Visualize march madness

github.com

11 points·nrjones8··5 comments

Fun. Especially the heatmap. Totally spitballing here, but it'd be interesting to see a version of the heatmap where the 0 is darkest and + or - is lighter. You'd lose information, but it'd draw your eye to the games that are exciting. Probably not as good as what you did but maybe interesting.

Not that interesting, but we're mid-development on an implementation of rickshaw into our product, so it's kinda fun to pop the data in: https://www.statwing.com/open/datasets/73d3396fc4e83fe2d293e...

I'm surprised more aren't mostly-white for the first 3/4, and then they split at the end. It seems like all the action in basketball always happens in the last 2 "minutes."

yeah, perhaps because they're from only the first two rounds of the tournament where games are more likely to be blowouts one way or another.

That last graph is pretty neat... Have you charted the later games? How about a way to do NBA games? Other sports?

Yeah, the newest games are now on the wiki page linked to. I've thought about doing NBA games slightly differently -- it would be cool to see how teams change throughout the season. So order the rows chronologically (first games at the top, end of season at the bottom) and look for patterns that way (when did a team peak? did they start strong but fall off later?). Unfortunately, that loses any notion of the quality of the opponent (the "RankDiff" shown in the NCAA plot). I'd also love to incorporate individual players -- it wouldn't be too tough to include which players score (i.e. have a row for each player), or some variation like that.

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