Track record
Every prediction is logged before tip-off and graded after the final buzzer. This page is the full scoreboard — nothing is edited after the fact.
The last 12 months at a glance
- Neural Net: called 854 of 1,373 winners (62.2%), missing the final margin by 11.9 points on average.
- Random Forest: called 821 of 1,373 winners (59.8%), missing the final margin by 12.3 points on average.
- XGBoost: called 880 of 1,364 winners (64.5%), missing the final margin by 11.8 points on average.
Summary as of the last site build. The charts below load the full game-by-game record.
Loading the track record…
How to read the track record
What gets graded
Every prediction on HoopModel is written to the database before the game tips off. Once the final score is in, a nightly job grades it: did the model pick the right winner, and how far was its predicted margin from the real one? Nothing is removed or re-scored afterwards, so the misses stay on the page next to the hits.
Winner accuracy is the share of games where the model's favored team won. For context, simply picking the home team every night wins a little more than half the time, so the useful question is how far above that line a model sits, and whether it stays there over a full season.
Why the betting market is on the page
The closing line from the betting market is the toughest public benchmark there is for an NBA game: it's the final consensus of a very large, very motivated crowd. We put it next to our numbers to keep ourselves honest. Beating it consistently is extremely hard, and falling a little short of it is normal for any public model.
The market comparison only uses games that have a recorded closing line, so both sides are graded on exactly the same set of games. We show the line for completed games only and don't publish picks against it.
Reading the charts
The trend charts use a trailing seven-day window, so a single bad night moves them less than it would a daily number. The scatter plot shows every game as one point: the closer the cloud sits to the diagonal, the better the margins. The game-by-game table at the bottom is the raw record that every other number on this page is computed from.