Pace and Usage

A basketball player scoring 22 a night is telling you the product of three things:

• Pace — how many possessions his team plays per 48 minutes. More possessions, more chances for everyone.
• Usage — what share of his team's possessions end with him shooting, drawing a foul, or turning it over.
• Efficiency — how many points he produces per one of those chances.

Two of those three are decided by the team and the coach. Only the third is really about the player.

A player traded from the slowest team in the league to the fastest will score more without changing at all, because there are simply more possessions in his games.

Per-possession and per-36-minute rates strip that out. They answer: at a common rate of opportunity, what does this player produce? That is the number that survives a change of team, coach, or role.

The same logic applies across sports. Football has plays per game; hockey has ice time; baseball has plate appearances. Wherever opportunity varies, divide by it.

Usage is the one that moves most abruptly. An injury to a teammate can hand a player five extra possessions a night overnight, and his per-game numbers will jump while his efficiency stays flat.

This is why the useful reaction to an injury is not "who scores more now" but "whose role grows, and can they hold efficiency at higher volume?" Most players get slightly less efficient as usage rises — they are taking the harder shots that someone else used to take.