Interactive mapping platforms tin hold upwards a really uncomplicated but effective means to visualize sports data. They are especially effective for creating shot-maps for ball based squad sports, e.g. football, soccer, baseball game as well as basketball.
Last calendar week the Los Angeles Times created a really impressive visualization of every shot made yesteryear Kobe Bryant inward his long career. Every Shot Kobe Bryant Ever Took allows you lot to explore a shot map of Kobe Bryant's 30,699 career shots, both successful as well as misses.
This weekend Kudos created their ain basketball game shot map using the CartoDB mapping platform. The Golden State Warriors Map allows you lot to analyze every game played yesteryear the Golden State Warriors inward their tape breaking 2015-16 season.
Using the map you lot tin explore as well as analyze trends inward shot locations, players, shot types, opponents, periods as well as clock times over the entire NBA season.
Creating this sort of sports visualization is really slowly amongst an interactive mapping platform (as long equally you lot hit got the data). Essentially you lot only demand to hit a map chemical constituent without whatever base of operations map tiles. You tin thus hit your ain pitch map using polylines. To hit your shot map you lot only demand to add together a marking to the map for every shot.
The exclusively tricky business office inward creating your visualization is converting your pitch based co-ordinate organization to the co-ordinate organization used yesteryear interactive maps.
I created this really unsmooth soccer viz illustration inward a pair of hours. To describe the pitch I started at 0 degrees of latitude as well as 0 degrees of longitude. I thus created a uncomplicated co-ordinate organization yesteryear equating ane grade of latitude or longitude to ane yard. So to describe a describe of piece of occupation to exhibit the 100 yard goal-line of a soccer pitch I only demand to describe a polyline from (0,0) to (0,100). I thus created the other lines on the pitch using the same co-ordinate system.
Plotting the shot map is only equally simple. If you lot intend of (0,0) equally the bottom corner of a graph it is a uncomplicated affair of plotting each shot set yesteryear adding the distance from the left touchline as well as the distance from the goal-line. So a shot taken 25 yards inward from the touchline as well as thirty yards from the finish would hit got a lat-long marking set of (25,30) on the map.
