Every Stat in Your Box Score, Explained

Open a box score in Highlight Factory and you get a wall of three-letter abbreviations. Some are obvious — PTS is points. Some are not: nobody is born knowing what GmSc means, and eFG % looks like FG % with a typo. This is the full glossary, in the same order the app groups them, with the formula behind each one and a plain-English read on what it's telling you.

Everything here is charted automatically from your game footage — no scorekeeper on the bench, no one tagging plays after the fact. The definitions below are exactly what the app computes; you can find the same list in the app under Settings → Stats Glossary.

Scoring & playmaking

Potential assists are the one worth pausing on. A player can create six good looks in a quarter and finish with one assist because their teammates missed five of them. Assists measure the player and everyone they pass to; potential assists measure the passer alone. If those two numbers are far apart, the playmaking is better than the box score gives credit for.

Shooting

Plain FG % has a known flaw: it treats a three and a layup as the same event. A guard who goes 6-for-15 from deep shoots 40% and scores 18 points; a post who goes 6-for-15 inside shoots the same 40% and scores 12. That's what the advanced shooting stats below exist to fix.

Rebounding

MeREB isn't a stat you'll find in a standard box score — it exists because chasing down your own miss is a distinct skill, and it's the kind of relentlessness that shows up on film long before it shows up in a stat line. (S/O to Angel Reese.)

Defense

Turnovers & fouls

That 0.44 × FTA shows up again and again below, so it's worth explaining once. Free throw attempts aren't possessions — two free throws are usually a single trip, and and-ones and technicals blur the count further. Multiplying attempts by 0.44 is the long-standing estimate for how many possessions a given number of free throws represents, which is what every rate stat below needs before it can divide by anything.

Six turnovers sounds bad. Six turnovers on 40 possessions is bad; six on 90 possessions, while running the whole offense, is not. TO % is the version of that number you can compare between a point guard and a stretch four.

Advanced

These four are where a box score stops describing what happened and starts telling you how good it was.

eFG % — field goal percentage that respects the three

Same idea as FG %, except a made three counts as one and a half makes, because it's worth one and a half times as much. Go back to the two players above: the guard at 6-for-15 from deep has a 60% eFG, the post at 6-for-15 inside stays at 40%. Same FG %, very different nights. Free throws are still ignored here.

TS % — the one number for scoring efficiency

True shooting folds in everything: twos, threes, and free throws, measured against an estimate of the possessions used to get them. It answers the only question that matters about a scorer — how many points did they produce per shooting possession? A player who lives at the line will look ordinary by FG % and eFG %, and excellent by TS %. That gap is the point.

USG — how much of the offense ran through them

Usage is share, not quality: the percentage of the team's scoring possessions a player finished. It's the context for every efficiency number next to it. High usage with high TS % is a star. Low usage with high TS % is a role player doing their job well. High usage with low TS % is the line a coach circles.

GmSc — one number for the whole night

Game Score weighs every counting stat by roughly how much it's worth and adds them up: makes help, misses hurt a little, turnovers and missed free throws hurt more, rebounds and assists and stocks help. Roughly speaking, 10 is a solid game, 20 is a very good one, and 40 is a night people talk about. It's a quick read, not a verdict — it doesn't know anything about defense that isn't a block or a steal.

Per game (season)

Season averages, across every game in the library. They're the numbers that go on a recruiting profile, and the reason it's worth charting the regular-season games nobody thinks to film.

The Four Factors

On the game screen, each team gets four tiles instead of a stat line. These are Dean Oliver's Four Factors — the four things that decide basketball games, in order of how much they matter.

Shooting is the heaviest by a wide margin, and the other three are roughly a tier below it. Compare the two columns after a loss and you'll usually find the game in one row: you shot fine but gave it away, or you took care of it and couldn't make anything.

What to actually look at

If you only read three numbers after a game, make them TS %, USG, and TO %. Together they say how much a player was asked to do, how efficiently they did it, and how often it ended badly — which is most of what a coach or a recruiter wants to know. Everything else is detail on top of that.

Then go watch the clips. A stat line tells you a shot went in; the film tells you whether it was a good shot. Highlight Factory charts both from the same footage, so every number in the box score is one tap from the possession it came from.