About CourtSketch
What is this?
A place for people who like to look at graphs during hoop Convos.
Featuring 40+ graphing tools for NBA players & teams, the goal of CourtSketch is to provide fast information in a way that is fun to engage with.
Where'd this all come from?
It's a bit of a story.
I started closely following the NBA again 3 years ago, enthralled by the brilliant community of film & data analysts that made up NBA twitter. I ended up joining the Thinking Basketball discord server to discuss the NBA at higher frequency, and I noticed that an inordinate amount of time was spent pulling statistics from different vendors to analyze players. At first, my goal was just to create a discord bot that would automate this process for said community and present the information in a (hopefully) useful manner. (Fun fact, the first iteration of the bot didn't even serve images, all of the information was sent via ASCII tables)
Then the bot started becoming more popular, and as it became more popular, people began having more detailed requests and I found myself continually inspired to create visuals aligned with these requests. It just kind of kept growing, and by the end of 2023, I found myself with a discord bot that served 40+ different types of graphics. I found myself often joking that I had built a web app as a discord bot, and commenting on how absurd it was I had decided to design all of this around text commands instead of clickable links.
This summer, I committed to finally building the actual web app. And naturally, true to form, a day before the start of the 2024-25 season, I finished this first iteration.
I have no idea what this will amount to, if it will amount to anything. What I do know is that I have poured a ton of myself into creating it, and that it's time to roll the dice and see if I can build a platform for myself.
I hope you enjoy it.
What comes with premium?
ShotCombos
Think 'WOWY for ShotCharts'. This is a tool that allows you to visualize shot data for any combination of players and teams over the past 25 years. Whether you're analyzing how a lineup performs with specific player combinations on the court or comparing shot tendencies over different eras, ShotCombos provides a number of different lenses to analyze scoring patterns and team/player success.
Team Series
Team Series allows you to track and analyze a team's tendencies and performance trends throughout an entire playoff series. This feature helps uncover how teams adjust their strategies from game to game, revealing shifts in shooting tendencies, schemes, and overall performance.
Player Series
Player Series offers a similar game-to-game breakdown for individual players, showing how their performance fluctuated over the course of the series. It compares these to the player's regular-season averages, allowing you to visualize how a player adjusted their game to their opponent, and better contextualize their challenges and/or success in any particular series.
Career Ranks
The Career Ranks tool tracks and compares a player's performance over the past 12 years across multiple key metrics. This allows you to chart their development throughout their career, and better contextualize where they land within the landscape of modern & historical basketball.
Predicted FAQ
Why is it throwing an error when I try to create a graph for this player?
Generally speaking, there are three reasons why this happens.
- Latency issues/down time from the provider. To minimize this, most of the stats are called from locally saved databases, but a few require external connection (wowy and teamshift being the most prominent) and occasionally that connection can be bumpy.
- Inclusion Cutoffs. Many of the graphs have some threshold for inclusion, since all of them involve visualizing comparative performance in some way and form. If the player barely played any minutes/was injured for all but a few games in the season, they might not meet the threshold needed for the graphic type.
- Development Bugs. I am a one man operation and this is a lot of code. If you ever notice the graphs throwing errors for a player who seems like they should meet whatever threshold, please ping me and I'll do my best to track down and correct the problem ASAP.
If this happens for a team, that's always going to be a case of a development bug on my end. So once again, please let me know so I can fix it.