2020: Week 49

 Challenge by: Carl Allchin

Ever since Jonathan's EPIC week 3 2020 challenge on building the National Basketball Association's (NBA) standings from game results have data preppers started sweating at the mere sight of a game's result. Well as we come to the close of 2020, it's time to face those fears and battle once again with game results to help find insights. 

This week's challenge is inspired by a visualisation by Tableau Zen Master Rob Radburn (@robradburn) who created an alternate way to look at how the race where Lewis Hamilton won this season's championship (click on the image to have a look at this in Tableau Public).


Being more of an NBA fan, I wanted to explore what stories exist within an NBA season. The challenge this week is to take the 2018/19 season (last non-Covid effected season) games and turn those data points into something that can allow you to create something similar to Rob's excellent view. I used Prep Builder to prepare the data for this view. Here's my viz to show you my application of the output data set from this week's challenge (click to get a closer view in Tableau Public):

Input

There is one Excel input file this week with 7 tabs of data, one for each month of the NBA Regular Season:


Requirements

  • Input Data from all the tabs in the Excel workbook
  • Determine who won each game
  • Work out the order of each team's games
  • Work out each team's cumulative wins after each of their 82 games in the season
  • Compare the team's to each other.
    • Rank 1 is the most wins by that game number
    • Rank 30 is the least wins by that game number 
    • In event of a tie, rank the team alphabetically (A > Z)
  • Output the data

Output


1 Output data set:
  • 4 data fields:
    • Rank1 (hint: I used rank in Prep a couple of times in this challenge!) 
    • Game Number per Team
    • Wins
    • Team
  • 2460 rows (2461 including headers)

The full output can be downloaded here.

After you finish the challenge make sure to fill in the participation tracker, then share your solution on Twitter using #PreppinData and tagging @Datajedininja, @JennyMartinDS14, @JonathanAllenby & @TomProwse1

You can also post your solution on the Tableau Forum where we have a Preppin' Data community page. Post your solutions and ask questions if you need any help! 

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