The WNBA Schedule

🔗 Live: ismayc.github.io/wnba-schedule · the-wnba-schedule.netlify.app

A React + Vite web app showing every game of the WNBA season in your timezone — with live scores, where to watch on your streaming services, league-wide standings, the playoff bracket, and league leaders.

No backend, no API keys, no tracking. The whole app is a static bundle plus a committed snapshot of the season.

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Views

View	What it does
📋 Schedule	Every game grouped by the calendar day you see, opening on today — previous days are hidden behind a toggle. Filter by team or by the teams you follow.
📆 Week	A Sun–Sat grid you can page through, collapsing to a two-column agenda on a phone.
📊 Regular Season	League seeding with the playoff cutline, or conference tables. W/L, PCT, GB, home/road splits, last-10, streak, net rating.
🏆 Playoffs	The bracket, where each slot is a best-of series. Projected from current standings until the real field is set.
🎯 Radial	The same bracket as concentric rings — seeds outside, the title in the middle.
📈 Stats	Season totals, league leaders across 8 categories, scoring margin, and the playoff race with magic numbers.
📜 History	Every completed season back to 2022, in three modes: one season in full (bracket + final table), that season's stats (totals, all leaderboards, scoring margin), and every champion with its seed and the Finals format it won under.

Star a team from any game card, standings row, or team panel to highlight it across every view, filter the schedule to "My teams", and scope live alerts to it. Clicking any team opens a team panel — splits, form, leading scorers, and what's next. Each game card also flags where to watch — a 📺 badge naming the streaming services that carry it (YouTube TV, Prime Video, Peacock). Plus: light/dark themes, spoiler-free mode (on by default — one 🙈 toggle reveals scores, and the choice is remembered per-device), shareable URLs, live alerts for notable moments, a game-detail modal with a quarter line score and season series, .ics calendar export (whole season or one team's), and installable-PWA support.

Data

Everything comes from ESPN's public, keyless, CORS-open feeds.

The season is committed, not fetched. scripts/fetch-schedule.mjs generates src/data/schedule.js, src/data/teams.js, and src/data/leaders.js, and mirrors team logos into public/logos/. The app therefore renders a complete season — including every result so far — with zero requests on load. At runtime, ESPN's scoreboard is polled only to overlay games that are live or just finished (every 30s while a game is in progress, 2 min otherwise, never once the season ends).

That snapshot is refreshed twice daily by .github/workflows/refresh-data.yml, which regenerates the data, runs the test suite against it, and opens a PR. Standings are derived from the committed scores, so a bad refresh surfaces as a failing test rather than a quietly wrong table.

Three feed quirks worth knowing

These are the difference between "looks about right" and matching the official standings exactly:

1. The Commissioner's Cup Championship is not a regular-season game. It appears in the schedule feed like any other, but doesn't count toward the standings. It's reclassified as seasonType: 'cup' and excluded.
2. A postponed game appears twice — the original slot and its makeup date, both live in the feed. The dead one is flagged and skipped.
3. Broadcast data has two shapes. The team-schedule feed uses media.shortName; the scoreboard uses names[]. Both are accepted.

With those handled, derived W-L, home/road splits, last-10, and streaks match ESPN's published standings exactly for all 15 teams.

Scoring frequency: why there are no per-basket events

The biggest structural difference from a soccer viewer. Goals are rare enough to enumerate as events — scorer, minute, penalty — and a Golden Boot table can be derived from them. Basketball can't work that way: ~65 scoring plays per game, ~20,000 per season.

So the model inverts. Games store a final score, and player leaderboards come from pre-aggregated season stat lines rather than being summed from events. Two things fill the gap that losing the event stream would otherwise leave:

• Quarter line scores are the analogue of a goal timeline. A final score of 98–93 hides whether a team led by 20 or trailed all night; the quarter breakdown shows it, with the higher scorer of each quarter marked. Committed for every played game, and every one is asserted to sum to its final score.
• Per-game leaders (points/rebounds/assists) answer "who did it" without an event list.

Frequency also changes the live display. A soccer app can show a goal the moment it lands and be right for the next ten minutes; a basketball score is stale within seconds. So the live badge shows the period (Q3, HALF, OT) rather than a running game clock, which would imply a precision a 30-second poll can't deliver. The exact feed status stays in the tooltip.

