As a huge college basketball fan, more specifically a die-hard Duke fan, I recently got into a heated debate about what school has the most top draft picks. So of course that sparked an interesting dashboard idea, with the NBA finals and upcoming NBA draft this month.
The result is an Xcelsius dashboard with all of the NBA Draft Lottery picks since 1985. My goal was to enable dynamic analysis of any date range for the top X draft picks. Whether analyzing top 5 draft picks or top 10 picks, I wanted to dynamically see what colleges produced the top number of draft picks.
At the same time, you can click on any team or college within the bar chart to see the individual players who were drafted.
To build this dashboard, I used a combination of a few workarounds and Centigon Solutions plugin components including Filtered Summary, Dynamic Sort, and Background Builder. Without these components, this particular dashboard would have been near impossible.
I am going to provide the source files for this particular dashboard and do a few articles about specific workarounds, so you can learn a few new tricks of the trade while having the opportunity to use add-on components to build this type of analysis.
View Dashboard
Filtered Summary
Used to dynamically count the number of players drafted to NBA teams, Filtered Summary provides a critical calculation layer to drive the analysis as you increase or decrease the number of years or draft numbers. Rather than relying on cumbersome, performance hindering logic, Filtered Summary continuously evaluates every player drafted from 1985 and then generates a summary table that is visualized in a bar chart.
Dynamic Sort
When Filtered Summary generates a dynamic count for each NBA team or College for where players are drafted, dynamic sort will automatically re-sort the data in place so the graph can visually represent the number of players in a descending order. With 2 simple properties, you can enable sorting and ranking with no impact to performance and no Excel logic.
Background Builder
To create a professional looking user interface, Background Builder was utilized to enclose all components into a single dashboard. With un-intrusive gradients and textures background builder can create a wide range of graphical styles. In the NBA dashboard background builder was combined with a brown color scheme aligned to basketball. With a few clicks of the mouse, you can easily re-configure background builder to a less flashy color scheme.
I have fixed the L.A. Clippers issue and have uploaded the 2009 draft class. I have also received several inquiries about the over-the top design. In this case I broke some of my own rules by employing a color scheme that creates some interference. I had created this to approach the NBA web-site, since I believe the analysis is interesting for NBA and college basketball fans. If I have a little time, I will apply a theme that is in-line with design best practices that I write about, rather than something that caters to marketers.
thanks for the comments
-Ryan Goodman
Cool Dashboard!
One question from a real beginner:
How do you manage the double slider to change the years you pick up for summary?
Nice idea. Looks like there’s a little data quality problem: notice that the LA Clippers show up twice in your screen shot? The entry for Shaun Livingston is “L.A.Clippers” with no space; all of the others are “L.A. Clippers”.
One suggestion: In addition to schools, it would be nice to view the data by conference.
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