Let me start by saying that last night (4/13/2016) was the most memorable night of regular season NBA basketball I’ve ever witnessed. Usually the last night of the regular season is typically fraught with some form of playoff drama, but last night was different. Headlines were centered around the Golden State Warriors facing the Memphis Grizzlies and the Los Angeles Lakers facing the Utah Jazz because history was going to be made.
Stephen Curry was able to record his 400th three pointer (no player has ever made 300 in a season), join the 50-45-90 club (the second player ever to do so), and lead his team to its 73rd win (most wins in a regular season). Also in the same night, a 20-year veteran named Kobe Bryant played in his last game where he scored 60 points on 50 attempts (the most by a single player in a single game in the modern era) while shooting a Kobe-esque 50% from mid-range. For this analysis, I will be looking at which one (Golden State Warriors or Kobe Bryant) really stole the show. To do so, I utilized R and Google Trends. Lets take a look!
The graphs above represent the average search interest relative to the highest point on the chart. If at most 10% of searches for the given region and time frame were for “pizza,” we’d consider this 100. This doesn’t convey absolute search volume.
Now we can clearly see that over time, the Golden State Warriors was of more interest to people than Kobe Bryant’s impending retirement. However, Kobe was able to put to such a dazzling performance during his last game that he was able to steal people’s interest and outshine the record setting Warriors. This was probably due to social media going crazy about his performance.