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Hello and welcome. Pull up a cushion and make yourself comfortable for this week's #SportsVizSunday roundup!
My sporting attention this week has mostly been on the British track athletes tearing it up and setting PBs. There's been some impressive times and hopefully it bodes well for the upcoming Olympic and Paralympic Games too. But enough sport on its own! Let's add some data.
As I've mentioned the upcoming Olympics & Paralympics already, I'm going to continue in that theme with Abbie Taylor's visualisation tracking the progress of the Olympic torch on its journey to France (where the Games are held this year). I really like the way Abbie has split the field to show both the journey inside the two countries - with the map in the top swapping between Greece and France - and the much longer journey through the overseas French territories.
Sidharth Suresh is next up with his visualisation showing when teams scored and conceded in the Indian Super League. I am absolutely enthralled by the narratives in this visualisation which capture a flavour of each team. It must be rather nerve-wracking supporting the Kerala Blasters, who like to score and concede a lot of their goals in the final 10 minutes! It's never over until the final whistle after all...
Next up is Felicia Styer's innovative pie/radial bar/fixed-length coxcomb showing home and away results in the US National Women's Soccer League (answers on a postcard for what you would call this graph). This is such a clever idea! Felicia has also kept it tightly focused by only colouring the blocks by win/tie/loss and putting the final score line into the tooltip. This makes it very easy to see at a glance who has played who and what the result was. There were many times I have wondered whether my local non-league team had already played another team this year, so I will be taking some inspiration from this for sure!
If you follow a lot of British football social media then you might have seen the topic of Gregg Hirshberg's visualisation - Immaculate Footy (renamed to Immaculate Grid once it spread to other sports)! In this game, you have to complete a grid of 3x3 spaces by picking an athlete who matches the criteria for that row & column. Each athlete can only be used once and you get more points if fewer other people have picked that athlete for that space. Gregg has made it even harder for himself by trying to pick Baseball & Basketball players who have played for a specific team as well as whatever the row and column conditions are! Check out his visualisation below to see how he's getting on. I like the contrast colours that Gregg has used, and how he has nested different things inside the 3x3 grid shape. Very cool.
Bo McCready is a man who needs little introduction to those who are more frequent followers of #SportsVizSunday. Fresh from Tableau Conference, he has taken on a new sports challenge - wrestling! As we have come to expect from Bo, this visualisation is packed with layers of unfolding info with brilliant use of colours, shapes and just one or two delicately placed annotations. Absolutely masterful as always Bo. There's so much detail and the design really flows.
Back to Viz Basics, one of the other great #DataFam community initiatives, looked at baseball salaries this week and I wanted to feature a couple of visualisations that crossed my digital path.
First up is Sarah Pallett who showed three different ways to represent the changing minimum salary through time. I like the elegant design for Sarah's graphs and how the three different methods compliment each other and build on the initial story.
The second visualisation I'm pulling out is this one by Yishan Hsieh. Yishan has shown the minimum salary against the average salary for each season, and noted that there is a growing disparity between the minimum and the average. Good insight Yishan!
Dan Wade is continuing his Formula 1 based challenge, and has added a bump chart for the season standings in the Drivers' Championship. This is a classic use for this type of chart and Dan's visualisation shows why it is so popular - easy to read and captures the historic changes along with the current position. Lovely stuff Dan, keep it up!
Inspired by a very cool visualisation of the NBA MVP voting by Lev Akabas (check it out below), our very own CJ sketched out a couple of examples of how this could look to chart the Ballon d'Or winners in men's football. There's something really attractive to me about this design - and here in #VS towers we had a few conversations about some other things that it might be suitable for without getting too messy. I'd be interested to see whether any of you in the community can come up with some innovative use cases too.
Here's Lev's original:
It's not unusual for a single sporting event to be inspiration for a visualisation, and Ansgar Wolsing has taken inspiration from Borussia Dortmund's 3-0 loss at Mainz in the Bundesliga yesterday (special shoutout for the speedy turnaround Ansgar!). Ansgar was incensed by the result given the market values of the two clubs. Sport can be a contrary thing but that doesn't lessen the sting when you're on the wrong end of an upset.
Heading into the home straight, we have a fantastic NBA shot location dataset from Dom Samangy. I will definitely be taking a close look at this - shot location data is always fascinating!
And taking us over the line, I wanted to congratulate Rob Taylor on his sports-related Viz of the Day! I remember featuring it in our pages and it fully deserves the VotD, congrats Rob!
That's everything from me this week. As always, thank you to the community for all of your inspiring contributions. Showcasing all of your excellent work is always a high point of my weekend.
Mo & the #SportsVizSunday team
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