Interactive LED basketball court

During the 2024 NBA All-Star weekend, the basketball court was essentially a giant LED screen on the second day. The company behind the panels talked about the technical side for a WTHR news segment, shown above.

The court was fun to watch but also distracting. It draws your eyes to the ground when the action is ahead and above the rim. So the technology seems less than ideal for an actual game. Maybe good as an expensive practice and training tool? I couldn’t believe not a single shot chart was shown during the three-point contest.

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Rise of Caitlin Clark, scoring machine

Caitlin Clark, a basketball guard for the University of Iowa, has been steadily adding to her point total over the past four years. Clark broke the NCAA record this past week. But as we all know, it’s not official until there’s a step chart that shows the rise over time.

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Collection of NBA basketball data sources and apps

If you’re into basketball data, Sravan Pannala is keeping a running list of data sources, apps, and visualization on the topic. I can always use more basketball data, so I’ll bookmark this for later.

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When Mike Breen announces “Bang!”

Mike Breen is a well-known NBA basketball announcer. When a player hits a big three-pointer, Breen often uses his catchphrase, “Bang!” Someone counted all the times he yelled the phrase for each player, because sure why not. Stephen Curry and Klay Thompson are a cut above the rest.

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Astericking NBA champions

It seems to have grown more common for basketball fans to complain that whoever wins the championship didn’t have to go through a legitimate challenge. If so and so wasn’t injured on the opposing team, so the naysayers claim, then such and such team wouldn’t have won. For The Pudding, Russell Samora made it easier to whine, based on an aptly named metric called CRUTCH.

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Non-abstract Curry shot chart

Stephen Curry of the Golden State Warriors scored 50 points in game 7 against the Sacramento Kings. He made 20 shots. Instead of the standard shot chart with dots on a simplified court, Todd Whitehead overlaid video frames of every made shot for a single image.

I assume all shot charts will take this format from now on. Thanks, ESPN.

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NBA will track players with a third dimension

The NBA currently uses player-tracking that estimates player position on the court in two dimensions. Imagine x-y-coordinates for a player at any given time. But of course two dimensions wasn’t enough, so the NBA is switching to the Hawk-Eye tracking system, which provides the third dimension:

The introduction of “pose tracking” provides new officiating capabilities to support better and faster decision-making, with the intent to increase the accuracy of officiating calls and the speed of play. In addition, the system will give the NBA and its teams the ability to measure and analyze athletic movement in new ways.

I think I liked sports better with just the box score. I might just be showing my age though.

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Greatest unexpected NBA performance

This is a fun one from Russell Samora and Reshad Malekzai for The Pudding. When watching basketball, one of the best things is when a player has an unexpectedly great game, so Samora looked for the greatest and most unexpected game based on data.

The video is also a nice example of how distributions and outliers can be applied in an analysis. Check out the data yourself on GitHub.

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LeBron James’ longevity

Okay, one more LeBron James thing, mostly because I like seeing different looks at the same data and topic. For The Washington Post, Artur Galocha and Ben Golliver focus on the longevity and consistency of James’ scoring. You expect scoring ability to decline with age, but James, at 38 years old, is still holding steady.

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Cumulative points scored by LeBron James and other top scorers

Never fear, Sopan Deb, K.K. Rebecca Lai, and Eve Washington, for The New York Times, are on the case with a comparison of LeBron James’ scoring timeline against other top scorers. They also provide breakdowns of how James scored his points, which show an all-around game rather than a hard skew towards a single type of shot.

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