About the WNBA Model
Game predictions, a full prop board, and a public scoreboard — built from structure, not a black box.
Two models, one number per market
Win probability and spread come from a stacked model — team Elo ratings combined with opponent-adjusted offensive and defensive efficiency (points per 100 possessions) and pace, refit every season. Totals come from a separate possession-level Monte Carlo simulator: it plays out the game possession by possession using each team's pace and efficiency, so the final total is the mean of a real simulated distribution, not a linear projection.
Game pages show that distribution directly — five real percentiles (p5 through p95) from the simulation, not a smoothed curve fit after the fact.
Player props, gated
Every posted points, rebounds, assists, three-pointers, and combo prop (Pts+Reb, Pts+Ast, Reb+Ast, Pts+Reb+Ast) is priced from the same player projections that feed the game model — expected minutes and per-minute production, not book-line reverse-engineering. A prop only prices when the player has enough 2026 sample and a confirmed role; otherwise it publishes with an explicit reason instead of a guess.
The guardrails (when we refuse to publish a number)
- No market, no claim. If no book has posted a line, we say so rather than price against nothing.
- Roster confirmation. Games with an unconfirmed rotation carry a flag and no pick.
- Divergence abstention. When our number and the market disagree too much to trust, we publish both and claim no edge.
- EV cap. An edge too large to be credible usually means a stale line, not real value — we don't publish it as a pick.
- Sample floors. Players below a minutes/sample threshold get no projection and no prop price rather than a number built on noise.
- Injury-aware. A player listed Out is never priced as available.
A pick — on the game board or the prop board — only ever means the model actually staked it: a non-null stake and no abstention. Every abstained row stays visible with its reason; the board showing its refusals is the product's honesty surface, not a gap to explain away.
Evaluation discipline
Every published claim is walk-forward: each season is predicted using only models trained on seasons before it, refit annually, and nothing is scored in-sample. There is no clean historical WNBA closing-line archive to benchmark against, so we don't claim a market baseline in the backtest — the live closing-line-value tracker is the real market comparison: every pick is graded against the closing line once its game settles, and the scoreboard publishes once the sample is large enough to mean something.