Tableau link: click here
In this tableau story I compared team and players basic regular season statistics of the Milwaukee Bucks 2017/2018 team with similar stats of NBA teams in the Eastern Conference that managed to win their first round playoff series in the last decade. I included in my analysis teams that were placed between the 3rd and the 6th position in the regular season (which I expect that the Bucks will end up in the current season). The main goal of this data story was to see if the Bucks team is on par with these teams across the selected statistical categories.
I initially present the current standing table to show the performance of the Bucks team so far to give the reader a first look at where the Bucks stand this season. After extensively exploring the dataset I chose to use the green color for the Bucks (which is their main official color) in my visualizations and grey for all other teams to better shown what I am trying to communicate. The decision to compare the Bucks with teams that managed to win their first playoff series in the last decade stems from the fact that Bucks have the longest NBA playoffs series win droughts than any other team in the NBA. I also decided to split the analysis in two main categories: offensive and defensive team statistics. I further included player stats with interactive options to enrich the analysis after the feedback I received in my initial version of my story. Furthermore, based on the feedback, I used the point differential stat to conclude if the Bucks are on par with the other teams and I also shortened my text boxes descriptions. As a final note, the team average statistics presented don't include the Bucks stats because the concept of the story is to compare the Bucks with the other 20 teams in the dataset (this Bucks team hasn't win a playoff series yet).
All data were downloaded from Basketball Reference website: https://www.basketball-reference.com/
Wikipedia article on "List of NBA franchise post-season droughts": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_NBA_franchise_post-season_droughts
This project was part of the Data Analyst Nanodegree Program by Udacity.