Corrections Applied to Historical Game-Level Team Turnovers on Basketball Reference

Basketball Reference is thrilled to announce a subtle, but meaningful, improvement to our game-level NBA statistics: the addition of 'team' turnovers to our single-game team turnover totals for all seasons back to 1993-94. Go ahead and read that again. And then maybe again. Again? Yes, it's a confusing word salad. But we'll explain. At least we'll try to!

An Official Scorer's Report (a fancy term for the official statistical document produced for each game; in other words: a box score) for an NBA game lists turnovers for each player. The bottom row of that turnovers column in the report, labeled 'TOTALS' contains those player turnovers summed up. Almost every box score on Basketball Reference from the 1980s through the present has shown the figure in that 'TOTALS' row as the team's total turnovers for that game. However, roughly half of the time that figure is not accurate. This is because underneath the TOTALS row, there is another row with shooting percentages, Team Rebounds and Total Turnovers. While the NBA hasn't counted 'Team Rebounds' (rebounds credited to the team but not to any individual player) in team rebounding totals for over 50 years, it has counted 'Team Turnovers' (turnovers charged against a team but not against any individual player) in team turnover totals since turnovers became a stat. The 'TOT TO' noted in a Scorer's Report will oftentimes match the summed player turnovers in the TOTALS row, but when it does not, it is because the 'TOT TO' row includes 'Team Turnovers.' These are almost always shot clock violations. The player holding the ball (or the last player holding the ball) is not charged with a turnover when a shot clock violation occurs. However, the team is. I'm attaching an image of an Official Scorer's Report below to display how this looks

As you can see, both the Suns and the Lakers have one more 'TOT TO' than they have summed player turnovers in the 'TOTALS' row. Up until now, our box score for this game has always given the Suns 23 turnovers and the Lakers 21 turnovers. Now our box score accurately shows 24 Suns turnovers and 22 Lakers turnovers. Our season turnovers for these teams have always been accurate. But our game-by-game counts have been slightly off in many cases. Most teams seem to average 30-50 'team turnovers' per season, so many games were correct and the ones that were wrong were only slightly wrong.

Still, we are very glad to be able to make this improvement. It makes our box scores, including the four factors calculations within them, more accurate. And the improvement is especially impactful when using row summing of team gamelogs to calculate something like offensive rating across a span of games. Before if you tried to calculate a team's offensive rating over a 25-game span you might be missing a dozen or more turnovers that weren't in our box scores. Now we have all of those back to 1993-94 included (and we will include them in 2024-25 and moving forward).

If you're looking at one of our box scores from before 1993-94, most games from 1983-84 through 1992-93 do not have team turnovers included. Box scores before 1983-84 will not always have turnovers included, but, when they do, the figure may or may not include the team turnovers. It depends on how good of a source we were able to find for a given game. But we are always making efforts to improve our data.

We would like to thank Justin Kubatko, who created Basketball Reference and continues to make incredible strides in NBA research, for providing us with this dataset. Please let us know if you have any questions, as we are aware that the jargon around this improvement is confusing to say the least.