Player Efficiency Rating
A per-minute rating that tries to fold a player's whole statistical contribution into one number, scaled so that league average is 15.
What Player Efficiency Rating measures
No single box-score stat captures a whole player. Points miss efficiency. Assists miss turnovers. Rebounds miss context. PER, built by John Hollinger, gathers every positive and negative box-score contribution into one figure, adjusted per minute so playing time does not inflate it. It gives a quick answer to a simple question: how productive was this player while he was on the floor? Because league average is fixed at 15, it is easy to read across seasons.
How Player Efficiency Rating is calculated
PER = (Points + Rebounds + Assists + Steals + Blocks − Missed FG − Missed FT − Turnovers), adjusted per minute and scaled so league average is 15.
The full version applies pace and position adjustments developed by John Hollinger.
PER: Player Efficiency Rating / uPER: Unadjusted PER / lgPER: League PER
The catch
PER is almost all offense
Hollinger admitted PER measures defense poorly. Steals and blocks are the only defensive inputs, and they are rough proxies. An elite defender who does not rack up steals or blocks, but contests everything and erases the other team's best player, will post a plain PER. Never use it as a full player grade.
PER rewards volume even when efficiency drops
Because it adds up counting stats, a player who takes 20 shots a game piles up more positive contributions than one taking 10, even at the same percentage. High usage nudges PER up in ways that do not reflect real value. Always read it next to Usage %.
Seen in a game
In the EuroLeague, this kind of number works best as a way to rank players inside one season. By the local version, PIR, Sasha Vezenkov of Olympiacos led the league in 2025–26 at 22.0, built on scoring (18.8 a game), rebounding (6.2) and doing it efficiently, exactly the mix these ratings reward. His teammate Nikola Milutinov reached 19.2 a different way, through dominant interior work, a league-best 76.5% free throw rate and 3.1 offensive rebounds a game. Both show what a rating like this captures: production across many columns at once.
Common questions
- What is player efficiency rating?
Player Efficiency Rating (PER) is an all-in-one number that sums a player's positive box-score contributions and subtracts the negatives, adjusted for pace and minutes, onto a per-minute scale.
- How is PER calculated and what is average?
PER weighs points, rebounds, assists, steals and blocks against missed shots, turnovers and fouls, adjusted for pace and playing time. The scale is set so that the league average is 15; above 20 is star level.
- Is PER the same as PIR?
No. PER is a per-minute, pace-adjusted efficiency scale. PIR (Performance Index Rating) is the EuroLeague's own official index, a simple sum of positive minus negative box-score actions in a single game or season. Both are all-in-one numbers, but the formulas and scales are different, so compare each only within its own context.
