NBA passing networks, 2022-23 season

Author: Pierre Robiglio and Thomas Robiglio

NBA offenses are evolving towards what has been branded "Heliocentism", namely the tendency of the offensive system to rely on one single decision-maker to carry the offensive load. Examples include Lebron James's title winning 2020 Los Angeles and the Dallas Mavericks with Luka Doncic. Is this heralded rise in heliocentrism supported by the data? We scrape data from official NBA records about the volume of passes between two players and the minutes played by each player in the past regular season. For each team we draw a network where the nodes are the players and the weighted edges represent the volume of passes between players. Players are represented by nodes, whose size is proportional to minutes played throughout the season. The edges show the volume of passes between each two players. In the visualisation it is possible to see the importance of the two-man game as a the engine of Denver’s league-leading offense, as highlighted by the thick line between Jokic and Murray (#15 and #27) or the radial structure of the Dallas Mavericks centered around all-star point guard Luka Doncic (#77).