A lot of European clubs play in two competitions in the same season — a domestic league and a continental one, like EuroCup or FIBA Europe Cup. That means a lot of players have two stat lines in the same season, for the same team, and those two lines can tell noticeably different stories about the same player.
The continental line is usually the more honest one. It’s tougher competition, played against a wider range of opponents, and it’s the one that best reflects how a player would actually perform if he moved to a stronger league. The domestic line, by contrast, can be inflated by a softer schedule — a player padding numbers against weaker domestic opposition while his real level shows up in the tougher games nobody’s looking at as closely.
This matters more than it sounds like it should, because whichever line gets pulled up first tends to anchor the whole evaluation. If the first stat line you see for a player is his domestic-league number, and it happens to be the flattering one, that becomes the reference point for everything that follows — even if it’s not the number that actually predicts how he’ll perform against tougher competition.
The fix isn’t complicated in principle: when a player has stat lines in two competitions of different strength in the same season, the tougher one is the more reliable signal, and it should be the one driving any projection into a new league — not because the domestic number is meaningless, but because it’s measuring something less relevant to the question you’re actually asking. This is exactly the logic MelonIQ applies automatically whenever a player has rows in both a domestic league and a continental competition: the continental line takes priority for projection, every time, without needing anyone to remember to check for it.
It’s a small rule with an outsized effect, because it’s exactly the kind of detail that’s easy to miss when you’re looking at a spreadsheet with one row per player instead of one row per competition.