The Denver Nuggets’ playoff run this season was nothing short of spectacular and one of the high points of the NBA bubble. Behind Jamal Murray and Nikola Jokic they came back from two 3-1 leads against the Utah Jazz and the Los Angeles Clippers, but lost to the eventual champion Los Angeles Lakers.
In my project there were a few things I really wanted to hit on. Jamal Murray and Donovan Mitchell battled in the first round and broke NBA playoff scoring records. I challenged myself and went with radar charts to compare Murray’s scoring compared to each of the other team’s leading scorer in each series. I think these three in comparison really show how high Murray and Mitchell’s scoring marks were compared to a normal playoff series.
For my main chart, I really wanted to hit on how much time the Nuggets spent trailing and how crazy their comebacks were. To do this I did a line chart with three different lines — their biggest lead, their biggest deficit and the final point differential. I think it’s pretty telling that the range of the chart was 25 to -40.
Lastly, I wanted to break down who really showed up for the Nuggets in the playoffs and who didn’t play as well. I used simple bar charts to chart five Nuggets players’ regular season stats to their playoff stats. Jamal Murray and Nikola Jokic really stepped up and solidified themselves as the team’s best players, and Paul Millsap and Jerami Grant didn’t step up in the way the Nuggets would have needed them to in order to get past the Lakers.
I think what makes this project work is the prior planning that I did and the time I took to come up with ideas for how I wanted to put this together. It was pretty heavily covered that they were coming back from big deficits, so I wanted that to be the main part of the graphic. I also knew how well Jamal Murray had been playing so I wanted to get something in there about his performance. Then the last group of graphs were simply to show how the team did. If I had tried to brainstorm ideas any later than I did I wouldn’t have had time to actually get them done. I’m happy with how it turned out and would like to continue doing sports-related work in the future.