2013 was an amazing year for me, in many ways. One thing that happened to me was I got sucked into fantasy sports. Bad. I always knew I was susceptible to it: sports, data, sports and data together. I suppose I was preconditioned in my early years by the countless hours spent pouring over and memorizing the stats on the back of my baseball cards. For some reason, I hadn’t taken the plunge into the world of fantasy sports (addiction) until a fellow little league father invited me and my oldest son Aaron to join a father-son fantasy football league.
My sincerest apologies to my wife, Sarah, for the handful of weekends this past fall that were utterly ruined by a certain someone in the house incessantly checking his ESPN app and getting grumpier by hour. It wasn’t Aaron.
To make things even worse, I started an NBA fantasy league in November. A handful of my friends & family from L.A., some new ones from Seattle, and a Aussie joined, and we were off and running. We call our league the “Shot Callers”, and my team is known humbly as “Dunk on You”. It’s all fun, really. When I win, that is.
Anyhow, I noticed that fantasy sports is mostly tracked via tables. Endless tables of numbers on the web. If you’ve read this blog at all for the last two and a half years, you know that tables of numbers on the web are like a Chris Paul alley-oop pass to me. I made this NBA fantasy dashboard, and yes, I even shared it with my league mates:
It’s a labor of love, really. It took a while of playing the game to even know what should be on the dashboard, and it requires constant updating. Thanks to the folks at basketball-reference.com for doing the hard work of providing each day’s stats in such a timely fashion. I love it that former UCLA Bruin Kevin Love is leading the pack. Your patience is appreciated as I continue to find and add the player profile photos, as many aren’t included as of yet.
Lastly, if you, too, are a fantasy sports addict like me, I’d love to hear your tips, tricks and even maybe some recovery methods you’ve found helpful. Into basketball fantasy sports? How could this dashboard be even more useful?
Thanks for stopping by,
Ben
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Hi Ben,
what is the name of the graph shown under ‘Players: Fantasy points’ on the left and how do you set that up in tableau?
Hey Ben, how did you get individual URLs for each player’s headshot? In the data, I can see you’ve got an individual URL for each image. You could do it manually, in theory, but did you have a way of automatically finding each URL? I’ve got a fantasy baseball dashboard I’d like to set up something similar on.
Yes, it was a very manual process, unfortunately. You might be able to use a web scraping tool like import.io for something like this. I’d send them a tweet to @importio. They’re super helpful and will probably respond with a day or so at the most. Good luck! If you figure it out, could you let me know?
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