Rumour Mill

The five categories, and what each means for a roster

Trades are the rarest and the loudest. In basketball a trade changes minutes for everyone on both ends, not just the names in the headline: the player who leaves opens a starting slot, the players who arrive push somebody to the bench, and the second-unit guard who was a streamer last week can become a starter overnight. Read a trade for the minutes it frees, not the stars it moves.

Signings cover the whole contract vocabulary of the league: extensions, two-way deals, ten-day contracts, waiver claims, buyouts and the G League assignments that decide who is actually on the floor tonight. A two-way signing in October is a footnote; a ten-day contract in March, for a team that just lost its centre, is a pickup.

Injuries is the category that decides most weeks. It includes the formal designations (out, doubtful, questionable, probable), the load-management rest nights that are announced hours before tip and the minutes restrictions that follow a return. This page cannot tell you whether a questionable player will suit up; the outlet's report and the club's own injury report can, so read them before lock.

Coaching and front office moves change rotations without changing rosters. A new coach means a new starting five and a new closing lineup, and the first two weeks under one are the noisiest minutes of the season. Buzz is everything reported as possible rather than done: the trade interest, the extension talks, the "expected to" stories. Buzz is where you plan; the other four are where you act.

How the sorting works

The categories are assigned by the same deterministic classifier every wire on this site uses, tuned with a basketball vocabulary: the contract words are the league's own (two-way, ten-day, supermax, qualifying offer), the injury words include the designations and the rest language, and the coaching words include the front-office titles. It carries negative signals as well as positive ones, so a story about a lawsuit, an award, a broadcast deal or a college program can never be labelled as a transaction however many roster words it contains. When the rule is unsure, the story is left unlabelled and stays on the News Wire rather than being forced into a category here. That is what keeps the two pages genuinely different: this one carries only what the classifier could place.

Why the timestamp matters more in basketball

A football rumour has a week to be true. A basketball one has until seven o'clock. Lineups lock game by game, most clubs play three or four nights a week, and the injury report is a living document that changes at the morning shootaround, again at the pre-game availability window and sometimes at tip. A row that was accurate at noon can be stale by six. The time beside each item is the reader's local time, the page refreshes every ten minutes, and the Updated stamp on the band says when the feed itself was rebuilt. If those two disagree by hours, the feed is behind, not the news.

The face on a row

A headshot appears on a row only when the classifier finds a player's full name in the headline and matches it against the basketball directory. A surname alone never qualifies: the league has too many players who share one, and a wrong face is worse than no face. A story the rule reads as league-level, a betting angle, a legal matter or an entertainment piece shows no face either, even when a name appears in it. That is the same Player News gate every wire on this site uses, and it errs toward showing nothing.

Using this page with the rest of the section

When an injury row lands, the streamers board is the next click: it reads the same injury feed, knows which clubs still have games left this week and ranks the fill-ins that fit under a weekly add cap. When a trade row lands, the schedule planner tells you how many games the player's new club has this week and whether a back-to-back is coming. And when a buzz row starts to look real, the players directory gets you to the player's page and his per-game rates before the market moves.