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This dataset contains information about the teams who played in the NBA Finals from 1950 - 2022.

Usage

nba_finals

Format

A data frame with 73 rows and 9 variables:

year

The year in which the Finals took place.

winner

The team who won the series.

western_wins

Number of series wins by the Western Conference Champions.

eastern_wins

Number of series wins by the Eastern Conference Champions.

western_champions

Team that won the Western Conference title and played in the Finals.

eastern_champions

Team that won the Eastern Conference title and played in the Finals.

western_coach

Coach of the Western Conference champions.

eastern_coach

Coach of the Eastern Conference champions.

home_court

Which conference held home court advantage for the series.

Examples

library(dplyr)
library(ggplot2)
library(tidyr)

# Top 5 Appearing Coaches
nba_finals |>
  pivot_longer(
    cols = c("western_coach", "eastern_coach"),
    names_to = "conference", values_to = "coach"
  ) |>
  count(coach, sort = TRUE) |>
  slice_head(n = 5)
#> # A tibble: 5 × 2
#>   coach              n
#>   <chr>          <int>
#> 1 Red Auerbach      10
#> 2 Pat Riley          9
#> 3 Phil Jackson       7
#> 4 Gregg Popovich     6
#> 5 Phil Jackon        6

# Top 5 Winning Coaches
nba_finals |>
  mutate(
    winning_coach = case_when(
      western_wins == 4 ~ western_coach,
      eastern_wins == 4 ~ eastern_coach
    )
  ) |>
  count(winning_coach, sort = TRUE) |>
  slice_head(n = 5)
#> # A tibble: 5 × 2
#>   winning_coach      n
#>   <chr>          <int>
#> 1 Red Auerbach       9
#> 2 Phil Jackon        6
#> 3 Gregg Popovich     5
#> 4 Pat Riley          5
#> 5 Phil Jackson       5