NBA Analysis of 23-24 Season

It’s that dreaded time of the year again for basketball fans. The Olympics have just ended, and the “Avengers Team” defeated the “Alien” in the finals to win the gold medal. It was a bittersweet watch as we saw some of the greats, like LeBron James and Kevin Durant, win their last gold medal with the Olympic team (unless LeBron hasn't retired in four years, which, knowing him, could be a real possibility) and pass the torch to the younger generation, such as Ant-Man and Devin Booker. The games were full of drama, and now that they have come to an end, NBA fans will have to wait an entire month and a half before they get to see their favorite players dominate the game again. To me, this seems like a great time for predictions for the upcoming season (which will be covered in a separate article) and for reflecting on the last season to see which players and teams dominated and which ones underperformed.

This project has allowed me to use data and visualizations to present insights in easily digestible pieces. I aim to analyze player stats from the NBA 2023-2024 season using Tableau.

There were 4 main insights that I wanted to get from this project:

1. What positions contributed the most to the three main stats: points, assists and rebounds

2. What position had the highest 3-point percentage

3. The distribution of points of players across all teams

4. How do different positions compare to each other in assists 

Before going into it any further, in case the reader of this article does not know basketball, here is a basic summary of the different positions:

Point guard – The player responsible for orchestrating the offense and normally the one who oversees assisting and creating chances for other teammates

Shooting guard – The player responsible for scoring in a variety of ways including shooting from the outside

Small forward – The biggest player on the outside of the key and normally considered a jack of all trades in both offense and defense 

Power forward – The shortest of the players close to the basket, is also considered a jack of all trades in offense and defense 

Center -The player that is normally the tallest/biggest, he is normally located under the basket and is largely responsible for defense.

Key Insights

· Center was the position with the lowest three-point percentage

· Doncic and Jokic dominate in stats and Sabonis is a player that should may be underrated

· Highest scoring duo were Giannis and Dame and Hawks might be in trouble next season

· Shooting guards have the second most assists and there is no major difference between the number of assists that small forwards and power forwards have

The Data

This dataset, sourced from Basketball Reference, offers a comprehensive summary of player statistics. It includes 572 rows, each representing a player-team combination, meaning players who were traded are listed multiple times. The dataset contains 30 columns (attributes) featuring both numerical data and text.

I downloaded all the data into a CSV file and all the data was downloaded into a single column separated by commas. This meant that the file had 38 columns worth of information put into one. To fix this, I used a tool in Excel named Text to Columns and by stating that the data was separated by commas, it was able to separate the data to its appropriate columns.

After the data was separated into the appropriate columns, it was obvious that there was some data cleaning needed to be done. The following things need to be corrected:

1. Some players appeared more than once since every time they were traded to a new team, they had their stats
2. The NBA is the most talented basketball league in the world so some players play different positions (for example a player playing as a point guard when traded to another team can switch their positions to shooting guard)

Once those mistakes were corrected, it was time to dive into the data and see if I could get my questions answered.

Bubble Chart: Which position dominates the stats? 

The main stats I wanted to concentrate on for this analysis were points, rebounds, and assists. Since I wanted to create a graph that showed the relationship between multiple stats, I figured that a bubble chart would be the most appropriate. The graph below shows the relationship between assists, points, and rebounds among players, with the X-axis representing points, the Y-axis representing assists, and the size of the bubbles representing rebounds

Several things stood out to me from this graph. Luka Dončić and Nikola Jokić seem to be the most complete players, with high numbers in points, assists, and rebounds. However, an unexpected name that is statistically close to them is Domantas Sabonis. This might be because the Kings haven’t had as much success as the Mavericks (Luka’s team) and the Nuggets (Jokić’s team), but Sabonis doesn’t come up often in conversations about the best offensive players in the league. Maybe after seeing this graph, that should change.

Stocked Bar Chart: Point distribution Per Team

In the graph below you can see the top scorers of each team and how much they contributed to the total points for that season. At first glance, you can see that there are a lot of colors and can seem a little bit overwhelming, but after a couple of seconds, you can see that most teams have 2-3 players that contribute most of the scoring.

One stat that stood out to me was that Giannis Antetokounmpo and Damian Lillard were the highest-scoring duo in the NBA. There has been a lot of talk about those two being “awkward” next to each other and not being the most effective, but in terms of points, it seems they don’t have a problem with it.

Another thing I found interesting is that Trae Young was not the leading scorer for the Hawks. It was, in fact, their shooting guard, Dejounte Murray, who was recently traded to the Pelicans. This means that the Hawks have just traded their highest-scoring player, which could potentially make the upcoming season challenging for them.

Heatmap: 3pt %. Per Team

In today’s era, being proficient in three-point shooting is a must if you want to succeed in the NBA. In the graph below, you can see the average three-point percentage per position and per team. I decided that a heat map would be the most appropriate visualization to use, as it makes it easy to see which position on which team had the highest and lowest success rates when it comes to three-pointers.

As you might expect, centers are the position with the lowest average percentage. However, two outliers were found among the centers from Boston and Phoenix, both having more than a 50% three-point average. I found this very strange, and after looking into the data, I discovered that it was due to the extremely low volume of three-pointers that the centers on these teams were shooting.

Treemap: Which position assists the most?

It is well known that generally, the point guard is the one who has the most assists since they orchestrate the offense and have the ball for most of the possession. I wanted to know not only how big of a difference in assists there was between point guards and other positions, but I wanted to know what position had the most assists after point guard.

After looking at the map, it seems that the shooting guards are the position that has the second most assists and that shooting guards and small forwards have a similar number of assists.

Key Insights

· Center was the position with the lowest three-point percentage

· Doncic and Jokic dominate in stats and Sabonis is a player that should maybe be underrated

· Highest scoring duo were Giannis and Dame and Hawks might be in trouble next season

· Shooting guards have the second most assists and there is no major difference between the number of assists that small forwards and power forwards have

 Closing Thoughts:

Thank you for taking the time to read this article! I hope you enjoyed it. Working with this data was a lot of fun, and I hope to apply what I learned in this project to future ones. I love basketball, and I thought it was awesome to incorporate data and visualization into it. In the future, I will likely work on more projects related to the NBA.

This project was done for educational purposes, and I am currently seeking a data analyst position. I am open to job opportunities and networking. Feel free to connect with me at  Jordan Solis.