Intro
After thinking about starting to blog here on SCN and constantly looking for topics this is finally the start of my own blog. The first blog post. Wow. :wink:
Hopefully this blog will see a lot more posts in the future, especially around HCM and technology topics.
So what is this post all about?
Some people might have heard about the topic. I've not seen a blog here on SDN dealing with it, but maybe I simply missed it. Last week the NBA revealed their new stats pages. You might ask why that is interesting for SCN and the reason of course is the technology behind this site. As already announced last year the NBA and SAP signed a contract to build a new stats page driven by SAP Hana.
This page is now finally there and everyone can start playing around with it. Read more about in the official statement on NBA.com and make sure you don't miss the video introducing the site.
SAP Hana in action
Compared to the old stats page which was completely text based and although it did provide a lot of stats it was somehow restricted and less fancy to use. Looking at the new page (which sports a nice little NBA runs SAP banner) we now get a real nice visually appealing interface.
The NBA itself is very much driven by stats and analytics nowadays and a lot of teams seem to rely on so-called advanced statistics. For the fans (like me) the new stats page is the first opportunity to play with these advanced stats like the teams and coaches do to find line-ups that work best in different situations of the game and so on. Of course we get cool visualizations like the shot chart below showing the hot and cold shooting zones of a player. You get to select the time range you want to report on, e.g. this season, the last ten games and so on.
Those basketball and NBA freaks like me will most likely already know about the site. For everyone else interested in analytics and specifically SAP Hana I would recommend to give it a try and play around with the data. The database behind the site contains the box scores of all games going back to the 60s.
Deep-dive
I'm still hoping to see one or a serious of posts with some details about this project and the implementation. Until then I'll enjoy the all new NBA.com/stats!
