Tonight’s best matchups, ranked by team quality and playoff stakes.
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 2,000 times per outcome, 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.
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.