How this works
What the numbers mean, where they come from, and what they cannot tell you.
A projection is a range, not a number
When we say a player projects to 31 fantasy points, that is the middle of a spread, not a prediction that he will score 31. Two players can both project to 31 and be completely different bets: one usually lands between 26 and 36, while the other can swing from 12 to 50. That spread is shown on every player page, because it often matters more than the middle.
Availability and opportunity come first
Before estimating fantasy points, the model separates whether a player will be active from how much opportunity he gets if he plays. Opportunity means minutes in basketball and hockey, snaps and touches in football, and lineup role or expected appearances in baseball. Combining those questions into one number would hide the risk you need to see before lineups lock.
When a starter is ruled out
The playing time and workload do not vanish — they move to specific team-mates, and not evenly. The Tonight page shows who gains them and what that does to each projection, because the useful question is not only “who is out?” but “who do I start instead?”
The accuracy record
Every projection is written down before the event begins and cannot be edited afterwards. Once the game finishes, the outcome is attached and included in the public score summaries, with the sample size next to each result. The accuracy record is free and needs no account, and its scored summaries and calibration bands are downloadable in one file. If a model is bad at something, that page says so.
What we do not do
- No number is published without the sample size behind it.
- No projection is quietly revised after the fact to look better. Corrections are added, never substituted.
- No advice is given for a format the model was not built for.
- Your browser stores opaque player IDs, not your name or email; the server uses those IDs to build your pages.
Where the data comes from
Only sources that permit this use. Where a source's licence forbids commercial use or scraping, it is not used at all — not behind the scenes, not "just for testing". Each surface records when it was last updated, and when one falls behind, a banner appears on the pages that depend on it rather than letting an old number pass as current.
What this cannot tell you
- It cannot tell you what a player will actually do tonight. Nothing can.
- It does not know your league's trade market, your rivals' habits, or your keeper rules.
- A well-scored model is still wrong regularly. The point of the record is that you can see exactly how often.