Team Turnovers
What Are "Team Turnovers"?
When you look at an Official Scorer's Report (the NBA's official box score document) for any game, you'll see a column listing turnovers for each individual player. The "TOTALS" row at the bottom sums those player turnovers. However, just below that row is a separate line containing shooting percentages, Team Rebounds, and Total Turnovers (TOT TO), and these two turnover figures don't always match.
The difference comes from "team turnovers," turnovers charged against a team but not against any specific player. These are almost always shot clock violations, where no individual player is assigned the turnover but the team itself is charged with one. Unlike team rebounds (which the NBA stopped counting in team rebounding totals more than 50 years ago), team turnovers have always counted toward a team's official total turnovers.
What Was the Issue?
Historically, our box scores from the 1980s through the present displayed the summed player turnovers from the "TOTALS" row as the team's total turnovers for the game. About half the time, this figure was accurate. The other half of the time, it was slightly low because it didn't include team turnovers from the "TOT TO" row.
Most teams accumulate roughly 30-50 team turnovers across an entire season, so any individual game was typically off by only one or two turnovers when it was off at all. Importantly, our season-level turnover totals have always been accurate; the discrepancy only existed at the single-game level.
What's Changed
Our game-level box scores now reflect the true total turnovers, including team turnovers, for every game from 1993-94 onward, and we'll continue including them going forward. This makes our box scores and the four factors calculations within them more accurate. The improvement is especially valuable when summing team game logs across a span of games to calculate metrics like offensive rating, where missing turnovers across many games could meaningfully skew the result.
Earlier Seasons
For games before 1993-94, the picture is more variable. Most games from 1983-84 through 1992-93 do not include team turnovers. Box scores before 1983-84 don't always include turnovers at all, and when they do, whether team turnovers are included depends on the source available for that particular game. We continue working to improve historical data wherever possible.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Justin Kubatko, the creator of Basketball Reference, for providing the dataset that made this update possible. For more details about this update, please see our blog post about the additions.
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