Team Points Per Game = Garbage

When it comes to team statistics, whether I'm scouting an opponent or evaluating my own team, Points Per Game means nothing to me. There are so many ways it can be misleading. Here's one example why.

When I was a sophomore in college (Southwestern University. Shout out to D3 Hoops!) we scored 61.7 PPG and gave up 62.2 PPG. We were ranked 21st in DEF PPG, and 362nd in OFF PPG. That makes us sound like a GREAT defensive team (we did defend pretty well) and a HORRIBLE offensive team (c'mon, we weren't THAT bad), and the reason was our PACE. That season was our first season running the Princeton Offense and we walked it up the floor on almost every possession. Basically, we were trying to slow the game down to minimize the number of possessions each game.

So when we played a good team like DePauw, and we held them to 20 points below their scoring average, it wasn't entirely because we played solid defense, but largely had to do with them playing a VERY slow game and in turn, having very few possessions.

Here's the solution: Offensive Efficiency Rating, or OER. What OER does, is take into account your Pace to see how efficient a team actually scores. Your OER is how many points you'd score out of 100 possessions. Let me give you an example of how it works.

In practice you give your Red Team and Black Team both 10 possessions each in the half court.

Red team scores 12 points in 10 possessions. That's 1.2 Points Per Possession (PPP).

Black team scores 9 points in 10 possessions. That's 0.9 PPP.

Since OER is points per 100 possessions, multiply both of those by 100.

Red team: 120 OER

Black team: 90 OER

Defensive Efficiency Rating, or DER, works the same way. In the example above, the results would be...

Red team: 90 DER

Black team: 120 DER

Check out this real short video to see how I use the Pelicans and Nuggets as examples of how OER works.

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