Taxonomy of Play Styles
Every NBA player-season since 1996, distilled to 2,426 career play styles and organized into 22 archetypes across 5 families — clustered from stat profiles, named from the numbers. These 22 career types are a separate, career-level clustering from the model's 8 season archetypes used on the Atlas and in the games. Find your favorite player. See who they really play like.
How it's built: each player's 14-feature stat profile (per-100 possessions, z-scored within season so eras compare honestly) is collapsed to a career-typical vector — the median season, robust to late-career decline. Ward agglomerative clustering on all 2,426 players yields one dendrogram; 5 families and 22 archetypes are cut from it. Archetype names come from each cluster's stat signature (percentiles vs all players), never vibes — 20 sanity anchors verified, including Curry/Lillard (sharpshooting stars), Gobert/Mutombo (rim runners), Rodman/Wallace (rebound specialists) and Nash/Stockton (elite point guards). Magic Johnson is absent: his career predates the 1996–97 dataset. Full method and QA: methods.