About Makeover Monday
MakeoverMonday is a social data project which “offers inspiration and a dose of perspective for those who communicate data, and allow people to explore different perspectives and approaches to create more effective visualizations.”
To be more specific, “Each week we post a link to a chart, and its data, and then you rework the chart. Maybe you retell the story more effectively, or find a new story in the data. We’re curious to see the different approaches you all take. Whether it’s a simple bar chart or an elaborate infographic, we encourage everyone of all skills to partake. Together we can have broader conversations about and with data.”
Inspired by Dong Yu (an amazing data analyst also graduated from USC), I started this project from January 2019 and hope to better understand how to interpret data and translate insights into impactful visualizations.
All my Tableau visualizations can be found here through my Teableau Public profile.
Makeover Monday Week 1
The MM this week is about NHL’s (National Hockey League) home and road attendance. You can find more details about this topic through here(link to wikipedia). The original visualization and dataset is here in case you are interested, and the source is from ESPN.
When I look at the dataset, I naturally want to verify whether the teams that have higher ranks received higher home attendance. Thus, I first built a bump chart to compare each team’s ranking trend and home attendance trend. To simplify the visualization, I mapped a new column Division to the dataset after refering to wikipedia’s information, and filtered only data from 2007 to 2017. It is also my first time using bump chart, so I borrowed the idea from Yu Dong’s post and just want to practice how to build it in Tableau.
The interactive graph is attached below. You can click at the bottom right corner to zoom in the visual and view in full screen.
Then, to achieve the original goal of tracking the changes of each team’s home attendance across seasons, I created another visualization using line graphs, and segment the data by divisions and conferences. Make sure to zoom in to fullscreen for a more accurate display.
We can clearly see that all teams experienced severe attendance decline in 2012, which was due to 2012–13 NHL lockout. The labour strike reduced the total number of games from 82 to 48, which caused the significant decline shown in the graph.
Insights
- The game rank and the home attendance is apparently positively correlated. The better the team performance, the higher the home attendance.
- Generally speaking, most of the teams’ home attendance stayed are a rather stable level across the past 10 years, except for the disrupt in 2012.
- Best and worst performing teams in each division throughout the 10 years (2007 - 2017) are listed below:
| Division | Best | Worst |
|---|---|---|
| Atlantic | Montreal | Florida |
| Central | Chicago | Winnipeg |
| Metropolitan | Philadelphia | NY Islanders |
| Pacific | Calgary | Arizona |
For the worst teams, they are all experiencing downward trend in home attendance in recent years, while the best teams home attendance stayed at stable high levels throughout the past 10 years
- Vegas is a fairly new team that has just come into play in 2017.