True shooting flatters the player who never gets fouled

The most quoted efficiency number in basketball has a blind spot, and the blind spot is about the size of the free throw line.

True shooting percentage was a genuine improvement on field goal percentage and it deserves the respect it gets. It counts the extra point on a three. It folds in free throws. Compared with what came before, it is a much fairer picture of what a scorer produced.

It also quietly rewards a certain kind of player far more than it should.

Here is the shape of the problem. True shooting is points per scoring opportunity, and free throws get discounted in the denominator because two of them are worth roughly one possession. That is mathematically defensible. What it means in practice is that a player who gets to the line a lot needs to be very good from the line to move his number much, while a player who takes nothing but wide open catch and shoot threes can post an elite figure while contributing almost nothing to the possession that created his shot.

So you end up with two players sitting on similar true shooting figures. One of them is a low-usage spacer whose entire scoring output is created by somebody else. The other is the somebody else: he draws two defenders, absorbs contact, gets whistled, and produces the shot the spacer takes. The number treats them as equivalent contributors and, worse, sometimes ranks the spacer higher.

Everyone in the industry knows this and the number gets quoted anyway, because it is available and it fits in a graphic.

The correction is not complicated, it is just less tidy. Look at true shooting alongside two other things: usage, so you know how much of the load he carried, and free throw rate, so you know whether he was creating advantage or inheriting it. A high-usage scorer at league-average true shooting with a heavy free throw rate is doing more useful work than a low-usage shooter two points above him.

The version that annoys me most is when true shooting gets used in contract arguments, where the spacer's agent has an easy graphic and the creator's agent has to explain gravity and rotations to a room that wants a single figure.

Use it as a starting question, not an answer. Ask why the number is what it is. The answer is almost always in the shot diet and who built it.