Visualizing the True Impact of an NBA Offense On an NBA Defense
Eric Siyuan Ma
Department of Computer Science
University of Calgary
Abstract
This project aims to provide a mechanism to efficiently
collect, visualize, and analyze a few statistical observa-
tions in NBA basketball. By developing a user friendly
web interface which unifies the data provided by the ser-
vices, users will be able to easily digest otherwise con-
voluted statistics. In this project we will focus on the 3
fold process of collecting the data, visualizing it with user
interaction, and analysis of the visualized data.
1 Introduction
Basketball is a game played by 2 teams on a single court.
There are 5 players per team on the court at any given
moment, and there are 2 baskets at opposite ends of the
court. The goal of the game is to put the basketball into
the opponent’s basket. Any goal scored within the ”3-
point line” is worth 2 points, and any goal scored from
outside the ”3-point line” is worth 3 points. Each of
the 5 players will play different positions according to
their unique strengths, and likewise will take their shots
at different positions around the court which allow them
to capitalize on these. For example, taller players will
generally stand closer to the basket, as they have an eas-
ier time reaching the 10 foot tall rim, and shorter players
will take shots closer to the 3-point line, as they are more
nimble and historically better at long-distance shooting.
Figure 1: Diagram of the Basketball Court [1]
Though the game of basketball is, at its core, con-
ducive to statistical analysis, it wasn’t until recently that
its use in fueling decision making exploded in popular-
ity. Advanced analytics can contribute to decision mak-
ing not only about team personnel, but about on-court
sets, coaching decisions, even positioning of players on
court at any given moment. For instance, the ”mid-range
shot” is any shot taken outside of the Free-Throw Lane
and inside the 3-point line (see Figure 1). Given that the
value of a 3-pointer is 50% more than the value of a 2
pointer, a player would need to be 50% more accurate on
their 2 point shots than their 3 point shots to justify even
taking a 2-point shot. Historically, this is only true of
2-pointers taken in the Free Throw Lane, or more com-
monly referred to as ”the paint”, owing to the proximity
to the basket. Although this fact seems plainly evident,
only recently has the league began to see a drastic change
in the average league offense (Figure 2).
Figure 2: League Total 3 Point Field Goal Attempts By
NBA Season [2]
This sudden rise in 3 pointers and change in offensive
schemes has caused teams around the league to begin
scrambling to adapt their team’s offensive strategies in
order to become as efficient as their peers, regardless of
whether or not it fits their personnel.
Because of this, we have seen a rise in the amount of
teams limiting their shot attempts to almost exclusively
within the paint and outside the 3-point line. However,
there are also a number of teams that utilize the spacing
created by these efficient shots to generate better (more
open) looks from the mid-range.
Teams in the league have widely varying defensive
strategies to contain and deal with the varying offenses
in response to these changes. However, each team has
their own strengths and weaknesses which influence their
distinct playstyles, and though they attempt to capitalize
on the strengths of their players and minimize their weak-
nesses, this decision does not always result in a defensive
strategy that is effective in stifling the offensive strengths
of a given opponent.
The goal of this project is to find out whether or not
a team’s defensive approach is influenced by an oppo-
nent’s offense, and whether or not teams will adjust their
offense to exploit their opponent’s weaknesses or work
around an opposing team’s offensive playstyle. As part
of this project, we also intend on observing the impact of
an individual player on the opposing team’s defense.
However, there are currently few available NBA statis-
tic APIs available for retrieving game data. Almost all
non-official statistical analysis of NBA statistics comes
directly from stats.nba.com. However, though the raw
data itself is made accessible, it is still a challenge to ac-
cess and gather the information. Many endpoints are de-
funct and offer broken data. Much work must be done
in order to efficiently gather the data needed for analysis
and to process it for use.
nba.stats.com, their visualization capabilities are practi-
cally non-existent, with only 1 visual being available (per
player shot charts). Some data from this project may
come from Basketball Reference, as scraping their web-
site is often easier than customizing a convoluted query to
the NBA stats API. Basketball Reference also maintains
historical records that are more comprehensive than that
of the official NBA website itself.
2.3 Py NBA API: https://github.com/swar/nba api
Though the NBA stats API is ever-changing, there is an
effort to map and document the endpoints, and provide a
python library to work with them. This is the library that
is currently most up-to-date and useable, and provides
a function to every known endpoint on stats.nba.com.
However, the arguments and exact return methods for
each endpoint are not yet documented, and significant ef-
fort is still required in order to utilize this library to gather
large amounts data efficiently. Contributing to and im-
proving this library may be done as part of this project.
2.4 PBP Stats: www.pbpstats.com
PBP stats is a website that generates visualization, with
user interaction very much along the lines of what this
project hopes to accomplish. Where they are lacking is
that their visualizations extend largely to offensive met-
rics, and not the relationship between two teams playing
against each other. An example of this is their ability to
generate an assist network of a team given the user’s se-
lection of season, season segment, and team (figure 3).

