A Visual Tour of Stephen Curry's 3 Pointers in NBA (2009 – 2021)
Watch this video with audio to see the final product, or scroll down to see the goals, concept & process of the project.
Unmute & watch on 1080p HD!
THE BRIEF
Student Project
2 weeks
April 2021
The task for this project was to bring in an element of animation (or motion) in a data visualization that tells an impactful story.
I chose to explore Stephen Curry's 3-pointer basketball shots in the NBA between 2009 – 2021. He is one of my favorite NBA players and I'm personally a huge fan of his 3-pointer shooting technique.
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Growing up, I played a lot of basketball and realized how my 3-point scoring conversion was stronger on certain positions of the 3-point line. This made me want to study the patterns of Stephen's shooting strategy.
Let's "bounce" into this journey!
what I was curious about
1. Who are the top 15-20 3-point shooters in the NBA?
2. How does Stephen Curry stand out from the list?
3. Evolution: Has his 3-Pt average conversion rate gotten better over the years?
4. Accuracy: What is the ratio of his "made shots" to "missed shots"?
5. Pressure: Does he use this strategy even in the last 30 seconds of a game?
6. Performance: If yes, then does it work to the advantage of his team winning?
the datasets
I collected data from NBA Stats and for the comparison of top players who scored 3-pointers, "3-Pt Average Rate" was utilized to contrast players' performances.
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I then filtered out Stephen Curry's data to see how his 3-point game evolved from 2009 to 2021 as he was evidently one of the best 3-point scorers in the NBA.
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The Buzzer Beater: Analysing the 3-point attempts by Curry in the last 30 seconds of the game
For Shot Chart Viz, the dataset was collected using NBA API in Python for the "Shot Chart Details" that gave me the location X and Y for each "made shot" and "missed shot" by Stephen Curry between 2009 – 2021.
sketches & ideas
I believe that visual thinking and the making of sketches aid my thinking and decision-making process. I sketched out basic variety of data viz. that could be translated from my data.
viz. explorations
The challenge for this project was to identify an impactful narrative to which I could stitch together information with the data I had. With multiple exploratory data viz. using tableau, I noticed how Stephen's evolution of 3 pointers has been outstanding. I thought of using his shooting locations on the basketball court to study his versatility.
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The heatmap on the bottom left shows how he attempts his 3 pointers across the entire 3-point line.
viz. in motion — show shots made in the last 30 seconds of the game?
Since I wanted to incorporate motion in data storytelling, I decided to show the ratio of "missed shot" vs. "made shot" by Stephen Curry on the basketball court in the last 30 seconds of the game.
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Here is an example of representing this data which is one of the frames that make up the video —
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30, 29, 28........0! [the golden second]
A small multiple approach of all 30 seconds show us how Stephen Curry relies on his 3-point shots to score as the game clocks towards the buzzer-beater.
Resources/Tools/Credits:
Data: NBA Stats, NBA API, Python, R
Design & Viz.: Tableau, Adobe (Illustrator + PremierPro + AfterEffects), Procreate
Inspiration: Kirk Goldsberry
Music: Lost But Won, Hans Zimmer
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key takeways and challenges
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Always sketch out an idea and work towards it, but also be flexible throughout the process as you iterate.
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The element of "motion" could've been displayed in a more sophisticated fashion, rather than consecutive frames.
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If time permits in the future, I'd like to build this on D3.js and make it an interactive piece.
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It's okay to not be overly perfect about every single design detail. (especially under time constraints)
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Get more feedback.
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I learned that it is possible to learn 3+ design applications in 2 weeks if you really want to! (& Youtube is your best friend!)
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Inspirations are powerful. Keep getting inspired!
