SmartRatings: A model to assess the entertainment value of every game, team and player

If you ask people which games are the most fun on a given Sunday, you might get a hundred different responses, depending on ingrained interests.

Who has been the most exciting player in the league in recent weeks? You may be taking a highly subjective approach to answering this question.

But we can actually provide data and more for the answers to these questions by looking at SmartRatings, which provides some unbiased guides to the best games and most exciting players the sport has to offer.

SmartRatings is an AI-based platform that calculates excitement levels and real-time headlines for sporting events. The excitement scale ranges from 0 to 100 and is powered by a complex algorithm based on six main variables: speed, parity, novelty, momentum, context, and social buzz.

The weighting of each variable is dynamic and adjusted as the season progresses, and the excitement scale translates to the following general subranges: 0-39 (dull game), 40-64 (good game), 65-84 (good game) ) , 85-100 (great game).

For example, this is Week 18 of the 2021 NFL season looks like:

As you can see, the AFC West matchup between the Los Angeles Chargers and Las Vegas Raiders is the top-ranked game of the week.

It also falls into the “great game” category because the teams have the same record (indicating parity), they are division rivals (increasing novelty), and most crucially, it can be a win or go home scenario that makes In regular season games, the background of the game is as important as possible.

These can also be divided into home and away ratings, which are biased towards the views of that fan base, and neutral ratings. So for neutral fans, a blowout might be boring (hence a very low rating), but the winning team will have a higher rating and the losing team will have a lower rating.

Here is an example:

At the player level, ratings are calculated by combining player performances with the best of those performances.

For example, a player with a lot of dunks and 3-pointers may have a better rating than a player who is mostly mid-range jumpers or free throws.

So the next time your buddy tells you his favorite player is the most exciting star in the league, you’ll get SmartRatings stats that tell you why he’s wrong. Sorry, man.