Calculate Assist Percentage in basketball

Question

On Basketball Reference they state that

Assist Percentage; the formula is 100 * AST / (((MP / (Team MP / 5)) * Team FG) - FG). Assist percentage is an estimate of the percentage of teammate field goals a player assisted while he was on the floor.

If you take a game from the NBA and look at Russell Westbrook for example.

MP=36, AST=10, FG=17

Team FG=40, Team MP= 48

So using the formula I do

100 * 10 / (((36 / (48 / 5)) * 40) - 17)

Which equals 7.519

But on the NBA stats site it comes back with 58.8.

Have I done something wrong with the calculation here or am I missing something?

Answer 1

I don't know why NBA stats shows Russell Westbrook assist percentage as 58.8 because basketball-reference stats for the same game shows 72.5.

From basketball-reference, stats for Russell Westbrook and team for that match,

MP=37, AST=10, FG=17, Team FG=40, Team MP= 240

NBA stats shows Team MP as 48 which is obtained after dividing 240 by 5 i.e, (Team Mp / 5).

Using these stats we can get assist percentage around 72.5. For your calculation, if you use 48 for (Team MP / 5) and 37 for MP (Russel played 36 min 57 sec) you will get almost same data as basketball reference.