Beautiful spider loses its way 2

A double post today.

In the previous post, I talked about NFL.com's visualization of football player statistics. In this post, I offer a few different views of the same data.

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The first is a dot plot arranged in small multiples.

Notice that I have indiced every metric against the league average. This is shown in the first panel. I use a red dot to warn readers that the direction of this metric is opposite to the others (left of center is a good thing!)

You can immediately make a bunch of observations:

• Alex Smith was quite poor, except for interceptions.
• Colin Kaepernick had similar passing statistics as Smith. His only advantage over Smith was the rushing.
• Joe Flacco, as we noted before, is as average as it goes (except for rushing yards).
• Tyrrod Taylor is here to remind us that we have to be careful about backup players being included in the same analysis.

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The second version is a heatmap.

This takes inspiration from the fact that any serious reader of the spider chart will be reading the eight spokes (dimensions) separately. Why not plot these neatly in columns and use color to help us find the best and worst?

Imagine this to be a large table with as many rows as there are quarterbacks. You will able to locate the red (hot) zones quickly. You can also scan across a row to understand that player's performance relative to the average, on every metric.

I like this visualization best, primarily because it scales beautifully.

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The final version is a profile chart, or sometimes called a parallel coordinates plot. While I am an advocate of profile charts, they really only work when you have a small number of things to compare.