In the words of the creator of Player Efficiency Rating (PER), John Hollinger, “PER sums up all a player’s positive accomplishments, subtracts the negative accomplishments, and returns a per-minute rating of a player’s performance.”

PER is not perfect but through an in depth calculation that includes adjusting for team pace, and standardizing to a league average makes it quite effective in evaluating individual players. For more information on PER, Basketball Reference has a great explanation.

By standardizing the output the division average has been set at a PER of 15.0.