Trend Research
How much did the shape of the league change from one season to the next? We measure it with Procrustes alignment — details on the methods page.
What changed this season?
When the league rotates, some stats stop meaning the same thing year over year. Pick a season below — or tap a story chip — to see how big the shift was and which numbers moved most.
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How big was the shift?
Which style of play gained ground?
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Rotation, season to season
Each point is one year-to-year step: how far the league’s 14-stat player profile had to rotate to line up with the next season. Shaded bands are the five research eras; orange rings mark the five biggest jumps.
Blue markers are our read on league events near spikes — not derived from the math. “Scoring era” at 2022-23 was wrong (7.6°); post-bubble spacing at 2021-22 (11.1°) is the better recent tag.
Biggest shifts
The five season-pairs with the largest rotation — where the league's statistical geometry moved the most in one year.
| Season pair | Rotation | Residual | Shared players | Most-rotated features | Interpretation |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
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Method
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Full write-up, the era-twin cross-era matching this same chained transform powers, and every other method on the site: read the methods page →
Archetypes over 30 seasons
Eight player types tracked across 30 seasons, who gained or lost share, and how types shift within each era.
Biggest type shifts (first 5 vs last 5 seasons)
Top types by era
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Court zone map
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More than baseline Less than baseline Defense zones (hatched)
Eight global player types, plus era-specific re-clusters for research. Court zones map where each era’s play showed up on the floor; by-era view compares each window to the one before (the first era is compared to today). How we built this →
Archetype emergence
Did genuinely new role shapes show up? Role tags by era and how crowded the type landscape got.
Roles by era
How many player types fit each era
What we tested
New types by era
A type counts as “new” when it doesn’t resemble anything from the prior era. How we built this →
Career shapes
How players move between archetypes over a career — class mix, example paths, and common switches.
Example paths (one per class)
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Careers migrate more now
Common reinvention paths
Path labels under common switches are our read, not model output. How we built this →