True Shooting Percentage (TS%) Calculator

Background.

True shooting percentage (TS%) is the closest thing box-score basketball has to a single, honest scoring-efficiency number. It answers one question: for every scoring chance this player or team used, how many points came back? Unlike field goal percentage it counts three-pointers at their real value, and unlike effective field goal percentage it also counts free throws — which is why a player who draws eight fouls a night and shoots 88 percent from the line finally shows up as the efficient scorer he actually is.

The formula, published in identical form by the NBA's own stat glossary and by Basketball-Reference, is TS% = PTS / (2 x TSA), where TSA — true shooting attempts — equals FGA + 0.44 x FTA. Enter points, field goal attempts and free throw attempts, and this calculator returns TS%, the underlying TSA figure, points per scoring attempt, the share of your scoring chances that came from the foul line, and the unadjusted points-per-shot number for contrast.

The 0.44 is the part that needs explaining, and it is the part most explanations get wrong. It is not a value assigned to a free throw. It is an estimate of the fraction of free throw attempts that actually end a possession. Think about how free throws arrive: a two-shot foul produces two attempts but ends only one possession, so each attempt is worth half a possession. A three-shot foul produces three attempts for one possession, so each is worth a third. An and-one free throw follows a made basket that already ended the possession, so it is worth zero. A technical free throw does not end a possession either. Weighted across an NBA season by how often each of those situations occurs, the average works out near 0.44, and both the NBA and Basketball-Reference standardised on that figure. The multiplication by 2 in the denominator is simply there to put the answer on the same axis as field goal percentage, where a 50 percent two-point shooter scores 1.00 point per attempt.

The practical value of TS% is that it makes players with completely different scoring styles comparable. In 2023-24 Nikola Jokić posted a .650 TS% by shooting 58 percent from the floor with a moderate free throw diet; Rudy Gobert posted .675 taking almost nothing but shots at the rim; Stephen Curry posted .616 on the highest three-point volume in the league. Field goal percentage would rank those three in a completely different and much less meaningful order. The league-wide average in 2023-24 was .580, up from roughly .530 twenty years earlier — the clearest single measurement of how much more efficient NBA offence has become.

What TS% cannot tell you is how much of the offence a player carried. Efficiency is easier at low volume, which is why analysts always read TS% next to usage rate: .650 on 29 percent usage, which is what Jokić did, is a different achievement from .650 on 15 percent usage. Below the calculator you will find the full derivation, a careful treatment of the 0.44 coefficient and where it comes from, the difference between TS% and eFG% worked through with real lines, benchmark scales for the NBA, WNBA and NCAA, and the worked example that runs Jokić's 2023-24 season through the formula by hand and confirms it against the .650 the league publishes.

What is true shooting percentage calculator?

True shooting percentage is a measure of shooting efficiency that takes into account field goals, three-point field goals and free throws in a single number. Its formula is TS% = PTS / (2 x TSA), where PTS is total points scored and TSA — true shooting attempts — is FGA + 0.44 x FTA. Basketball-Reference and NBA.com both publish this definition verbatim. TSA is an estimate of the number of possession-ending scoring attempts a player or team used: every field goal attempt is one such attempt, and each free throw attempt counts as 0.44 of one because most free throws come in sets where only the final shot ends the possession. Multiplying TSA by two puts the result on the same scale as field goal percentage, so a value of .500 means one point per scoring attempt, exactly what a 50 percent two-point shooter produces. TS% is a rate statistic and carries no information about volume: a bench player who scores 6 points on 3 shots posts a .750 TS% for the night without having carried any offensive load. That is why it is conventionally read alongside usage rate, and why Dean Oliver's skill-curve argument holds that efficiency and role must be judged together. TS% is also strictly a scoring statistic — it says nothing about passing, rebounding, defence or turnovers, all of which sit outside the box-score terms it uses. The related statistic effective field goal percentage, eFG% = (FG + 0.5 x 3P) / FGA, answers the narrower question of how efficiently a player shoots from the floor while deliberately excluding free throws. The gap between a player's TS% and his eFG% is therefore a direct measure of how much value he adds at the foul line.

How to use this calculator.

1. 01Enter total points scored. Take the PTS figure directly from the box score — it already includes free throws, and it should.
2. 02Enter field goal attempts (FGA), twos and threes combined. Do not include free throws here.
3. 03Enter free throw attempts (FTA), counted as individual shots: a two-shot foul is 2 attempts, a three-shot foul is 3, an and-one is 1.
4. 04Read the primary result. A 2023-24 NBA scale: below .520 is poor, .560 to .590 is around average for a rotation player, .620 is very good, and above .650 is elite. The league average that season was .580.
5. 05Check the true shooting attempts figure to see how the free throw adjustment landed. A player with 6 FTA gains 2.64 attempts, not 6 — that is the 0.44 coefficient doing its work.
6. 06Look at the share of attempts from the line. Anything above about 20 percent marks a player whose scoring depends heavily on drawing contact, which is a real skill but also a fragile one: officiating changes and playoff whistles move that number more than they move jump-shot percentage.
7. 07Always read TS% next to usage rate. High efficiency on a small role is not the same accomplishment as high efficiency while carrying a third of a team's possessions — use the usage rate calculator on this site to get the second half of that picture.

