Over the past 25 years, the NBA has worked to carve out branding space as the sports league that plays lots of games on Christmas Day. With Boxing Day and the start of Kwanzaa, there are still a good number of NBA teams on the schedule. The slate of contests tonight might be even more competitive and a tougher task to predict for our weekly NBA Swarm than those that were played on the holiday.

Typically, in this space we highlight a game that the swarm expressed heavy confidence in, but today we’ll show you the other side of that coin. One of the most important aspects of predictions and intelligence is awareness; namely, understanding when something can be predicted confidently, and when it cannot. Here’s an example of the latter from today’s NBA swarm.

The replay above shows what happens when the swarm tries to predict a match-up between  a 13^th– and a 15^th-place team. This game likely involves clubs with shaky motivations, roster issues, and a myriad of rapidly changing in-game variables. As you can see, when it came time for the swarm to predict this contest, the puck hangs in the middle before haltingly sliding over to Phoenix as the pick. There’s no consensus until the very end, and this is a classic example of what it looks like when the swarm thinks you should steer clear of a game.

Every week, Unanimous AI publishes predictions made by its Swarm AI platform. Want to have those picks delivered to your inbox? 

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