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I love both basketball and the NBA, but one thing that's always frustrated me as a basketball fan in the Internet age is how most websites with player career statistics default to text tables for displaying stats.
It just seems so obvious that this data should be presented in line chart form: it's much quicker and easier to grasp a player’s career trajectory when you can literally see the shape of their performance over time.
The advantages of line charts:
Quicker to grasp: - A quick glance at a line chart allows you to understand the arc of a player's career by simply seeing the shape of the line, whereas in a text-chart you have to read each cell.
Show relative performance over time: - Line charts also make it easy to see how a player's performance changes season to season. Text tables make you mentally calculate these changes, while a plotted chart visualizes the change for you.
Easier to compare: - when looking at two players career PPGs on the same graph it's a lot easier to understand their performances relative to one another versus seeing two tables of their respective stats.
I've been confused why no source of online player statistics has already done this, and I kept procrastinating on doing something about it myself because I didn't want to deal with the complexity of sourcing NBA data to make my own simple stats website. But then I came across the relatively new Chrome extension side panel API and realized I could solve my frustration without having to maintain my own NBA player career statistics dataset!
So with some spare time earlier this year I developed a Chrome extension called Visual-Stats. It lets you view NBA player career statistics on line charts directly within your browser.
I think you'll find Visual-Stats useful and fun for exploring and comparing different NBA players' careers. I'm excited to share it with the community and hear your thoughts!
Extension: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/visual-stats/fnopme...
Website: www.visual-stats.com
Demo video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_rPXN8nq6_k
