6533b861fe1ef96bd12c5ab4

RESEARCH PRODUCT

A Web Application for Interactive Visualization of European Basketball Data

subject

description

The statistical analysis of basketball games is a fast-growing field. Certainly, basketball data are scientifically relevant because an appropriate analysis provides a great deal of information about the performance of both players and teams. The number of games played each season generates a large amount of data worth analyzing. Basketball analytics is well established in U.S. leagues. In Europe, however, it has not been duly developed. This study focuses on the top three European team competitions: the EuroLeague, the EuroCup, and the Spanish ACB (Association of Basketball Clubs, acronym in Spanish) league. Their official websites provide access to game data for anyone who is interested, but they are only represented in a static tabular form. As a consequence, it is difficult to gain any valuable insights from them. This article presents a highly useful interactive tool, created with the free statistical software R, which makes it possible to visualize and explore basketball data from a large number of seasons. We will demonstrate its core functionality. An accompanying R package is presented in the Supplementary Data.