Serious NBA arguments sound different once everyone can speak NBA advanced stats. When you drop NBA advanced stats that describe how efficient a scorer is or how a team behaves with a star on the floor, the room changes. People stop shouting and start thinking.
This list is not about turning you into a spreadsheet. It is about giving you 7 simple NBA advanced stats that actually carry weight when we talk about LeBron, Jokic, Curry or your favorite sixth man. Get a feel for these, and the next time someone says “rings only,” you will have a better answer than a shrug.
Context
Here is the thing with modern NBA talk. The box score on its own is too shallow. Points, rebounds, assists tell you who filled space, not always who drove to win. Teams now track everything from shot quality to how fast you closed out on a corner shooter.
But the eye test still matters. Coaches, scouts and players will tell you they do not live only in numbers. They use NBA advanced stats as another camera angle, not a replacement for watching film. The sweet spot for real conversation lives where those two meet.
If you are a casual fan who wants to be taken seriously, you do not need to memorize formulas. You just need to know what these numbers are trying to say about value, efficiency and impact when the game gets tight.
Methodology: I leaned on official league stats pages and trusted public databases that spell out formulas such as true shooting percentage equals points divided by two times field goal attempts plus zero point four four times free throw attempts, then ranked these NBA advanced stats by how clearly they describe impact, how well they travel across eras and how often real coaches, players and front offices use them, breaking ties in favor of the stat that gives casual fans the cleanest story across different seasons.
The stats that actually matter
1. True shooting percentage
Picture a late season Utah game a few years back. Joe Ingles walks to the bench after drilling another corner three and the broadcast graphic flashes his true shooting percentage in the high sixties, a number that usually belongs to rolling bigs who only dunk. You did not need the formula on screen, but it was sitting there in the background, turning his calm stroke into something louder.
True shooting percentage blends every way you score. In plain language, it takes all your points and compares them to a mix of your field goal attempts and free throws, weighted so free throws count less than full shots. Recent seasons have seen league average in the high fifties, while stars like Stephen Curry live closer to the low sixties, sometimes higher. That gap is the real space between a volume scorer and an efficient problem.
The human side is funny here. Ingles has joked that he once googled true shooting percentage, still did not really understand it, then laughed and went back to doing what he does. “Screw it,” he said. “Let me just keep shooting and see if it keeps going in.” He did, and his season landed among the best true shooting years ever by a non center.
Teammates teased him about leading the league in a stat he could not fully explain.
For fans, this number is huge because it kills empty thirty point nights. If someone scores 30 on 30 shots with a true shooting mark below league average, you can calmly say the volume looked good but the value did not. I have watched replays of those kinds of games a dozen times and still come back to the same thing. Once you see the true shooting line, the performance feels different.
2. Effective field goal percentage
Now shift the camera to Boston. A Celtics run, the ball pinging around the arc, another open three from the slot. Joe Mazzulla leans into this way of playing and once deadpanned to reporters, “I love open threes. I like math. I like space.” You can almost hear the effective field goal percentage in that quote.
Effective field goal percentage takes normal field goal percentage and fixes its biggest blind spot. Regular field goal treats a three like any other make. Effective field goal pretends every three is worth one and a half makes. So a player shooting 40 percent from three can end up with an effective field goal mark in the mid fifties, right next to someone who lives inside the paint. In a typical season, the league average effective field goal sits a few points above the standard field goal because threes keep going up.
The emotional impact shows up when a shooter goes 6 for 18 from the floor but 6 for 12 from three. Old heads see 33 percent and shake their heads. You can come back with his effective field goal percentage, which tells you he just produced offense at a rate that many mid range specialists never touch. A fan said, “Once I saw that number, I stopped yelling about guys not driving enough and started yelling about bad long twos instead.”
Behind the scenes, coaching staffs live with these shot charts. When a team like Boston or Golden State is humming, their effective field goal percentage usually towers over league average. Film rooms replay those possessions and match them to the numbers. Good spacing, clean decisions, a sea of open threes. It all shows up in that one line.
3. Usage rate
Think back to those Houston seasons when James Harden stood near the logo, rocking defenders to sleep. Every possession felt like it started and ended with him. That feeling has a stat behind it. Usage rate.
Usage rate measures the share of a team’s plays that finish with your shot, free throws or turnover while you are on the court. Most starters float in the low to mid twenties. During his peak Houston run, Harden pushed into the low forties. That means that in some seasons more than 40 percent of Rocket possessions that finished while he played ended through him. For comparison, plenty of All Star level guards live closer to 27 or 28.
Harden’s former general manager Daryl Morey once said about numbers and the eye test, “You do not need all the numbers. You can watch as well and see that.” If you watched those Rockets, you did not need usage rate to tell you Harden touched nearly everything. The stat just gave a clean, comparable number to describe it. Teammates have talked about how tiring that style could be, both for defenders and for Harden himself, especially deep in games.
There is a cost here, and fans feel it. Tired legs. Stalled possessions where four players stand and wait. Maybe I am reading too much into body language sometimes, but usage rate is the number that backs up that sense that one player is carrying too much or, in some cases, not enough. You can look at a box score, glance at usage and say, That is way too heavy or This star needs to take control. Then you can point at the number instead of just vibes.
