A basketball coach gathered data from games where her team won the game after having a halftime lead and where her team lost the game after having a halftime deficit. She displayed the data in scatter plots.

Does either scatter plot indicate a positive correlation between the variables?

For either graph, we see that as x increases, y generally increases as well. Both variables increase together. So this is why we have positive correlation. Put another way, the regression line has a positive slope.

If both x and y decreased together, then we'd have positive correlation as well. All that matters is x and y go the same direction together. In contrast, negative correlation is whenever x goes up but y goes down, or vice versa. Little to no linear correlation is whenever the points are either scattered randomly, or they fit a nonlinear pattern (eg: quadratic).