Jordan’s Teammates – A Story of His Career
SOURCE: http://content.fanatics.com/six-degrees-nba/#mj
From the very first class we saw the example of the karate dojo that split into two resulting in “colored” nodes depending on which dojo each person aligned with. This webpage shows something similar – but not quite the same. This page shows how NBA players are connected to one another by playing with them on a team and coloring based on “groups” that are calculated rather than actual teams that the players played on. Specifically looking at Michael Jordan’s graph, We can see three key groups, which is strange – Michael Jordan has only ever played for two teams: the Chicago Bulls and Washington Wizards. The bottom two groups are actually not just showing all the Bulls MJ has played with, but also separating them into his early career in red and his last threepeat after a two year stint in baseball. This phenomena of three colors beautifully shows how looking at the clustering of nodes can give you deep insight into grouping nodes. Just a two year gap and some roster changes while MJ was gone is enough to alter the clustering coefficients of their mutual teammates so much that it is detectable which teammates are from what period and team of MJ’s career. You can even see Charles Oakley forming a bridge between the green and red, which is very peculiar as red is MJ’s early career from the 1980’s with the Bulls and the green is from Jordan’s end of career in the 2001 and 2002 season with the Wizards after coming out of retirement. Well, as it turns out – there’s a reason for this. Charles Oakley was drafted by the Bulls the year after Michael Jordan, so they shared a lot of the same teammates for three seasons before Oakley was ultimately traded to the New York Knicks. Fifteen seasons later, Oakley and Jordan are reunited as Jordan is playing out his last season in the NBA with the Wizards – hence sharing the majority of the connections in the green group.
Thinking about this from the perspective of triadic closures, it’s pretty clear why there are so many lines between nodes in Jordan’s network. Take any two of MJ’s connections – triadic closure would tell us that there is likely a connection between those two teammates as well, and it is quite intuitive why as well. If you take any two players who have played with MJ before, chances are they were on the team at the same time as him. For Jordan, the clustering is actually slightly lower among the Bulls (the red and yellow), enough so that an algorithm can distinguish them as two different parts of his career. This is because Jordan stayed with the Bulls for the very vast majority of his career, meaning his teammates at the end of his Bulls career probably won’t form a triadic closure with those from when he was just drafted, with exceptions being people like John Paxson, who stopped playing the season after Jordan left to explore baseball, and Scottie Pippen, who spent his entire career with Jordan until Jordan retired after the 1998 season. Meanwhile, his time with the Wizards showcases a cool connection between clustering coefficient and triadic closures – being that he only stayed with the Wizards for two seasons, the clustering coefficient of the green group is incredibly high – if you were teammates from one season, you were probably teammates for the next season, thus forming a triadic closure with Jordan, but if many people are forming a closure with Jordan even multiple closures, that means that Jordan’s connections are usually also connected i.e. high clustering coefficient.