High Quality Sports

TS% – True shooting percentage. This is a one number metric for efficiency. You can think of it as regularizing between 1s, 2s, and 3s, all of which you can score in basketball. You can also think of it as if the player had scored the same amount of points on shooting only 2 point shots, that’s what their efficiency would be.

rTS% – relative True shooting percentage. This is a players true shooting percentage relative to the league average during that particular year. The NBA has gone through many different rule changes, trends, officiating and offensive and defensive environments. This means it’s not exactly fair to say shooting 50% true shooting in 2001 is equivalent to 50% true shooting in 2020 or 1980. If a league average for 2010 is .543 and a player shoots .593 for that regular season they are shooting +6, likewise if a player shoots .593 in 2020, where the league average was .565, they are only +2.8. It was easier to score in 2020 (for whatever reason) so using a raw number isn’t as accurate. Using relative true shooting levels the playing field.

aTS% – adjusted True shooting percentage. This is similar to rTS% but it is adjusted to a playoff opponent. So if the Memphis Grizzlies allowed a true shooting % of 51.63 in 2006 and Dirk Nowitzki shoots 62.7% then his aTS% is +11.07. The league average doesn’t matter because he’s not playing the league he’s playing one particular opponent multiple games in a row. So rTS is relative to the league and aTS is adjusted for opponent.

Per75 box score – Most superstar players in most years throughout league history play about 75 possessions per game. In slower paced years players played more minutes but it still came out to about 75 possessions. Per 75 simply adjusts for pace and minutes to put everyone on a level playing field. You can simply think of this as points per game adjusted for league environment.

Ortg and Drtg – Offensive and Defensive rating. This is just points per 100 possessions or points per 100 possessions allowed.