposal

Background & Motivation

The National Basketball Association (NBA) is one of the most famous sports league in the world. It consists 30 men basketball teams (where 29 in the US, 1 in Canada) which was founded in 1940s, named BAA (Basketball Association of America). Then it changed to the current name of NBA after merging with NBL (National Basketball League) in 1949. NBA plays are generally fast-paced, physically intensive where audience find it fascinating to watch. NBA also represents the best basketball play standard in the world. Joining NBA is the ultimate dream for a professional basketball player.

As NBA fans, our group would like to analyse on player’s statistics and team’s performance to clear our doubts like how the play styles of NBA basketball have been changed over the last 10 years. We would apply different visualization tools and graphics to gain in-depth analysis.

Project Description

The aim of this project is to get deeper knowledge into the current trend in NBA and what makes a team succeed, so the questions we are going to answer are:
1. Is the role of centre becoming less and less important NBA?
2. Are 3-point-shooting teams more likely to win through the past ten years?
3. What is the most important quality of a championship team?
4. Is there a indicator of a player’s best performance in career?
5. What make 2011 Dallas mavericks and 1996 Houston Rockets win the championship?

Schedule

Academic Studying Week	Task	Done By	Status
Week 7
1	Brainstorm project topic and scope	Everyone	Completed
Week 8
1	Formulate ideas	Everyone	Completed
2	Consulting Prof	Everyone	Completed
3	Deciding on tools/techniques to use	Everyone	Completed
4	Upload detail project proposal	Everyone	Completed
Week 9
1	Data preparation, consolidation, preprocessing and cleaning	Everyone	Not Completed
Week 10
1	Update Wiki page	Everyone	Not Completed
2	Study Treemap		Not Completed
3	Study Multi-Series Line Chart		Not Completed
Week 11 & 12
1	Web App Developer	Everyone	Not Completed
Week 13
1	Do poster, presentation preparation	Everyone	Not Completed
Week 14
1	Presentation	Everyone	Not Completed
Week 15
1	Submission of project poster	Everyone	Not Completed
2	Submission of final project paper and artifacts	Everyone	Not Completed
Week 16
1	Visual Analytics Poster Night	Everyone	Not Completed

TOOLS

Our team decided to use the following tools for analysis:

1. Tableau:

• 1. • Treemap
     • Sunburst Charts
     • Parallel Plots
  2. QGIS:
     • Geospatial Analysis: To see if there’s any correlation between
  3. JMP:
     • Clustering Analysis
     • Logistic Regression: The outcome of the analysis will usually be based on a success or failure of the game. Hence to do a regression analysis on factors for success of a game, we need to use logistic regression as the dependent variable is categorical in nature
     • Time Series Analysis: Basketball Reference consists of 5 years’ worth of dataset. Thus it’s worth doing a time series analysis on player performance, team performance, change in player’s role and several other factors

PRIOR WORK & REFERENCES

1. Success Factors in NBA:

• 1. • http://www.basketball-reference.com/about/factors.html
  2. The length and success of NBA careers:
     • Coates, Dennis; Oguntimein, Babatunde. International Journal of Sport Finance 5.1 (Feb 2010): 4-26.
  3. Racial Discrimination among NBA referees:
     • http://ww2.amstat.org//Chapters/boston/nessis07/presentation_material/Justin_Wolfers.pdf