Metrics I Love: True Shooting Percentage

True Shooting Percentage (TS%) is one of my favorite metrics in terms of what it says about the performance of a given player in terms of his ability to score. The fundamental principle of True Shooting Percentage at its core is to determine how many points a player can be expected to generate per scoring attempt. It's simple yet extraordinarily effective in ranking players as efficient scorers. But in the sense that this really is a per possession type of metric, the fact that this concept is represented as a percentage has never quite made sense to me, I always felt it should be represented in terms of points per scoring attempt in order to help more easily explain the concept to coaches and the like.

A percentage is, by definition, a rate out of 100% or 1. For example, I missed four days of school out of five this past week - 4/5 = 0.8/1 = 80%. I missed 80% of the school days this past week. The numerator is the number of days of school I missed, and the denominator is the number of possible days of school I could have attended for. It is clear how the numerator and the denominator are linked and it's easy to see what happens when they scale down to a denominator of 1. When we look at the formula for TS%, it's not immediately clear how the numerator relates to the denominator

TS% = Points / (2*(FGA+0.44*FTA))