Hi HN,<p>I love both basketball and the NBA, but one thing that's always frustrated me as a basketball fan in the Internet age is how most websites with player career statistics default to text tables for displaying stats.<p>It just seems so obvious that this data should be presented in line chart form: it's much quicker and easier to grasp a player’s career trajectory when you can literally see the shape of their performance over time.<p>The advantages of line charts:<p>Quicker to grasp:
- A quick glance at a line chart allows you to understand the arc of a player's career by simply seeing the shape of the line, whereas in a text-chart you have to read each cell.<p>Show relative performance over time:
- Line charts also make it easy to see how a player's performance changes season to season. Text tables make you mentally calculate these changes, while a plotted chart visualizes the change for you.<p>Easier to compare:
- when looking at two players career PPGs on the same graph it's a lot easier to understand their performances relative to one another versus seeing two tables of their respective stats.<p>I've been confused why no source of online player statistics has already done this, and I kept procrastinating on doing something about it myself because I didn't want to deal with the complexity of sourcing NBA data to make my own simple stats website. But then I came across the relatively new Chrome extension side panel API and realized I could solve my frustration without having to maintain my own NBA player career statistics dataset!<p>So with some spare time earlier this year I developed a Chrome extension called Visual-Stats. It lets you view NBA player career statistics on line charts directly within your browser.<p>I think you'll find Visual-Stats useful and fun for exploring and comparing different NBA players' careers. I'm excited to share it with the community and hear your thoughts!<p>Extension: <a href="https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/visual-stats/fnopmemelgaimmjnakgndfoklpnlkafk" rel="nofollow">https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/visual-stats/fnopme...</a><p>Website: www.visual-stats.com<p>Demo video: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_rPXN8nq6_k" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_rPXN8nq6_k</a><p>Code: <a href="https://github.com/jdamon96/visual-stats">https://github.com/jdamon96/visual-stats</a>