New Yorkers in the N.B.A.

On Christmas we published an interactive game of sorts that lets you pick your own all-time team of New Yorkers who went on to the N.B.A, along with a selection of teams from some notable pundits and former players. There weren’t really a lot of sketches to post, but for me, the best part of the project was looking through old N.B.A. photographs from the NYT archives and, in some cases, from the players’ colleges. (Below, Bill Bolger, courtesy of Georgetown University.)

The project didn’t end up being a real hit traffic-wise, possibly because people were spending time with their loved ones on Christmas rather than playing games on the internet, or possibly because the actual audience is relatively small. Still, it was worth it for me – this feature had a lot of new features we hope to use again, including  customized sharing and, I think, a good integration of Isotope – some of these features were used again on Interactive News’s Year on Page 1 project. I also got much better at scraping with R’s XML package, and I’ll try to post a demo here soon.

Finally, if you can’t tell, Dan Nguyen’s SOPA Opera was an obvious design inspiration for this.