The formula.

The formula is TS% = PTS / (2 x TSA) with TSA = FGA + 0.44 x FTA.

Step one: count the scoring chances. A field goal attempt is one chance to score and it ends the possession whether it goes in or not (an offensive rebound starts a new one). A free throw attempt is different. Free throws arrive in bundles: a two-shot foul gives two attempts but consumes only one possession, so each attempt is half a possession-ending event. A three-shot foul gives three attempts for one possession, so each is a third. An and-one free throw follows a made field goal that already ended the possession, so it consumes none. A technical free throw likewise ends nothing. Weight those cases by how often they occur across a season of professional basketball and the average lands close to 0.44 per attempt, which is the value the NBA and Basketball-Reference both publish. Hence TSA = FGA + 0.44 x FTA.

Step two: convert points per chance into a percentage. Points divided by TSA gives points per scoring attempt directly. Dividing by 2 rescales it onto the field-goal-percentage axis, where 1.00 point per attempt reads as .500 — exactly what a two-point shooter converting half his shots produces. So TS% and points per scoring attempt are the same statistic in two units, related by points per attempt = 2 x TS%.

Why 0.44 and not 0.5. If every free throw came in pairs, the coefficient would be exactly 0.5. It is lower because and-one free throws and technical free throws consume no possession at all, and three-shot fouls contribute at one third rather than one half. Older work, including Dean Oliver's team-possession estimator, uses 0.4 rather than 0.44; this calculator uses the 0.44 published by the NBA and Basketball-Reference for true shooting, because that is the convention behind every TS% number you will see quoted. The pace factor calculator on this site uses 0.4 for possessions because that is the convention Basketball-Reference publishes there, and mixing the two coefficients across formulas is a common source of mismatched results.

TS% against eFG%. eFG% = (FG + 0.5 x 3P) / FGA ignores free throws entirely. Take Kobe Bryant's 81-point game: 28-for-46 from the floor with 7 threes and 18-for-20 from the line. His eFG% was (28 + 3.5) / 46 = .685, already outstanding. His TS% was 81 / (2 x (46 + 0.44 x 20)) = 81 / 109.6 = .739, because the 20 free throw attempts added only 8.8 to the denominator while adding 18 points to the numerator. The 5.4-point gap between the two figures is a precise measurement of the value of getting to the line.

Edge cases. A line with no field goal attempts at all (a player who only shot free throws) still has a defined TS%, since TSA is positive; the points-per-field-goal-attempt contrast figure is reported as zero rather than infinity in that case. A line with no scoring attempts of any kind has no defined TS%, and the calculator says so rather than returning a misleading zero.

A worked example.

Frequently asked questions.

References& sources.

1. [1]Basketball-Reference.com Glossary, entries 'TS%' ("True Shooting Percentage; the formula is PTS / (2 * TSA)") and 'TSA' ("True Shooting Attempts; the formula is FGA + 0.44 * FTA").
2. [2]NBA.com official Stats Glossary, entry 'True Shooting Percentage': "A shooting percentage that factors in the value of three-point field goals and free throws in addition to conventional two-point field goals. Formula Points/ [2*(Field Goals Attempted+0.44*Free Throws Attempted)]".
3. [3]Basketball-Reference.com, 2023-24 NBA advanced player table — source of the published TS% of .650 for Nikola Jokić used as the worked-example cross-check, and of the comparison values quoted for Rudy Gobert (.675), Stephen Curry (.616) and Luka Doncic (.617).
4. [4]Basketball-Reference.com, 2023-24 NBA season summary — league-average TS% of .580 and the Boston Celtics team line (PTS 9887, FGA 7396, FTA 1654, published TS% .609) used in the team-level FAQ.
5. [5]Basketball-Reference.com box score, Toronto Raptors at Los Angeles Lakers, 22 January 2006 — Kobe Bryant's 81-point line (81 PTS, 28-46 FG, 18-20 FT) with the published TS% of .739 and eFG% of .685 used in the eFG%-versus-TS% comparison.
6. [6]NBA Official Rulebook, Rule 5 (Scoring and Timing) — a free throw counts one point, a field goal from beyond the three-point line counts three, and every other field goal counts two. These are the point values the numerator of TS% aggregates.
7. [7]Oliver, D. (2004). Basketball on Paper: Rules and Tools for Performance Analysis. Potomac Books. Source of the possession-based framework behind the free-throw-to-possession conversion and of the skill-curve argument that efficiency must be read alongside usage.