Offensive Rating/Possession Usage
by Ken Pomeroy on Tuesday, January 17, 2006
Offensive rating is a measure of an individual player’s efficiency. In its simplest form, it’s points produced divided by possessions used. If you want to know more than that, you must read Dean Oliver’s Basketball on Paper. Otherwise you’ll have to take my word that the formula is about as good as it gets for assessing personal efficiency based on the stats that are recorded.
Values of ORtg fall in the same range as team efficiencies - 100 is about average, higher values are better. Considering that individual stats are often dependent on team interactions, to say that Player A is better than Player B because he has a better offensive rating is a serious misuse of this metric.
A very important aspect of offensive rating is that it must be used in conjunction with the possession usage (%Poss) column to have any value. The average player will use…