Every year, NBA players take about 200,000 shots. Each season, 30 teams combine to play 1,230 games, and at the end of the regular season, you can bet the sum total of shots taken will be very close to 200,000. In the hands of a cartographer, a season’s worth of this shooting data is a veritable treasure trove of information. But here’s the thing: In the first decade of this century, there weren’t many cartographers working in the NBA league office or for analytics departments in any of the team front offices.
Back then, basketball analytics was still in its infancy; it was all about spreadsheets and linear regression, not spatial and visual reasoning. Still, whether the league knew it or not, by adding these little spatial references to their game data, basketball analytics was about to become a lot more than spreadsheets. Things like data visualization and spatial analyses were going to be very important.
Unfortunately, there weren’t many folks with those skills working in pro basketball, and even though countless analysts had access to all the data the league was collecting — including all of the shot data — nobody was applying a spatial treatment. Nobody was mapping the NBA.
When I first got my hands on these massive haystacks of shooting data, I was teaching cartography at Harvard. I’d found a way to retrieve five seasons’ worth of shooting data from the web, and I built a database that included over 1 million NBA field-goal attempts, who shot them and where they shot them from. As an analyst, I knew there was amazing intelligence waiting to be revealed within the database. As a mapmaker, I was confident I could visualize some of it in cool new ways. And as a huge NBA fan, I couldn’t wait to see the results.
