I’ve been heavily influenced recently by FreeDarko’s book “The Macrophenomenal Pro Basketball Almanac“. If you haven’t heard of it, check out the website. The infostrations (information illustrations?) are some of the most unique and well done I’ve seen in any field.

One of the chapters contains a graph displaying the anomalies that are Gerald Wallace and Josh Smith. It displays the amount of combination of plays over a given time frame. The purpose is to show how diverse and unique these two players are. The simplicity of the volume of data is what really stuck with me.

In an attempt to devise a interactive visual in a similar vain I created this. The more I began to look at it, the more I realized that it resembles a genome chart. And in a strange way, it sort of is a players DNA. The graph displays events (shots, rebounds, fouls…) quarter by quarter for each game in the 07/08 season. This example is Paul Pierce. I’d like to extend this idea to creating genomes for each player and build in a mechanism to compare players for similar sequences.

Move the mouse over the boxes to see the event name. The gray boxes display the game and quarter. Pressing 1,2,3,4 or 5 will hide and display the different events.

1 - Shots - Yellow
2 - Rebounds - Blue
3 - Fouls - White
4 - Turnover - Green
5 - Foul Shot - Light Blue
6 - Foul Given - Purple

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