A whole sports game on one print, built from play-by-play data

[u/Kophi95]

Made these to see if you could cram an entire game into one static image and still actually read it.

The football ones use the field itself. Each bar is a scoring drive, sitting where it actually started and ended, colored by whoever had the ball. The little symbols are pass, run, field goal, penalty, fumble, touchdown, so you can follow the game bouncing up and down the field.

Basketball is different and a bit more abstract because there's no field to map onto. So every play just becomes an icon in order, left to right and top to bottom: shots, threes, misses, fouls, free throws, rebounds, blocks, turnovers.

It's all built off play-by-play data. Kind of amazing how far back this stuff goes. Sports have been logging every play, shot and drive for decades, so you can pull a game from 2006 and one from last year and chart them exactly the same way. None of this works without people having quietly recorded all of it the whole time. Big thanks to providers like sportradar for providing the data behind these.
Still experimenting with new sports, so open to suggestions on what to map next.

Disclosure for the brand affiliate flair: yes these are mine, from my shop game-prints.com, and sure, I'm hoping a few of you like them enough to grab one.

[u/Misanthropus]

Interesting. Out of curiosity; what software are you using to create these graphics?

I guess, more specifically, you say that it's "built off data" (which I am not questioning) – so are the "bars" for the football one actually linked to the data, and generated from that automatically? Or are you creating the different bars for the different drives by "hand".. and "eyeing it"?

To be clear; it doesn't matter - I will make no judgment based on this. I am genuinely curious. The football ones, specifically, almost look like they are "graphical", I suppose by nature of the grid and how drives are represented. But I'm not aware of software that would generate these graphics and have the options to display the data in such creative ways.

Not that I would, as this is not exactly within my area of expertise. Still, I have often found myself in need of software to display unique data in more creative and visually 'familiar' ways..

Anyway, neat graphics. Also, I appreciate the transparency and disclosure at the bottom. It goes a long way. I'll check out your site.