It’s hard to believe the NBA 2021 season has started! We’ve created an NBA Team Dashboard that lets fans explore how their favorite teams have evolved and how they compare over the past 20 seasons in terms of:
Win-loss %
Offensive rating (adj): points scored per 100 possessions adjusted for strength of opponent defense
Defensive rating (adj): points allowed per 100 possessions adjusted for strength of opponent offense
Net rating (adj): point differential per 100 possessions adjusted for strength of opponent
You can select teams and seasons you’d like to explore and dig deeper using hover, box & lasso select, zoom, and download tooltips. Metrics are scraped from Basketball Reference. If you’d like, you can learn more about how ratings are calculated. Each year refers to the year the season ended. The goal is continuity, tracking how a group of players performed over time regardless of franchise changes. What’s fascinating is how dramatically a team’s success and offensive and defensive prowess can change and how teams and divisions compare with one another over time.
When collecting, shaping, and cleaning the data, care was taken to account for franchise changes, either permanent or temporary, and expansion teams to ensure that today’s 30 teams map back to their original set of players. Some changes, like the Vancouver Grizzlies becoming the Memphis Grizzlies from 2002-onward, the Seattle SuperSonics becoming the Oklahoma City Thunder from 2009-onward, and the New Jersey Nets becoming the Brooklyn Nets from 2013-onward, are relatively straightforward. More complicated are those behind today’s New Orleans Pelicans and Charlotte Hornets, which have both undergone multiple transitions, name changes, and expansions. For example, the Charlotte Hornets became the New Orleans Hornets from 2003 onward, while the Charlotte Bobcats were added as an expansion team from 2005 onward. Due to Hurricane Katrina, the New Orleans Hornets transitioned to the New Orleans/Oklahoma City Hornets from 2006-2007 and relocated back to New Orleans in 2008. The New Orleans Hornets became the New Orleans Pelicans from 2014 onward, while the expansion Charlotte Bobcats became the Charlotte Hornets from 2015 onward. Today’s New Orleans Pelicans trace back to the original Charlotte Hornets from 2000-2002 (and before) and the New Orleans Hornets from 2003-2013. Today’s Charlotte Hornets trace back to the Charlotte Bobcats expansion team from 2005. We’ve mapped out the NBA’s franchise changes and the logic we’ve used to create today’s teams in the 2nd tab. You can find code for the scrape and dashboard on our Git.
We hope you have fun with it and learn more about how your favorite teams have evolved over the past 20 seasons and how their offense and defense stack up. If you’d like to learn more, give us a shout at info@crawstat.com!
