HoopRankings
A team's overall scoring margin relative to what an average team would be expected to produce in that same game, after adjusting for pace (how many possessions the game was played at) and the strength of the opponent. It's the combination of a team's offense and defense (OPAA + DPAA) into one net number — positive means better than expected, negative means worse. PAA is the main number HoopRankings sorts teams by.
The offensive half of PAA — how many points a team scored above what would be expected against that particular opponent, once pace is accounted for. Reflects offensive efficiency on its own, independent of how the defense performed in the same game.
The defensive half of PAA — how far below the expected/average score a team held its opponent, adjusted for pace. Like OPAA, DPAA is scaled so that higher is always better — a high DPAA means a stronger defense, not more points allowed.
Built game by game from wins and losses: beating a team that's ranked highly (based on that opponent's own performance over the season) earns more credit than beating a weak team, and losing to a weak team costs more than losing to a strong one. Averaged across the season, Resume Score reflects the quality of a team's body of work — who they played and how they fared — separately from how many points they actually scored.
Two teams can have similar PAA but different Resume Scores if one of them has beaten (or lost to) notably tougher competition along the way.
The overall ranking number used to rank teams for bracketology, blending PAA (how well a team has actually performed) with Resume Score (the quality of the schedule behind that performance) into a single figure. Resume Score is weighted up in the blend since it naturally sits on a much smaller scale than PAA — without that adjustment, PAA would dominate the ranking almost entirely and Resume Score would barely move the needle.
The player-level version of team PAA — an individual's overall statistical contribution, expressed as a points-equivalent rate stat scaled to a standard 40-minute pace (48 minutes for the NBA), so players who play different amounts of time can be compared fairly. It's the sum of a player's offensive and defensive impact (OPAA + DPAA).
Two things shape it beyond the raw box score:
Playing time affects confidence, not just totals. A player's PAA is pulled toward zero (neutral) the fewer minutes they played, so a hot few minutes of garbage time doesn't swing their rating as hard as the same production over a full game would.
Opponent strength matters. A player's offensive numbers are weighed against how strong the opposing defense was, and their defensive numbers against how strong the opposing offense was — so the same stat line is worth a little more against a tougher opponent.
The offensive share of a player's PAA — scoring (split between shots taken inside and outside), assists, offensive rebounding, and turnovers, combined into one number.
The defensive share of a player's PAA — blocks, steals, and defensive rebounding, combined into one number. Same convention as team DPAA: higher is always better.
Player OPAA and DPAA are built from individual components, each capturing one specific way a player affects the game. These are what Player Compare and the "similar players" search on Player pages actually compare against — two players can have similar overall PAA while getting there very differently (e.g. one via inside scoring, the other via playmaking).
These ten make up most of a player's OPAA and DPAA, but both also fold in a couple of contextual adjustments — pace, opponent strength, and how the team performed overall while that player was on the floor — that aren't broken out individually here. Summing just the ten components won't land exactly on the total.