The Stat Everyone Stares At (And Why It's Lying to You)
Turn on any NBA broadcast and you'll see it immediately — PPG leaderboards, scoring averages, the player who dropped 30 last night. Points per game is the stat that never stops showing up. It's also one of the most misleading numbers in basketball.
Here's the problem. PPG only tells you one thing: how many points a player scores. It says nothing about how efficiently they score, how many possessions they use, or whether their team is actually better when they're on the floor. A guy going 7-for-29 with eight free throws can finish with 25 points and look like a star. He isn't.
Russell Westbrook's 2021-22 season is the clearest example. He averaged 18.5 points. His field goal percentage was 44.4%. His true shooting percentage was 50.1% — 14th percentile in the league. He was taking bad shots at a high volume, and the numbers reflected it if you knew where to look. Most fans didn't. They saw 18.5 and assumed competence.
What Actually Matters: True Shooting Percentage
True shooting percentage (TS%) is the stat that PPG wishes it was. It accounts for free throws, two-pointers, and threes, weighted by their actual value. It tells you what percentage of each possession a player effectively converts into points. League average is usually around 56-57%. Elite players sit at 60% or higher.
Steph Curry's 2023-24 season is a great example. He averaged 24.5 points on 47/41/91 shooting splits. His TS% was 63.1%. That gap between his scoring average and his shooting efficiency is what makes him historically great — he's not just scoring, he's scoring without wasting possessions.
Compare that to someone like Jordan Poole during the 2022-23 season. Poole averaged 20.4 points. His TS% was 53.8% — below league average despite looking like a productive scorer. The PPG was real. The efficiency was not. Those are two completely different players hiding behind the same points-per-game number.
The One Number That Predicts a Player's Real Impact
Player Efficiency Rating (PER) was invented by John Hollinger to boil a player's entire statistical contribution into a single number. It adjusts for pace, minutes, and league context. A PER of 15 is league average. Above 20 is All-NBA territory.
Jayson Tatum's 2024-25 season is a useful reference. He averaged 26.8 points with a PER of 23.7 — genuinely elite. His TS% was 60.2%. His net rating with him on the court versus off it was consistently positive. That's a player whose scoring average reflects real value, not just volume.
Now look at someone who posts big PPG numbers without the PER to back it up. The mismatch is the tell. You've probably argued in a group chat about which player is better. The one with the higher PER almost always wins that argument. The stats just didn't show it in the places most fans look.
How to Watch Smarter
The habit worth building: when you see a big scoring night, pull up the shooting splits before you say anything in the group chat. True shooting percentage is on every major stats site. It takes ten seconds and it changes how you evaluate what you just watched.
Field goal percentage is the first filter. 45% from the field with high volume is solid. 42% with high volume means a lot of misses and wasted possessions, even if the points add up. Three-point percentage matters even more at the margins — a player who's 4-for-4 from deep on eight attempts versus someone who's 4-for-12 changes entire game scripts.
Net rating is the stat that requires context — it's team-level, not individual — but it's the best overall signal of whether a lineup is actually winning when a specific player is in the game. If you want to know who's actually driving winning, that's the number. PPG never tells you that. It just tells you who's shooting.
The Bottom Line
Points per game is the stat that looks good in a headline. It almost never tells you who's actually playing well. True shooting percentage and PER are harder to find and require more attention — but they're what separates the casual take from the informed one.
If you want to test whether you can actually predict which stat matters on any given night, there's a platform for that. GAGE lets you compete on player predictions using exactly these kinds of stats — and you have to know the difference between the number that looks impressive and the number that actually wins games.