Tier 1
Primary / authoritative
Official NBA transaction announcements, official team releases, league documents and governing agreement language when mechanics matter.
How it is used: Preferred evidence for creating or confirming a right.
Trust the path, not just the answer
Data & methodology
Future NBA draft-pick rights are not a simple owner column. One original pick can be subject to transfers, protections, swaps, ranked pools and fallback obligations. Who Gets the Pick? keeps the evidence, structured interpretation, deterministic resolution and public explanation separate so uncertainty is visible instead of hidden.
Core principles
What the site will and will not claim
Pick identity is immutable
A pick is identified by draft year, round and original team. Trades add or transfer rights; they do not rewrite that original-pick identity.
Conditional rights are not ownership shorthand
The site avoids saying a team “owns” a pick when it holds only a swap, protected claim, ranked selection or other conditional right.
Unknown stays unknown
If evidence is incomplete, sources conflict or the current model cannot safely express a term, the record stays unpublished or explicitly disputed instead of being simplified into a confident answer.
Evidence
Source hierarchy
Authority and permission are separate questions. A source can be strong evidence without being a licensed production data feed. The site stores its own concise structured interpretation and provenance rather than mirroring source text.
Tier 2
Established structured references
Independent future-pick ledgers and established transaction databases used to cross-check the current state and complicated chains.
How it is used: Useful for reconciliation and, when independent sources agree, human verification.
Tier 3
Secondary reporting
Reputable beat reporting, major sports publications and specialist reporting that helps reconstruct or explain a transaction.
How it is used: Useful supporting evidence and discovery, but normally not enough by itself for publication.
Tier 4
Community / discovery
Forums, fan blogs, social posts and community discussion.
How it is used: Lead generation only. Never the sole support for a verified right.
Verification
A model can assist research. It cannot approve a right.
A real arrangement normally needs at least one primary/authoritative source or two independent established references that agree. Complicated chains require the originating transaction, relevant later modifications, a current-state cross-check and a human-created resolution note.
- Collect source records for the originating transaction and later modifications.
- Translate the evidence into structured pick identities, rights, conditions and fallback paths.
- Create representative scenarios and resolve them independently of the code.
- Run the deterministic resolution engine and compare its result with the expected scenarios.
- Review the plain-English interpretation separately from the engine output.
- A human reviewer explicitly approves the record and records reviewer identity and time.
- Only after that review can the right enter the canonical dataset; public display is a separate explicit publication gate.
What statuses mean
Publication status is part of the answer
Pending / unverified
Research may exist, but no authoritative public conclusion is shown yet. Pending does not mean unencumbered.
Human verified
A named human reviewer has approved the structured interpretation and recorded when that review occurred. Publication still requires an explicit public gate.
Disputed
Credible sources disagree or the interpretation remains unresolved. The site does not silently choose the cleaner answer.
Model blocked
The obligation is known, but the current deterministic model cannot safely express every dependency. It is tracked rather than forced into an inaccurate rule shape.
Keeping data current
A verified right can become unverified again
Draft rights change when teams make later trades. A new transaction that affects a verified arrangement returns that record to review until the transaction chain, structured right and explanation have been rechecked. Historical verification is not treated as permanent truth.
Boundaries
What the methodology prevents
- No invented transaction terms or guessed protections.
- No automatic publication of model-extracted rights.
- No changing structured rules just to match a generated explanation.
- No hiding conflicting evidence to produce a cleaner answer.
- No treating public website access as automatic permission for commercial bulk extraction or republication.
See the methodology in the product
Start with the canonical pick board, then open an individual pick page. Published rights carry their sources; unpublished rights remain withheld rather than inferred from the original team name.