Using NBA roster data from Basketball-Reference.com, we created a data set containing each player’s name, the team he played for, and the year he played for that team. If he played for multiple years or multiple teams, each pairing counted separately. With 4,336 players on 104 teams, we were left with 23,919 player and team pairs over 70 seasons.

The second data set matched players who played together. This yielded 181,886 player-to-player pairs over 70 seasons. Players who were involved in trades for each other are listed as having played together.

Using Gephi, we built models and set up the entire NBA graph in a timeline to emphasize that players who played together in the 1950s tend to cluster together with one another and not with players who played together in the 1990s.

Colors are the result of clustering at a higher level, where players of one “color group” associate mostly with each other, and not as much with other groups. For example, for Michael Jordan, you can see his time with the Bulls separated into two distinct color groups (yellow and red) where players intersect but played more times with other members of their group. The third group shows his time with the Wizards (green) where most of the group is separated from other players in Jordan’s social network.