And it rules out goal-style alerts. One notification per basket would fire ~65 times a game. The 🔔 toggle instead surfaces the moments that change how a game feels — tipoff, a lead change, a one-possession fourth quarter, and the final — detected by diffing poll snapshots, so no play-by-play feed is needed. A close fourth quarter alerts once on entering that state, not every 30 seconds while it holds, and a buzzer-beater that both flips the lead and ends the game is reported as one moment rather than three.

Format notes

The WNBA is not a group-stage tournament, and two details drive most of the app's logic:

• Seeding is league-wide 1–8, not by conference. Conference is presentational.
• A playoff slot is a series, not a game — best-of-3, then best-of-5, then best-of-7 — and the bracket is fixed: semifinal pairings don't re-seed.

The archive

src/data/history.js holds every completed season back to 2022 — the year the playoffs became series in every round (best-of-3 first round, best-of-5 semifinals and Finals). Through 2021 the first two rounds were single-elimination games with double byes for the top two seeds, a bracket shape this app doesn't draw.

Series lengths are per season, and inferred rather than assumed. The Finals grew from best-of-5 to best-of-7 in 2025, so each archived season carries its own lengths and the bracket is drawn against them — rendering 2023's 3-1 Finals against 2025's rules would show it as unfinished. The lengths are derived from each season's own results: the winner of a best-of-N takes exactly ceil(N/2) games, so N = 2 × wins − 1. A 4-0 sweep can only be a best-of-7. Nothing is hardcoded, so the next format change is picked up automatically.

Each season commits its final standings, its playoff games, its season totals and its leader boards; the ~200 regular-season games are summarised into the standings rather than committed. The bracket is rebuilt at runtime by the same buildBracket() the live season uses, and box scores are fetched from ESPN by event id, so every archived game opens one.

npm run fetch:history        # rebuilds the archive (a season in progress is skipped)

Two data caveats the archive handles explicitly:

• The league grows. seedings() tables today's franchises, so a season before an expansion team existed would carry phantom 0-0 rows for it (Golden State joined in 2025; Portland and Toronto in 2026). Those rows are filtered out — 2022-24 show twelve teams, 2025 shows thirteen.
• Archived leader boards show no team badge. ESPN reports a player's current club even when an older season is requested, and only for players who later moved — so 2023's scoring leader Jewell Loyd reads as an Ace rather than a Storm, while Breanna Stewart's Liberty badge is correct. A board mixing the two silently is worse than one showing neither; the names, ranks and values are that season's.

Develop

npm install
npm run dev              # local dev server
npm test                 # unit + render tests
npm run build            # production bundle
npm run coverage:badge   # tests with coverage, writes public/coverage.json

npm run fetch:schedule   # regenerate committed data from ESPN
npm run check:schedule   # report drift between committed data and the live feed
npm run verify:live      # check the live overlay's assumptions against a game in progress

scripts/ uses Node built-ins only — no imports from node_modules — so CI can run the data jobs on a bare checkout with no install step. A CI job enforces this.

Testing approach

The suite leans on real data rather than hand-made fixtures, because real data contains the edge cases you wouldn't think to invent.

• Standings are checked against the actual 2026 season, and the numbers are independently verifiable against ESPN's published standings.
• The bracket is tested against the complete 2025 postseason (test/fixtures/playoffs-2025.js) — 24 games, 7 series — because the 2026 bracket doesn't exist until September. It reproduces the real outcome: Las Vegas over Phoenix 4–0. That fixture caught two bugs a synthetic test would have reproduced my own assumptions right past.
• Format invariants that would otherwise depend on this week's results (like "seeding ignores conference") are tested with synthetic data instead, so they don't break when the standings shift.

One gap the suite structurally cannot close: the live overlay's field mapping was inferred from completed and scheduled games, and the tests mock ESPN using the same inferences — so they agree with the assumption by construction. npm run verify:live, run while a game is actually in progress, is the only check that compares those assumptions to reality.

Deploy

Built with base: './', so the same dist/ works at a domain root (Netlify) and under a subpath (GitHub Pages /wnba-schedule/) with no separate build.

• GitHub Pages deploys automatically from ci.yml on every push to main, gated on tests passing.
• Netlify deploys from the same workflow, but only once NETLIFY_AUTH_TOKEN is set as a repository secret (NETLIFY_SITE_ID is already stored as a repo variable). Until then that step is skipped and Netlify can be updated with npx netlify-cli deploy --prod --dir dist.

Credits

Created by Chester Ismay. Source on GitHub.

Unofficial fan project. Not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by the WNBA. Team names and logos are trademarks of their respective owners. Schedule, results, and player data via ESPN's public feeds.

MIT licensed.