Slider Stats: An all-in-one NBA Statistic Analyzer

By: Miwa Hirai

Slider Stats: An all-in-one NBA Statistic Analyzer

Customize your NBA statistics analysis with Slider Stats

By: Miwa Hirai

May 7, 2024


In the world of basketball, metrics are everything—from awards, rankings, and player contrasts—making statistics a reliable way to compare various NBA players. Slider Stats takes these statistics and creates a platform where users can compare different NBA statistics. From casual fans to full NBA analysts, Slider Stats empowers its users with a customizable, objective way to compare the performances of different professional players in the NBA, all at their fingertips.

Why Slider Stats?

Commonly used websites such as NBA and ESPN have raw statistics. However, Slider Stats stands out by taking these raw statistics and utilizing a unique and unbiased ranking algorithm to compare numerous statistics with different players. Not only that, it also allows for multi-statistic comparison, meaning that the user can compare numerous different statistics at once. It’s also updated daily, meaning that the statistics the user looks at are relevant and new. With Slider Stats, basketball fans can customize, compare, and conquer the world of NBA statistical analysis in a way that no other platform offers.

User Interface

To use Slider Stats, the user must choose what statistic they want to focus on, such as game stats. Then, the user can choose a year and the position they want to analyze. The user then chooses the statistics they want to compare—such as points and minutes per game—and then slides the importance of the selected statistics. Slider Stats allows the user to choose the weight of the different statistics and the range of the statistics, allowing only the players within these ranges to show up in the comparison table. With just these few steps, the user can compare in-depth statistics of their favorite players.

Features

Delving deeper into the features of this all-in-one website, the importance sliders allow the user to choose the importance of the statistics included in their selection. Additionally, the weighted sum feature is a custom statistic that shows who the best player is given the user’s selection. This feature is particularly useful for NBA analysts as it provides a comprehensive view of a player’s performance, where the highest score is a combination of the selected importance statistics. As for filtering, there is position filtering, where the user can filter players based on their position. The range sliders ensure that the presented data only includes the players who fall within the selected range, which is achieved through a min-max dictionary.

There are two main types of stats in Slider Stats: total statistics and per-game statistics. Total statistics compare players based on accumulated statistics over the season, whereas per-game statistics compare players based on average statistics per game. This website offers many more types of statistics, such as playoffs statistics, clutch statistics, team statistics, and head-to-head statistics.

Technical Aspects

This groundbreaking NBA statistics analyzer uses NBA API—an API client for NBA.com—which hosts a variety of NBA statistics and is updated daily. The development team utilized the endpoints within the API to gain access to both the raw and advanced statistics, ensuring the utmost accuracy. As for Python libraries, the team used Pandas to convert the data from the API into data frames. They did some data manipulation with these data frames, such as concatenating them together to create a big list of statistics they wanted to use and points per game calculations. To simplify the process of making the front-end using Python, they used Streamlit, allowing them to add widgets such as sliders and buttons onto the website.

###Conclusion

In conclusion, Slider Stats emerges as a game-changer in the realm of NBA statistical analysis, offering a comprehensive platform for fans and analysts. By harnessing the power of customizable metrics and an unbiased ranking algorithm, Slider Stats changes the extent of player comparison beyond raw statistics. Whether delving into per-game statistics, team dynamics, or head-to-head matchups, Slider Stats offers a wealth of insights to satisfy the curiosity of basketball enthusiasts and professional analysts alike.