.png)
Happy Sunday, everyone and a very warm welcome to a new week of sporting visualisation. I hope 2023 has gotten off to the best possible start and that any resolutions you've set yourselves are still going strong.
By the end of the PDC Darts World Championships at Alexandra Palace I was pretty hooked. I'm not sure whether it's the personalities of the players, the simplistic drama of the matches or the speed at which a match progresses with frequent twists and turns or the atmosphere of the 'Ally Pally' crowd. Probably a combination of it all but it makes for tremendous viewing that culminated in an amazing final between Michael Ver Gerwen and Michael Smith featuring what will already be a sporting highlight of 2023-a "nine-darter" (the quickest possible checkout by a player) which was achieved by Michael Smith. To add some context, this was only the second nine-dart finish achieved in a World Championship final and to make it even more incredible, Van Gerwin had the possibility of archiving it in the very same leg! Check it out, below!
Onto the round-up this week and for those still reminiscing on events in Qatar and one of the heroes from that tournament, Lionel Messi, then check out this fascinating visual from Soumyajit showcasing the successful dribbles from the Argentinian number 10. The combination of scatter plot and sonar chart provides a great insight into where Messi creates his mischief for opposing defences. Watch out for zone 3!
A couple of months ago I had the pleasure of seeing Yasushi Ishikawa's Hakone-Ekiden visual charting of the results from 2002 - 2022. It's great to a 2023 view has been created using the same engaging blend of visuals and colours.
This viz from Lev Akabas perfectly captures the dominance of American Football in the US psyche with 82 of the most-watched programmes during 2022 featuring the sport. I was surprised to see this, believing the spread of popularity between the NFL, basketball and baseball to be far closer. Great stuff, Lev!
Friend of the community, Daniel Ling previews what is sure to be a fantastic network view of football managers. It's looking great already, Daniel. We can't wait to see the finished design!
If you wanted to flex those Tableau technical muscles with a sport-related dataset then look no further than the wonderful community initiative Workout Wednesday which tackles image rolls and dynamic zooming featuring the Men's Rugby World Cup in 2021.
Finally onto a couple of brilliant tutorials from the man (or should that be machine) that never sleeps, CJ Mayes. First up is this piece focussing on gathering and then plotting tennis shot data in Tableau. I know this has been on CJ's agenda for a while so it's fantastic to see that investigation and hard work come to fruition. It seems the breakthrough was achieved via a visit to Roland Garros for the French Open. It's a hard life isn't it, CJ?!
I'm sure many of us who have worked with images in Tableau have struggled with some aspect of them, whether it be size, picture formats or resolutions. If you have or are looking to use images, maybe club badges, in the future then give this a read. Using Python to resize the images, CJ creates consistent logos for an NBA dataset. As with all CJ's work, the blog is easy to follow and all the code and data is available to follow along with, step by step.
That's all for this week. Thank you for continuing to share your work and allowing us the opportunity to see and showcase all of this wonderful content.
As a reminder, don't forget that all important tag #sportsvizsunday to ensure we don't miss your work.
Have a great week,
Simon and the SportsVizSunday team
Comments