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Even the official stats can be wrong.

People think a tool like jjB!B is simple: read the stats, send an alert. Here is one game, from today, that shows why it isn’t.

The game

11 November 2026, East Asia Super League, group stage. Busan KCC Egis beat Taipei Fubon Braves 88–80 in Busan. The best player on the floor was on the losing side: Marko Todorovic, 25 points and 19 rebounds in under 30 minutes.

What the arena showed

With 7:06 left in the fourth quarter, KCC up 73–65, the scoreboard in the arena showed five fouls next to his name. Five red dots. The fifth was a technical foul, and a technical counts towards fouling out. The best player in the game was done.

What the official box score says

Now the official full-time box score. Todorovic: 4 personal fouls. Every other player on that scoreboard matches the sheet: Pickett 4, Chou 3, Hung 1, Che 2. Only the man who fouled out is one short.

Anyone who reads only the sheet sees a player with four fouls, still in the game. He wasn’t.

He was not the only one. On the other side, KCC’s Shawn Long (21 points, 12 rebounds) has 3 fouls in the box score. In the arena he had 4 before the first quarter was over: two, then three, then four. He sat for the rest of the half, and the scoreboard still showed four at the break.

I know, because I was watching. I saw those fouls pile up and I acted on it: I went against KCC. At half-time they were down 7. Then Long came back, KCC fought back, Fubon fell apart, and Todorovic fouling out sealed it. I lost.

That is the honest part of this story. The fact was right, and I had it in time. It still wasn’t enough. That is why I will never tell you that a fact is an edge.

This is not an attack

The cause is simple: the box score doesn’t count technical fouls. On the court they count. A technical is one of the five fouls that put a player out of the game. On the sheet they disappear. It is a bug, not a scandal. That is exactly the point.

This is not a small amateur league. The East Asia Super League was valued at $100 million when it launched, with tens of millions in investment and former NBA players among its backers. A professional league, with real money behind it, and its official sheet still misses the fouls that matter most.

What jjB!B is up against

And this one is rare. A technical foul that never reaches the foul column doesn’t happen often. I have a hundred more stories like this one, and most of them are about bugs that show up far more often.

Now multiply that by every league. There are dozens of different stats systems in basketball, maybe a hundred, and each one does things its own way. Players are written under different names from one competition to the next. A foul lands in the wrong column. A substitution is missing, so a player on the bench still looks like he is on the floor. Minutes stop counting. Most of the time the numbers are right. The trouble is the times they are not, because those are the moments that matter.

So a tool that just repeats what it reads would repeat the mistakes too. jjB!B can’t trust a single number. That is a big part of what the brain in the box is for: not only picking the facts that matter, but making sure they are facts.

It is the least visible part of jjB!B, and one of the hardest. When an alert says a player is out, it has to be true.

Would jjB!B catch this?

I asked that question the same day. In the leagues jjB!B covers today, we haven’t seen this problem, and the numbers already go through checks. But jjB!B doesn’t follow this league. If it did, it would probably run into the same wrong foul count.

That is what the beta is for. I watch these games and follow the alerts, and so do the beta members. The first time one of us spotted something like this, it would be fixed quickly.

This game made us go one step further. We agreed to add a new check to every league and every stats system jjB!B reads: when the box score and the play-by-play don’t agree, jjB!B will follow what actually happened on the floor, from the play-by-play, not the box score. As this game shows, the box score can still be wrong after the final buzzer. The check is on the list, right after the big feature we are finishing now.

So one wrong number on a sheet nobody reads twice ended up making jjB!B better.

One more thing

One game, so many lessons. And one last one, just for fun. This is the team stats page from the same official box score.

If it does, you have seen the jjB!B logo. Some things you can’t make up.

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