NBA Team Passing Wheels
A way to visualize passing on your favorite NBA team
Shri Khalpada and Rob Moore
The Loom visualization shows passers on the left and receivers on the right. Both sides are sorted, meaning the players who pass the most are on the top-left and the players who receive the most are on the top-right.
The Chord visualization connection between two players represents the volume of passing between those two players. A connection that starts out thick for player A and becomes thin as it goes to player B means player A passes more to player B than player B does to player A.
Hovering over the connections will show you information about how many passes led to assists, and the field goal percentage of shot attempts after passes.
If you have shooting — if you have great shooting — then the more ball movement the better, because you have guys coming off screens and you want to make the defense have to defend for long stretches rather than just one pass and a shot.. so we looked at the passing totals, and 300 was a really key number for us.
With the depth of shooting talent in the NBA today, understanding good ball movement is more important today than it's ever been before.
We were particularly interested in building something to help us answer the following questions:
- How many passes per game are teams making, keeping in mind the 300 target that Steve Kerr had for the Warriors?
- Who's making the most passes on a given team?
- Who are those passers passing to the most?
- What are the outcomes of those passes?
We decided on using a chord diagram to represent passing data, and hope you have as much fun exploring it as we did putting it together!
We're just getting started.
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