Comments on: Data Visualization — March Madness Style

By: Roger Crawley

Roger Crawley — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 15:28:59 +0000

The easiest way to achieve 2 different colours is to use a stacked column with 2 series, where each series has a value of 0 or its lead.

By: Tim Wilson

Tim Wilson — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 01:12:24 +0000

I like @Roger and @Michael’s suggestions. I gave it a quick run in Excel 2007, but only half got the “different color based on which team is winning” to work — there is an option to “invert negative values,” but that didn’t really get me to what I was looking for. I’m now thinking this will be my excuse to fiddle around some more with Google Charts to see if I can get the added control there. May not be until next March!

By: Michael Pierce

Michael Pierce — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 16:47:46 +0000

I wonder if plotting it as a bar chart, with no gap, would give the stair-step effect without having to plot every 2,400 seconds…

I definitely like the improvement and I’m wondering what an entire bracket would look like plotting out the entire tournament, using smaller versions of the chart….hmm…

By: Roger Crawley

Roger Crawley — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 17:33:48 +0000

What about using a column chart with 0 gap. This would make the steps more obvious and you could also set the colour of the column to the colour of the team leading.

By: Interesting Links for 3-April-2009 | PTS Blog

Interesting Links for 3-April-2009 | PTS Blog — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 10:01:39 +0000

[...] boring. But I liked Gilligan (Tim Wilson)’s improvement on ESPN’s Game Flow graph in Data Visualization – March Madness Style. Rather than tracing both teams’ scores from bottom left to top right, Tim plots score [...]

By: Tim Wilson

Tim Wilson — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 00:05:20 +0000

Thanks, Jon!

I initially broke the game down into 2,400 seconds and built the chart that way, which did give them, for all intents and purposes, the stairstepped look. I got to thinking that was overkill, so backed off to 15-second increments, which introduced the sloped lines. You make a good point, though.

By: Jon Peltier

Jon Peltier — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 23:06:00 +0000

Tim -

I like your representations better than the original. I’ve seen similar charts showing a team’s accumulated win-loss differential over a season. You don’t need to show all wins and all losses, just like you don’t need to show all points for and against.

The thing I might change is to put a vertical line segment at each scoring event, rather than a diagonal line that slopes to it (compulsive? moi?), giving a sharper stepped appearance.