2 Previous Work
2.1 Official NBA Stats Website: www.stats.nba.com
Figure 3: User Selection to Build Assist Network Visual-
Almost all of the data that we aim to get will be acquired ization
from stats.nba.com. In the official website, there is data
for nearly every statistic imaginable concerning each in-
dividual player. However, the data comes in the form of
a table, and pure numbers. Currently, their visualization
capabilities outside of shot tracking is very limited, and
most defensive statistics are not visualized at all. More-
over, since their API is not technically open to the public,
there is no documentation on it and ways of accessing
their data is constantly changing, making it difficult to
keep gathering the newest available data on games.
2.2 Basketball Reference: www.basketball-
reference.com
Basketball Reference is the go-to encyclopedia of histor- 2.5 Squared 2020: www.squared2020.com
ical and current basketball knowledge. They maintain an Squared 2020 is a site that provides in-depth statistical
ongoing database of all basketball statistics, being up- analysis of various key areas of basketball, and specif-
dated frequently. They offer a wider range of statistics ically the metrics in which we use to measure perfor-
than nba.stats.com. They have an emphasis on histori- mance and efficiency of players and teams. They have
cal data, and are almost purely a reference site, offering a focus on writing articles, and fitting statistical models
very little in the way of analytics. However, just like the to aggregated sets of box-score data representing perfor-
mance of players. They often attempt to provide a dif-
Figure 5: Mockup Web Application
ferent perspective of looking at conventional basketball
metrics, and often looking at how well those metrics rep-
resent the team/player they are describing.

Figure 4: Building NBA defense using convex hull [3]

using numpy and pandas in Python.

In Figure 4, they attempted to represent NBA defense
using constantly moving convex hulls, and defining poor
defense when penetration of a hull occurs. Though they
have good visualizations and analysis, there is no user
interaction with their visuals, and so if one is curious
about extending their analysis, one has no choice but to
email them to request additional analysis. Nevertheless,
they are a great repository of knowledge to look to when
performing statistical analysis on basketball data, as they
have many novel methods and apply conventional statis-
tical models to basketball data in ways that are not at first
intuitively appropriate.
3 Implementation and Visualizing the Data
The first phase of this project will be to write methods to
easily gather and organize the correct data, saving it either
temporarily in a database for easier future use. We will
be using (and improving) the python nba api open-source
library for this purpose.
During this project, a web application will be devel-
oped that will be responsible for rendering and displaying
the visualizations, as well as taking in user input (figure
5).
The left and right columns will be user selection for
teams and players, and the middle column will be for vi-
sualizations. This will be a spatial visualization on the
court of heatmaps and shotcharts.
This web application will use React.JS and bootstrap
for its frontend and Flask Python for its back-end im-
plementation. These have been chosen for ease of use
and popularity, owing to their well-documented methods.
Some work will be saved by using the nbashots[4] library
in python to assist in drawing heatmaps and shotcharts.
Analytics will be performed largely in R, with some
work being done in conjunction with the nbashots library,
A successful finished product should look as such:
• Users will be able to select the two teams to look at,
as well as being able to look at the past N amount of
games to analyze.
• The user will be able to choose between several
visualizations, including, but not limited to, shot
charts and heat maps. These visualizations should
be both easy to understand and explain. Some in-
vestigative work will be conducted as part of this
project in order to determine the most intuitive and
useful visualizations for this data.
• There will be options to select analysis of Team vs
Team, Player vs Player, and Player vs Team.
• Statistical analysis will be performed on the correla-
tion of the chosen comparison, and time permitting,
a predictive model of future games. For example,
Kolmogorv-Smirnov tests could be run on the dis-
tribution of shots per team per game, to see if oppo-
nent’s defenses affect the overall distribution. This
could be shown as graphs of the distributions shown
beneath the visualizations.
Ideally, gathered data will be stored in a MySQL database
to facilitate ease of future use, and to save time on re-
peated queries.
4 Timeline

Task Expected Completion

Proposal January 25th
Data Gathering Methods Complete February 4th
Web Application Framework Complete February 25th
Visualization Work Complete March 18th
Analysis and Correlations Complete April 1st
Potential Additional Work April 7th
Final Presentation April 8th
Final Paper April 12th

5 Conclusion
Basketball is a data rich sport which could greatly ben-
efit from complex statistical analysis. Current barriers
to meaningful statistical analysis on this data include the
fact that the data may be difficult to acquire (since met-
rics are scattered across several different sources and ex-
posed by unique existing APIs) and the fact that the sheer
amount of data may be difficult to work with. Further-
more, few resources are available online that feature user
interaction which allows for the creation of meaningful
visualizations and analysis. These are things that we hope
to address through this project.

References
[1] Getdrawings.com. (2019). Basketball Court
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https://squared2020.com/2017/08/20/basics-in-
negative-binomial-regression-predicting-three-
point-field-goal-percentages/ [Accessed 22 Jan.
2019].
[3] Squared Statistics: Understanding Basketball
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https://squared2020.com/2015/11/08/building-nba-
defenses-using-the-convex-hull/ [Accessed 22 Jan.
2019].
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