Estibot and the like are useless tools which I give almost 0 credit to. The only good appraisals are human, and by human I mean those who know what they are talking about and who not only use formulas like number of characters, words and syllables but also a ton of common sense and industry knowledge.
As far as finding type in traffic domains, this should be common sense as well.
The reason nba99.com might still get some type in traffic is probably due to people trying to look up stats or records for that year, or perhaps there is player or players that sport the number 99? I'm not a big enough fan to know for sure. I could see it getting a small handful of direct type ins per month by people too dumb to type in nba.com. I would normally be doubtful it would get enough to make it worth registering. Do you own it? How much traffic do you see?
You can look at sedo.com, namedrive.com, and other parking sites to analyze parking stats on names that are for sale, number of visitors, etc. You can also look at PremiumDrops.com for a boatload of stats.