Names that belong to no one: how the basketball simulation names its players and teams

Every player and team in the league has a name now, on the site, in the box scores and in the stream's commentary. None of them is real. Each name is drawn once from the league's seed and kept, and it decides nothing: no part of the simulation reads a name, so a player called something else would play exactly the same game.

Common names are likelier

First names and surnames come from public lists of the thousand most common names in the United States, ranked most common first: 1,917 first names and 1,000 surnames, about 1.9 million possible full names for a league of 450 people. The lists give a rank, not a count, so the draw leans toward the top of the list without ignoring the rest: the first quarter of a list holds half of all draws.

u = (bits(key, counter) >> 11) * (1.0 / (1 << 53))
return pool[int(len(pool) * u * u)]

Squaring a uniform number bunches it toward zero, and zero is the most common name. A league of invented people ends up with more players called Mark or Lisa than Harlan, the way a real league does.

Never a real player

A drawn name is checked against every player on the public lists of men's and women's professional basketball players, 7,091 names with their accents and punctuation folded away. A match is drawn again. So is a name already somewhere in the league, and a surname already on the same team, so two people are never confused in a box score. A name made of two common parts meets a real player often enough that this happens regularly, and the check is what catches it.

A team is a place and a nickname

A team's name is one of 54 states and territories and a plural noun from a list of 102 chosen for it, with every nickname a professional basketball team already uses taken out. That left a gap: a draw gave the league a team called the Mississippi Dolphins, a name that belongs to football. Now a nickname used by a current team in professional football, baseball, hockey or soccer (14 of the list's words) is drawn again, and the place is kept. Six of the thirty teams had drawn one (three of them Dolphins), and each got a new nickname under the same place: the Mississippi Dolphins became the Mississippi Kestrels.

Only the tables of teams each league has now are read. Reading the whole of each league's history as well also caught teams that folded decades ago and would have renamed a team visitors have already met, so they were left alone. The list itself did not change, so no team that never drew a borrowed word was renamed.

A name, once shown, stays

A name is part of how a visitor knows a player, so it is never edited in place. A future way of drawing names would be a new version with draws of its own, and a test pins a sample of today's names so they do not change by accident. The tournament keeps the same promise: a day already on the site keeps the names it was played under, and the days ahead carry the new ones.