Original post with all Finals MVPs since 1969 on NBA.com

Original post on NBA.com.

In 2003, the first round of the playoffs was changed from best-of-five to best-of-seven. Since then the 2008 Celtics are the only team to have played a full series in the first round before going on to win the NBA Finals.

Published here on Sports Illustrated.

After only three games in the MLB, Masahiro Tanaka has already taken the world by storm. Here’s a look at every batter that he’s pitched to so far. Of those 82, he’s only let up sixteen hits and a single walk. Pretty good start.

Original post on NBA.com. Featured on Washington Post and Deadspin.
See how your team fared against other playoff teams during the 2013-14 regular season.

Original post on NBA.com.

Here’s a look all NBA teams to pull off an 18-game winning streak as of 3/31. Soon after, the San Antonio Spurs went on to win 19 straight games in a row earning a place amongst this elite group of classic teams.

Original post on NBA.com.
Coverage on: USA Today, Deadspin, Washington Post, Fast Company, Fansided, Visually, Flowing Data, Give Me Sport

Here’s a look at how starters on all 30 NBA teams share the basketball. The thickness of the gray lines on the accompanying chart represents the average number of passes per game between two players.

A very clear picture emerges on which teams distribute the ball more evenly between players, such as the Nets, Bulls and Cavaliers. On the flip side, Chris Paul and Blake Griffin dominate passing for the Clippers, and likewise for Kevin Love and Ricky Rubio of the Timberwolves.

This data would have been virtually impossible to collect in the past. However, all NBA arenas are now equipped with SportVU technology. Several cameras are installed overhead which are used to track every move of the game.

Some notes on methodology: The top level center, point guard, shooting guard, small forward and power forward were selected from all team depth charts. The average number of passes were calculated from data from this season only (through Tuesday), taking into account only those games where all five players were active and saw playing time. In-bounds passes were excluded. Line thickness represents combined passing in both directions between two players.

Created for NBA.com. Original post here

There has been a lot of buzz about LeBron James’ 61-point game Monday night, but Oklahoma City’s Kevin Durant racked up his 10th 40-point game of the season on Tuesday. Here’s a look at players who consistently have been scoring big this year.

Here’s a piece for Sports Illustrated on how 40-yard dash times affect draft odds in the NFL Combine. Extra Mustard

We picked up an upright 1905 Steinway model “K” for fifty dollars at an estate sale a few weeks ago. Steinway has been the world’s premiere piano-maker for over a century, so even though ours is in rough shape, it’s pretty cool just to have one sitting in the living room.

Here’s a look at the costs of the classic Steinway model “D” grand piano since 1900. Values reflect the lowest retail price for each year and no, they are not adjusted for inflation! (It’s about what pianos actually cost at the time)

Using varied sizes of a two-dimensional shape is often an effective way to visually compare quantities. One might think that scaling an object 200% in Illustrator would cause its area to become twice as large. This is not the case. It will actually result in an area four times as large, due to the fact that both the linear height and linear width are scaled by 200%.

Here is a simple formula to calculate the necessary scale percentage, based on the relationship of two values.

Example: We need one square to represent 100 people and another to represent 200 people.

Now just take a copy of the first square and scale it 141.4% in Illustrator.

Featured on CNN and Visually.

Population density measures the amount of people in a given area, generally per square kilometer or mile. It’s difficult to get a clear image of what these vast spaces actually represent, so I thought that it would be interesting to flip the equation on its head and figure out how much space there is on average per person. This “Personal Space” is very easy to calculate. In the imperial system, ft² per person = 27,878,000/(people per mile²). In the metric system, m² per person = 1,000,000/(people per km²).

One very simple bit of data stood out in the research for the last set of visualizations: The Celtics and the Lakers have won more NBA Championships than all other franchises combined. Pretty amazing.

Best Sports Infographics of 2012 on Deadspin. Featured on Fast Company.

It clearly takes a village. Jordan was already a force to be reckoned with in the late eighties, but it wasn’t until Pippen, Grant and Kukoc stepped onto the court that the championships started rolling in. This phenomenon was obviously not missed on LeBron in “The Decision” to join forces with Wade and Bosh.

Best Sports Infographics of 2012 on Deadspin. Featured on Fast Company.

With seventeen total Championships, the Celts are the most decorated franchise of all time. However, none of the big stars ever averaged over thirty points a season (Bird got pretty close at 29.9 in the 1987-88 season), again exemplifying the power of a rounded team effort.

It’s also interesting to see how the unparalleled run of wins in the sixties tapers out into the double decade drought that began in the mid-eighties.

Best Sports Infographics of 2012 on Deadspin. Featured on Fast Company.

Many of the biggest names in the history of the sport were dressed in gold. With sixteen wins, the Lakers fall just one shy of Boston, and once again the championships coincide more closely with the clusters than the peaks.

Some of the team’s best played in the 60′s, but due to Celtic domination, Baylor, West and Chamberlain didn’t take the finals until quite late in their careers.

Best Sports Infographics of 2012 on Deadspin. Featured on Fast Company.

The thought of the Knicks bringing home the gold seems somewhat far fetched, but apparently it actually happened in ’70 and ’73. The days of Clydesanity must have been pretty exciting.

We were cleaning out some drawers in the office yesterday and came across a clunky old SyQuest disk. Memories of a particular workflow suddenly came back to me:

- Flip through a book of stock images. Choose one.
- Walk to the stock agency and pick up the chrome.
- Drop the chrome off at a service bureau for a drum scan.
- Return to the office and wait.
- Receive package from courier several hours later.
- Take out chrome and SyQuest disk with “hi-res” image.
- Try repetitively to mount the disk until it finally works.

This last step was particularly fun, as it often required several OS reboots.

All of this is of course now accomplished with a scroll and a click (and in turn a few extra inches around the waistline), but SyQuest certainly deserves a tip of the hat for making large graphic files portable and quietly revolutionizing the design field.

This graphic focuses on some of the more popular magnetic removable storage formats from the 70′s through the mid 90′s, before optical and ultimately solid state technologies came on with a vengeance.

A quick note: Each of these formats were revamped several times to increase storage capacity over the years. I’ve just included the sizes that were most popular for long periods of time as a frame of reference.