The WNBA Has Its Own 3‑Point Revolution
The NBA is in the midst of a much discussed 3-point revolution. Teams now have multiple 3-point threats on the court at once, changing the style of play by stretching defenses and forgoing mid-range two-point shots. My question was simple: Is the WNBA experiencing its own 3-point revolution?
Data source: basketball-reference.com
Tools:
- Web Scraper
- Tableau
- R
- Illustrator
- Photoshop
- ai2html
Project Description
This piece started as a simple chart in Tableau showing the increased prevalence of 3-point shot attempts in the NBA and WNBA. In addition to the line indicating percent of total points from 3-pointers, the thickness shows 3-point attempts normalized over 100 minutes of game time.
To add some additional context to the piece, I initially looked at different aspects of the data such as shot attempts by position, individual and team stats, and shot distance. I found that many of the detailed statistics kept for the NBA were not as available for the WNBA. Not wanting to drop the women's league, I decided instead to shift focus entirely to the WNBA. After scraping the data from basketball-reference.com, I used R to chart three WNBA teams along with the WNBA and NBA league averages.
I traced the Tableau chart in Illustrator to keep the variable line widths and then brought in the charts I created in R. I added a legend and annotations and used the WNBA orange as a base for the color scheme. I finished off the piece by inserting photos of three of the most influencial players, one from each of the highlighted teams.
