Visualizing Sports Information Amongst Maps

Interactive mapping platforms tin forcefulness out hold upwards a real uncomplicated but effective means to visualize sports data. They are specially effective for creating shot-maps for ball based squad sports, e.g. football, soccer, baseball game in addition to basketball.

Last calendar week the Los Angeles Times created a real impressive visualization of every shot made past times Kobe Bryant inward his long career. Every Shot Kobe Bryant Ever Took allows y'all to explore a shot map of Kobe Bryant's 30,699 career shots, both successful in addition to misses.

This weekend Kudos created their ain basketball game shot map using the CartoDB mapping platform. The Golden State Warriors Map allows y'all to analyze every game played past times the Golden State Warriors inward their tape breaking 2015-16 season.

Using the map y'all tin forcefulness out explore in addition to analyze trends inward shot locations, players, shot types, opponents, periods in addition to clock times over the entire NBA season.


Creating this sort of sports visualization is real slowly amongst an interactive mapping platform (as long every minute y'all get got the data). Essentially y'all simply demand to exercise a map chemical ingredient without whatever base of operations map tiles. You tin forcefulness out in addition to thus exercise your ain pitch map using polylines. To exercise your shot map y'all simply demand to add together a marking to the map for every shot.

The solely tricky business office inward creating your visualization is converting your pitch based co-ordinate organization to the co-ordinate organization used past times interactive maps.

I created this real unsmooth soccer viz event inward a duad of hours. To depict the pitch I started at 0 degrees of latitude in addition to 0 degrees of longitude. I in addition to thus created a uncomplicated co-ordinate organization past times equating i grade of latitude or longitude to i yard. So to depict a business to demo the 100 yard goal-line of a soccer pitch I simply demand to depict a polyline from (0,0) to (0,100). I in addition to thus created the other lines on the pitch using the same co-ordinate system.

Plotting the shot map is simply every minute simple. If y'all mean value of (0,0) every minute the bottom corner of a graph it is a uncomplicated affair of plotting each shot pose past times adding the distance from the left touchline in addition to the distance from the goal-line. So a shot taken 25 yards inward from the touchline in addition to xxx yards from the destination would get got a lat-long marking pose of (25,30) on the map.