Scroll through any advanced stats page during an NBA broadcast and PER usually sits near the top of the list. Short for Player Efficiency Rating, it is one of the oldest catch-all numbers in basketball analytics, a single figure meant to answer a blunt question: how productive was this player, per minute, once everything he did on the floor gets added up? It was built by longtime ESPN.com columnist John Hollinger in the late 1990s and later adopted and extended by Basketball-Reference.com, which now publishes it for every NBA and ABA season on record.
How Is PER Calculated?
Basketball-Reference’s own glossary quotes Hollinger directly on the concept: “The PER sums up all a player’s positive accomplishments, subtracts the negative accomplishments, and returns a per-minute rating of a player’s performance.” In practice, points, assists, rebounds, steals, and blocks all add to the number, while missed shots, turnovers, and personal fouls subtract from it. The raw total then gets adjusted for the pace of the player’s team, since someone on a fast-breaking squad naturally racks up more box score stats than a player stuck in a slow, grinding offense. Finally, the whole league gets rescaled so the average qualifying player lands at exactly 15.0 every single season, a detail Basketball-Reference confirms directly in its explanation of the calculation. That normalization is why a PER from 1996 can be compared to a PER from 2026 even though the game looks completely different now.
What Counts as a Good PER?
Because the league average sits fixed at 15.0, PER works something like a curve grade. Hollinger built a rough scale to translate the number into plain language, and teams still lean on that kind of shorthand when they evaluate prospects entering the draft lottery pipeline or a veteran already in the league. A mark in the 20 to 22.5 range reads as borderline All-Star production, 22.5 to 25 counts as a “definite All-Star,” and anything past 25 moves into weak-to-strong MVP-candidate territory. Cross 30 and a season starts to resemble a runaway MVP campaign. Only a handful of players in league history have ever topped 35, a level generally described as one of the greatest seasons ever played. On the other end, a rotation player without much offensive role typically lands in the 13 to 15 range, and a PER under 9 usually belongs to someone who will not stick in the league for long.
Is PER36 the Same Thing as PER?
Fans searching for PER often stumble into a related but separate idea called per-36 stats, and the two get mixed up constantly. PER is already a rate stat built around minutes played, so there is no official “PER36” version of it floating around. What people usually mean by per-36 numbers is a simpler exercise: taking a player’s raw box score totals, points, rebounds, assists, whatever the category, and scaling them to what they would look like across exactly 36 minutes. That trick is handy for comparing a bench player’s scoring pace to a starter’s without any of PER’s pace adjustments or internal weighting. It answers a narrower question than PER does, and it ignores shooting efficiency almost entirely, which happens to be one of the things PER was built to capture in the first place.
Where Does PER Fall Short?
No single number captures a basketball player, and PER has known blind spots. It leans almost entirely on box score categories, so a player who racks up shots, boards, and assists will usually outscore a lockdown defender whose value shows up in possessions prevented rather than stats accumulated. High-usage scorers tend to get rewarded simply because volume feeds the formula, even on nights when their efficiency dips. Front offices that discuss restricted free agency contract offers rarely treat PER as a closing argument for exactly this reason. It works well as a starting point for gauging offensive productivity. It was never built to render a full verdict on a player’s two-way impact.
Who Has the Highest PER in NBA History?
According to Basketball-Reference’s single-season PER leaderboard, the all-time record belongs to Nikola Jokić, who posted a 32.85 PER during the 2021-22 season. Jokić also owns the second-highest mark ever recorded, a 32.35 he put up in 2025-26, meaning the two best PER seasons in league history both belong to the same center. Wilt Chamberlain, Michael Jordan, LeBron James, and Giannis Antetokounmpo round out the historical top ten, a group that includes Giannis’s 32.05 from the 2021-22 season, years before the core of that Bucks roster was reshaped by the trade that eventually sent him out of Milwaukee. That company says plenty about what PER is designed to capture: dominant, efficient, do-everything seasons from players who barely left the box score empty.
