Insights Engine
How the Showstone Insights Engine finds valuable historical patterns without making predictions.
Last updated: 2025-11-14
The Insights Engine is about pattern discovery, not direct forecasting. It highlights how players have performed in
specific contexts (pace, minutes, road vs. home, and more) so you can see where the past data is especially interesting.
1. What Is the Insights Engine?
The Insights Engine is a tool on Showstone designed to surface historical patterns in player performance rather than
to predict exact future outcomes. It answers questions like:
- How does this player tend to perform in fast-paced games?
- What happens when they play high minutes on the road?
- Are there past contexts where their stat lines consistently spike or drop?
Instead of providing a single projection, the Insights Engine helps you discover where the data shows interesting, repeated behavior.
2. Context Filters and Views
The Insights Engine typically allows you to filter historical data by a variety of contextual dimensions, such as:
- Pace – fast vs. slow games
- Location – home vs. road performance
- Minutes – games where the player played above a certain threshold (for example, 32+ minutes)
- Opponent type – teams that play fast, defend a certain way, or belong to a specific tier
Applying these filters updates the historical sample and shows how the player has performed in similar situations in the past.
3. What Kind of Patterns Does It Show?
Once a filter combination is applied, the Insights Engine might surface:
- Average and median stat lines in those contexts
- Hit rates above or below certain thresholds
- Distributions of outcomes (for example, how often they clear 20+ points in those games)
These views are about describing the past, not making a precise future prediction.
Example: You might see that a certain player has historically scored 25+ points in 70% of games where:
- The game pace was in the top third of the league, and
- The player logged 34+ minutes, and
- The game was on the road.
That pattern may be relevant if the upcoming game shares several of those characteristics.
4. How Is This Different from Projections?
The Insights Engine is fundamentally different from the projection system:
- Projections summarize expected outcomes for a specific upcoming game.
- The Insights Engine summarizes how the player has performed in similar historical contexts.
Projections are forward-looking estimates. Insights are backward-looking descriptions. Both can be useful, but they serve different purposes.
5. Practical Use Cases
Common ways to use the Insights Engine include:
- Checking whether an apparently “high” or “low” line is actually unusual in similar past contexts
- Finding spots where a player historically overperforms or underperforms relative to their usual baseline
- Supporting or challenging a narrative about pace, road games, or heavy minutes
It is especially powerful when combined with the Player Dashboard and Matchup Dashboard, giving you a player-centric view,
a team-centric view, and a context-pattern view.
6. Limitations
As a historical tool, the Insights Engine:
- Does not automatically adjust for new roles, coaching changes, or evolving play styles
- Cannot guarantee that past patterns will repeat in the future
- Reflects the data sample size; small samples can be noisy
The Insights Engine should be used as a way to see patterns and ask better questions, not as a single source of truth.
It complements projections but does not replace them.