Sports talk

I love talking about sports. Fastbreak is the idea I came up with when I asked myself: how can I enhance casual sports talk between friends? For me, fastbreak is growing into a nice companion to everyday sports conversations.

What are we talking about?

I want to walk you through how fastbreak can enhance casual sports jibber-jabber.

Fastbreak is still in early development. As of writing this post, it’s the middle of the NFL post season. Therefore, a lot of what we talk about today is the NFL playoffs. How do I use fastbreak to talk about the NFL playoffs?

Fastbreak can answer all the easy questions: who is the best team as we approach the playoffs (scatter plot of offense and defensive EPA), or who is on a hot streak going into the playoffs (line graph of top ten teams cumulative net EPA), or even what playoff team is at highest risk for turnovers (highlight playoff teams on the turnover differential bar chart).

But what about more in depth talking points about the upcoming matchups:

• How do two teams offense and defense stack up against each other for the Wild Card round?
• What will be the closest games? What game will be defensive battle or an offensive battle?
• Which team has more weapons? Who is going to see the most production?
• How did each team fair against common opponents? How badly did they lose late in the season?

These are the type of questions we should aspire to analyze and answer. The purpose of fastbreak is to make this type of insight more accessible to everyone. As advanced statistics become more accessible, it is easier to have insightful conversations about sports.

Fastbreak helps you tell a story through data visualizations. To convey a clear story, we start with offering an easy path to self educate about advanced analytics and statistics. Every chart has an Info icon that accesses a bottom sheet that explains the chart and what the statistics say about a team or player.

Fastbreak makes it easier to engage with meaningful data out in the open. It should be easy to share advanced statistics with friends and family. Here are some examples:

Joker's true shooting percentage compared to his usage is off the charts.

The Seattle game is a lock right? I can't see the San Fran defense stifling this offense; Seattle is the second rated defense as well.

It's awesome to see Crosby and the Penguins still contending.

Conclusion

Fastbreak is a companion to more-in-ddepth sports discussions. Talking ball is most fun when we start with the numbers and expand to what we see with our eyes on the field. Fastbreak offers the tools to share and think deeply about sports statistics so we can start with the same foundation of knowledge and build on it with our subjective eye tests. But the discussion doesn't stop there. Stats are just the beginning of the conversation.