Build a Team Four Factors Dashboard in a Spreadsheet

You don’t need a database, a Python environment, or a single line of code to scout an entire league. You need a spreadsheet, eight numbers per team, and about twenty minutes. By the end of this you’ll have a one-page Four Factors dashboard that diagnoses any team’s offensive and defensive identity at a glance — the same framework front offices have leaned on for two decades, rebuilt in cells you control.

A quick recap of the Four Factors

Dean Oliver’s insight, which we cover in full in our Four Factors explainer, was that winning basketball collapses into four things, and that they aren’t equal. He weighted their importance to winning at roughly:

The four factors and their classic weights1. Shooting — eFG%  (~40%)
2. Turnovers — TOV%  (~25%)
3. Rebounding — ORB%  (~20%)
4. Free throws — FT Rate  (~15%)

Shooting dwarfs everything else; free throws are the tiebreaker. Every team has eight of these — four on offense, and the mirror image on defense, where the job is to suppress the opponent’s four. That symmetry is what makes the whole thing fit on one screen.

The four formulas you’ll enter

Here are the exact formulas your sheet will compute. Memorize the shape of them; you’ll be typing them into cells in a minute.

Factor formulaseFG% = (FGM + 0.5 × 3PM) / FGA
TOV% = TOV / (FGA + 0.44 × FTA + TOV)
ORB% = ORB / (ORB + Opp DRB)
FT Rate = FTA / FGA  (or FT / FGA)

Two coefficients earn their keep. The 0.5 in eFG% credits a made three as 1.5 made twos, because it’s worth 1.5 made twos. The 0.44 in TOV% converts free-throw attempts into possession-equivalents, the same league-average cost we use for True Shooting and usage. For free-throw rate you can use attempts per field-goal attempt (FTA/FGA, a measure of how often you get to the line) or makes per attempt (FT/FGA, which folds in how often you convert) — pick one and stay consistent across all teams.

Where to pull the eight numbers

You need raw box-score totals, not the rates — the sheet computes the rates. For each team you want, on both offense and defense, grab: field goals made and attempted, three-pointers made, free throws made and attempted, turnovers, and offensive rebounds (plus your opponents’ defensive rebounds, which you need for ORB%).

Two free sources have all of it. On Basketball-Reference, a team’s page carries both its own per-game totals and its opponents’ totals — that “Opponent” row is what powers the defensive half of your dashboard. On NBA.com/stats, the team stats pages list the same totals and the opponent splits. Either way, copy season totals (or per-game; the rates come out identically since the games divide out). If you want a deeper menu of where to find this, we ranked the options in our free data sources guide.

Building the sheet, column by column

Start with one row per team. In the leftmost columns, paste your raw inputs — label them clearly: FGM, FGA, 3PM, FTM, FTA, TOV, ORB, and Opp_DRB. Then add a parallel block of the same eight for the defensive side, prefixed Opp_ (the opponent’s FGM, FGA, and so on). That’s your data. Now the calculated columns, where the actual dashboard lives.

Assuming the raw inputs sit in columns B through I, the offensive factor cells read:

Spreadsheet formulas (offense)Off eFG% → =(B2 + 0.5 × D2) / C2
Off TOV% → =G2 / (C2 + 0.44 × F2 + G2)
Off ORB% → =H2 / (H2 + I2)
Off FT Rate → =F2 / C2

The defensive columns are the identical four formulas pointed at your Opp_ inputs. The trick to reading defense correctly: for eFG%, TOV%, and FT rate, lower opponent numbers are better (you’re suppressing them), while for defensive rebounding you actually want your DRB%, the flip side of the opponent grabbing offensive boards. Keep a clear header note about which direction is “good” for each defensive cell, because that sign-flip is the single most common mistake people make building one of these.

Conditional formatting and a weighted rating

Numbers in a grid don’t talk. Color does. Select each factor column and apply a color scale — green for good, red for bad — using a 3-color rule. For the offensive factors and defensive rebounding, high is green; for the three defensive suppression columns, invert the scale so low opponent numbers go green. Now the whole league lights up at a glance: a team that’s green across the top row and red across the bottom is an offense-first club, and the pattern of greens tells you exactly how each team is good.

To collapse all eight into a single score, build a weighted rating. The cleanest approach is to convert each factor to a z-score (how many standard deviations above or below the league average it sits, using =(cell − AVERAGE(column)) / STDEV(column)), then combine offense minus defense with Oliver’s weights:

Weighted factor ratingRating = 0.40 × z(eFG) + 0.25 × z(TOV) + 0.20 × z(ORB) + 0.15 × z(FT)  — offense minus defense

Sort by that column and you’ve got a homemade power ranking grounded in the four things that actually win games. It won’t perfectly match a full net-rating model — for that, see our net-rating spreadsheet — but it’ll get you remarkably close, and it shows the why underneath the ranking.

An illustrative row, so you can check your formulas

Here’s a single made-up team to test your cells against — the numbers are invented purely to verify the arithmetic, not to represent any real club:

If your eFG% cell returns 53.9% and your TOV% cell returns 12.5% from those inputs, your formulas are wired correctly. Swap in real team totals and the dashboard comes alive.

The takeaway

A Four Factors dashboard is the highest-value spreadsheet a basketball fan can build, because it turns eight raw totals into a complete diagnosis of how a team wins or loses — on both ends — with nothing but arithmetic you can audit yourself. Pull the numbers, type four formulas twice, color the grid, and weight the result. You’ll never read a box score the same way again, and unlike a black-box rating, every cell is one you can trace back to a shot, a turnover, or a trip to the line. Pair it with offensive and defensive rating and you’ve got the entire output-and-input picture on two tabs.