How the ratings and the gauntlet work

The data, the six-category player model, and the deterministic simulation behind every run.

The data

Players and their season box scores come from public EuroLeague statistics for the modern era. For each player we keep their peak season — the year their all-round production, measured by PIR, was highest — and use that season's profile as their rating in the game.

PIR (Performance Index Rating) is the standard EuroLeague single-number summary of a game's box score: points, rebounds, assists, steals and blocks earned, minus missed shots, turnovers and fouls suffered. It is a useful shorthand for overall impact, and it is what separates the stars from the role players who make up the Make-the-Playoffs pool.

The six-category profile

A single number cannot capture what a player does, so each player is scored on six categories: scoring, playmaking, rebounding, perimeter defence, rim defence, and efficiency. Each category is a z-score — how many standard deviations above or below the league average that player was, computed within their own era and season so a 2004 guard is measured against 2004 guards, not against a different decade.

This is why balance matters. A five that is all scoring and no rebounding or rim protection has a lopsided profile, and the simulation punishes the gap. A team that covers all six categories rates higher than the sum of its scorers.

Single-season buckets

The draw lands on one club in one season, not a decade. A club-season is only drawable if enough of its players cleared a minimum sample, so thin rosters are dropped rather than padded. This keeps every draw a real, coherent roster you could have watched, and it is why the pool is deep in the well-documented modern seasons.

The simulation

Your five combine into a team rating from their six-category profiles, rewarded for balance across the categories. The gauntlet then plays out a full bracket: a regular season of many games, a best-of-five playoff series, and the Final Four semifinal and final.

Each game's result comes from a logistic win probability — your rating against the round's rising difficulty, which climbs as you advance. The playoffs are harder than the regular season, and the Final Four is harder still. The whole run is seeded deterministically, so the same lineup always produces the same record; there is nothing random to re-roll.

Why undefeated is rare

A perfect run means winning every game across the whole bracket, and the per-game probabilities are tuned so that even an elite five is unlikely to run the table. This is deliberate. Early versions handed out undefeated runs freely, which made the badge meaningless. Now it is a genuine feat — most great lineups win a title without ever going unbeaten.

Fair play

The draw is resolved on the server from a secret seed the client never sees, and every submitted lineup is re-checked: each player must genuinely belong to the club-season their slot landed on, and in Make-the-Playoffs each must genuinely be an underdog. A run cannot be forged by editing what the browser sends.