project_nba_season_readiness — Findings

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User's stated goal 2026-08-06: WNBA has been the focus, but be ready for NBA season. Audit found the NBA training leg was not merely dormant — it was crash-looping nightly since 2026-08-02.

Root cause (CloudWatch-confirmed, now FIXED on feat/xgboost-plus-v5-missingness commit 4d19651): the 45-day rolling training window drained as offseason days pushed playoff dates out (592 samples on 8/01 = last success → 476 → 364), then ValueError: Need at least 500 samples to train. Two defects:

min_samples was dead code for NBA: run_train_nightly passes 200, trainer.train gates on 200, then called model.fit() which hardcoded _fit_with_min(min_samples=500). A 200-499 row window cleared the gate then raised inside fit. (MLB's trainer already called _fit_with_min directly — NBA never adopted it.)
[internal detail removed]

Why this matters for opening night: the first weeks of the season produce thin windows (200-499 resolved props). Pre-fix, every one of those nights would have crashed instead of fitting a model.

RATCHET LOCKED SHUT (code FIXED on branch 847320a, prod state NOT fixed). Live models/registry.json has deployedHoldoutAccuracy = 0.6758 stamped by v44 on 2026-06-01. Honest prop models score 52-56%, so every retrain this season would be refused — the same fluke-holdout lockout that blocked 21 WNBA retrains pre-7/07. All 60 registry entries show holdoutSamples: 0 / holdoutAccuracy: 0.0 (offseason), and the old gate could not tell "unmeasured" from "0% accurate". Commit 847320a ports WNBA's gate (holdout_evaluated + 0.52 abs floor + beat hit-rate baseline + stamp only when measured) and adds holdoutEvaluated/holdoutBaseline/deployReason to registry entries.

Still open before the season:

[internal detail removed]
NBA accuracy reports read 0/0 in offseason; confirm the sample-producing pipeline resumes in preseason rather than assuming it.
Re-run scripts/brier_board.py --fit after the first real retrain (its calibration map is fitted on the pre-v5 model, and it is WNBA-shaped — check before trusting it on NBA).