Pace asks a simple question — will this player finish the season higher or lower than that one? — but answering it fairly means we need a projected season total for every player, not just a snapshot of where they are today. Here is how those projections are built.
A raw per-game average treats a player's opening night the same as her most recent game, and quietly assumes she will play every game left on the schedule. Neither holds up over a season. Roles change, minutes rise and fall, and players miss time. A season average describes the past; it does not project the finish.
We build each player's current rate from her game log, weighting recent games more heavily than early-season ones. A player who has moved into the starting lineup, or seen her minutes climb, shows up quickly rather than being buried under two slow months. A hot or cold stretch fades in influence over time instead of defining the whole projection.
A handful of games is a small sample, and small samples lie. So we pull that recent rate toward a talent baseline — essentially the player's established level from the prior season, or her own season mean for rookies and newcomers. Early in the year, when we have seen little, the baseline dominates; as games accumulate and the picture sharpens, the player's actual form takes over. This is what keeps a three-game hot streak from projecting a number no one could sustain.
The output is a total, not a rate: a player's current total plus her projected rate across the games she has left. Crucially, "games she has left" is scaled by how available she has actually been. If she has appeared in 18 of her team's 22 games so far, we do not suddenly assume she plays every remaining night.
On top of that, we read an authoritative injury feed. A player ruled out has her remaining games trimmed, so a known absence pulls the projected total down instead of assuming she will suit up. A day-to-day tag does not move the projection — she is still counted as available — but it is flagged on the Pace card so you can weigh it yourself.
Every rate is computed from official per-game box scores rather than scraped estimates, and player bios and injury reports come from established league data sources. The projections are rebuilt every day after games go final, so the numbers you see reflect the latest slate — not last week's.
This is a projection, not a prediction of any single game, and not betting advice. It is our best estimate of where a season total lands given a player's current form, workload and health — the same recency-and-regression thinking used across modern basketball analytics, tuned to the shape of a WNBA season. Curious about the games themselves? See How to play.