Bucket Blitz
Who is filling it up tonight?
There are no picks on this page, and there will not be until the work below is finished. Not built as a product — but its inputs publish on the NBA hub. Official Forecasts: favoured side (Elo rating), elo-derived game-winner estimate (accuracy not established) and Predicted Player Statistics (PTS, REB, AST, 3PM, PRA, P+R, P+A medians). Withheld: team scores, margin, total and ranges. No NBA player model is validated yet. What is missing is the signature product assembled from them; until that is built and gated, nothing publishes here.
What exists today
- Games captured466 scheduled 2026-27 games — the schedule is captured as the league releases it, never inferred
- First graded Official Forecast gameOctober 20, 2026
What has to be true before it publishes
The public product is not built yet. 4 of 10 pipeline stages behind it have a record. Every product on this site has to pass the same list and a public review before it publishes, and Bucket Blitz has not yet. 6 sports publish Official Forecasts today (MLB, NFL, NBA, Premier League, Ligue 1 and UFC). A stage only counts as done when there is a record of it.
- Schedule/event discoveryDone
Counts as done when: daily schedule artifact from an approved source, date-correct in ET.
- Team/player identity + assetsDone
Counts as done when: canonical ids resolving through the identity components with fallbacks.
- Pick qualification policyDone
Counts as done when: a written policy with thresholds, applied by code, with no-play as a first-class outcome.
- Product generationDone
Counts as done when: boards/cards generated by scheduled automation with the product-state contract.
- Required stats/context dataPart-way
Counts as done when: the model's input fields present for a full slate, no paid call outside budget.
- Market/odds ingestionPart-way
Counts as done when: credit-guarded ingestion producing de-vigged implied probabilities.
- Model/simulationPart-way
Counts as done when: a versioned model producing per-event outputs from pregame inputs only.
- Calibration/validationBlocked outside our control
Counts as done when: a preregistered backtest against settled results — the MLB bar (Brier vs market), not a smaller one.
- Publication + freshnessPart-way
Counts as done when: public surfaces derive freshness from the product's own artifact.
- Official settlementPart-way
Counts as done when: grading from official results with lineage stamps, quarantine on ambiguity.
Why it is not shipped early
A model that has never been checked against settled results can still produce confident-looking numbers — that is the easy part. Four models on this site were built, measured against a bar set in advance, and rejected for failing it; their write-ups are public. Bucket Blitz gets the same treatment, which means it appears here when it earns a page, and not before.