The WNBA games worth watching this week, ranked by team quality and playoff stakes.
Chance each team finishes at each seed, or misses the playoffs.
Each line traces the game's win-probability swing — flat is a blowout, wild is a nailbiter. See all →
Every WNBA game gets a nightly score out of 100, weighing two things:
How good is the matchup? Uses the harmonic mean of both teams’ ESPN BPI ratings, which penalizes lopsided games. A +5 vs +5 matchup scores much higher than a +5 vs -5 blowout waiting to happen.
How much does this game matter for playoff seeding? A Monte Carlo simulation runs the rest of the season 10,000 times, using Elo ratings with home-court advantage and a margin-of-victory multiplier to decide each simulated game. We sum how much every team’s playoff odds swing depending on who wins tonight — including bubble teams watching from the outside, not just the two playing. Bigger swing → higher score. Playoff odds and game importance come from the same simulation run, so the two numbers are consistent with each other.
The 60/40 split is an editorial choice, not a fitted number — there’s no objective measure of how “watchable” a game is. Quality and importance are each scaled 0–100 on their own terms, then blended.
Non-regular-season games are not simulated and show no importance score. Expansion teams start at league-average strength until they have a real BPI.
Want the details — calibration, validation, and the known limitations? Read the full methodology & source on GitHub.