Tag / Basketball

by anthonysmoak

How to Extract Web Data with Power BI

By now you’ve probably heard that the Los Angeles Lakers were a pretty solid dynasty in the latter half of the 90’s. I was never a Michael Jordan and Bulls fan during their reign of terror in the 90’s. It all started with the Bulls first title at the expense of Lakers’ fans back in 1991.

So while I must admit that “The Last Dance” was a well executed documentary focused on a team I didn’t care for, it did evoke nostalgia for the 90’s.

Kobe Shaq

Although we suffering Lakers’ fans had to wait our turn, we did get the last laugh as “The Next Dance” revolved around a young Kobe Bryant and prime era Shaquille O’Neil.

I built a ribbon chart visualization in Power BI showcasing the top scorers from 1995 to the three peat years ending in 2002. Thank you Spencer Baucke for the ingenious web scraping technique!

Lakers Ribbon Chart Thumbnail

Follow along in the video and make a ribbon chart for your favorite NBA team.

As always, do great things with your data.

Anthony B. Smoak, CBIP

Inspiration ► https://bit.ly/2WZFWCA

If you find this type of instruction valuable make sure to subscribe to my Youtube channel.

Check out other Power BI videos of interest definitely worth your time:

All views and opinions are solely my own and do not necessarily reflect those of my employer.

Kobe & Shaq Image: David Sherman / NBAE via Getty Images file

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by anthonysmoak

Tableau Dashboard Tutorial: Dot Strip Plot

In this video tutorial I describe a dashboard that I put together that displays the distribution of various NBA player statistics. I use the always handy parameter to enable the user to choose which statistics are displayed on the dashboard. Although I’m showing sports statistics measures in this dashboard, it could easily be repurposed to show the distribution of a variety of business related metrics.

I break the dashboard up into three areas: histogram, dot strip plot, and heat map. In the second part of the video, I describe in detail how to build out a jittered dot strip plot. The benefit of the jittered dot strip plot is that the marks representing NBA players obstruct each other much less as compared to the linear dot strip plot.

Techniques used in the dashboard were previous outlined in my Ultimate Slope Graph and How to Use Jittering in Tableau (Scattered Data Points) posts.

Feel free to head to my Tableau Public page and download the workbook for yourself. Drop me a line in the comments or on YouTube if you learned something.

As always, do great things with your data!

If you find this type of instruction valuable make sure to subscribe to my YouTube channel.

All views and opinions are solely my own and do NOT necessarily reflect those of my employer.

by anthonysmoak

Create Rounded Bar Charts in Tableau

Part 1: How to Make Rounded Bar Charts in Tableau

In this post you’re getting two videos for the price of one (considering they’re all free for now, that’s a good thing). I put together a relatively simple dashboard to help illustrate a few intermediate level concepts. In this first video I take a look at the number of total assists by NBA players during the 2017-2018 season. In case you were wondering, Russell Westbrook led the league in assists during that season. If you don’t know who Russell Westbrook is, then skip this Tableau stuff and watch the last video immediately (and then come back to the Tableau stuff).

In the first Tableau dashboard video, you’ll learn two concepts:

  • How to make rounded bar charts;
  • How to filter the number of bar chart marks via use of a parameter;

Part 2: Apply Custom Sorting in Tableau

In the second video I build upon the dashboard built in the first video by showing you how to add a custom sort. The custom sort relies upon the creation of a parameter and a calculated field. The parameter and calculated field enable the user to select either a dimension (e.g., Player Name) or a measure (e.g., sum of assists) from a drop down box and the visualization will sort ascending or descending as requested.

The calculated field relies upon the RANK_UNIQUE function.

In this context, RANK_UNIQUE returns the unique rank of each player’s assist total. The key with RANK_UNIQUE is that identical values are assigned different ranks. As an example, the set of values (6, 9, 9, 14) would be ranked (4, 2, 3, 1), as no tied rankings are allowed.

Part 3: Interact with the Dashboard

Bonus: Russell Westbrook on the Attack

For those of you who do not know who Russell Westbrook is, I’ve got you covered. These aren’t assists but in these situations, he didn’t need to pass!

References:

Thanks to both the Tableau Magic blog for outlining the concept of rounded bar charts and the VizJockey blog for the custom sort methodology. Check out and support these  blogs!

As always, do great things with your data!

If you find this type of instruction valuable make sure to subscribe to my YouTube channel.

All views and opinions are solely my own and do NOT necessarily reflect those of my employer.

by anthonysmoak

L.A. Lakers Visualization: R Code Plus Illustrator for the Win

I am a huge Los Angeles Lakers fan since I grew up on the West Coast; I lived in Los Angeles for a year and Las Vegas for many years as a kid. Magic Johnson and the “Showtime” squad of the 80’s will always be the best team dynasty in NBA history in my rather biased opinion. I wanted to make a visualization using base R code to plot a bar chart of Lakers wins by season and then use Adobe Illustrator to complete the effort. Using a .csv data file from Basketball-Reference.com I was able to tell the story of the franchise in an easy to comprehend visualization. I love bringing data to life and making it tell a story!

Laker Wins By Season

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