4. Player efficiency rating
Player efficiency rating is probably the most famous single number in NBA advanced stats. John Hollinger built PER to roll box score production into one rate stat where league average is set at 15 every season. If you see a player at 22, you know they are well above average. When you see seasons above 28 or 30, you know you are looking at a monster year.
You see PER pop up whenever people argue about all time seasons. Years where LeBron James cleared 30 in PER, or recent seasons where Nikola Jokic lived in that same neighborhood, tell you those stars generated far more value per minute than an average player. You can stack a 28 PER season next to one at 21 and say, Yes, the second guy was good, but the first one is living in a different tier.
PER has real flaws. It leans heavily toward offense and box friendly production and does not see the small defensive details that never show up in a steal or block. Hollinger himself has said you treat PER as one tool, not the final word. Front offices and agents still use it in presentations because one clean number sticks, but the best rooms pair it with film and other impact metrics.
Fans feel that tension. One comment read, “I use PER to see who belongs on a certain shelf, then I go back to watching games.” That is the right spirit. PER does not end arguments. It gives you a floor. If someone’s favorite player never cracks a strong PER season while the guys they are compared to stack several, that is worth bringing up before the volume goes up. Then you can move on to deeper numbers.
5. Offensive and defensive rating
Now zoom out from a player to a full possession. Steph Curry drags a defender over a screen, Draymond Green short rolls, swings to the corner, and a shooter drills a three. The scoreboard moves by three, but the offensive rating sees something deeper.
Offensive rating looks at how many points a team scores per 100 possessions. Defensive rating flips the floor and counts how many points you allow per 100 possessions. Because these stats adjust for pace, you can compare the slow grind of a 2004 Pistons group to a fast paced modern offense without getting fooled by raw scores. When a team like the 2016 Warriors lives around the mid one teens on offense while the league average sits several points lower, that is a real gap in scoring power.
Coaches talk about this stuff more than you might think. Steve Kerr has spoken about trusting the math on shot quality and letting the ball find the right shooter instead of chasing mid range pull ups. Players like Draymond have told stories about early meetings where Kerr insisted the ball would always find the guy who should get the shot. That philosophy shows up in those sky high offensive ratings. On defense, staffs will set goals like staying several points better than league average over a full month, then post those charts in the locker room.
On defense especially, rating is the quiet anchor behind simple labels. When a team allows five or six fewer points per 100 possessions than league average, that adds up to several extra wins over a season. Fans might remember one huge block or chase down, but defensive rating is the number that says, Night after night, this group actually gets stops.
6. On off plus minus
Some stats feel abstract until you connect them to a current star. With Nikola Jokic, on off plus minus is the one that jumps off the page. For years, Denver’s net rating with him on the floor has sat around plus double digits per 100 possessions, while the team slid into the negatives when he sat. You watch the film and see it, then you check the on off column and the difference feels even louder.
On off plus minus tracks how a team performs, in point margin per 100 possessions, with a player on the court compared to when he is off. Simple idea. Massive implications. When a team is plus 10 with you and minus 5 without you, that is a 15 point swing. People call that the footprint of a franchise player. It can also expose empty box score production when someone piles up points yet the team plays the same or worse with them on.
Analyst Dean Oliver once summed up the balance this way. “Your eyes see the game much better than the numbers. But the numbers see all the games.” On off plus minus lives right in that line. Your eyes remember the second half run with Jokic on the floor. The number tells you that same pattern has been happening all year. Coaches see that split and quietly tailor rotations to make sure a star overlaps as often as possible with shaky bench groups.
7. Box plus minus and defensive impact
If on and off tells you how the team behaves with you, box plus minus tries to separate your personal work from team context by using only box score stats. It asks, based on everything you did in the box, how many points per 100 possessions did you add above an average player.
Basketball Reference built box plus minus to adjust for position and era and to line up with plus minus value as closely as possible. When you scan the career leaders, the names make sense. Michael Jordan, LeBron James, Nikola Jokic all sit near the top with numbers well above plus seven for their careers while role players hover closer to zero. In recent seasons Jokic has hit single season marks even higher than that, which matches the way his passing, rebounding and scoring blur together.
The twist, and this is where defense comes in, is that there is a defensive version that tries to isolate stops and disruption. A classic example is someone like Draymond Green or Rudy Gobert. Their defensive box plus minus, and similar impact models that lean on tracking data like contest rate and shots deterred at the rim, often rank near the top of the league even in seasons when their scoring looks modest.
Coaches rave about that. “Defense is about being in the right place every time,” one coach said. “The numbers are finally catching that.”
What comes next
Once you live with these NBA advanced stats for a while, you start to see the game differently. You do not just see a thirty point night, you ask if the true shooting popped and do not just accept that a player “carried” a bad roster, and finally check on off plus minus or defensive impact to see if the math agrees.
Teams are already a step ahead. They are using even more complex models, tracking data and proprietary grades you never see on a broadcast. But the gap between the public numbers here and the private stuff behind the curtain is smaller than it used to be. If you can speak true shooting, usage, ratings, on off and impact models that respect defense, you are not faking it in any room.
So next time a friend says, “Rings and points, that is all that matters,” what will you throw back at them instead of a sigh.
Read More: https://sportsorca.com/nba/classic-nba-teams-every-new-fan-should-study/
