ScoutRoomOffensive and defensive rating are the cleanest way to judge a team — and the easiest to get quietly wrong below the top level.
The idea is simple and good: don't judge a team by points scored, judge them by points per opportunity, so pace doesn't fool you. A team that scores 95 in a track meet isn't necessarily better than one scoring 78 in a grind. Rating strips the pace out. In the NBA or any fully-tracked league, that means points per 100 possessions, and everyone's working off the same clean possession counts.
Drop down to NBL1, state leagues, most women's competitions — and that clean possession count vanishes. The box scores are there; reliable possession-by-possession data often isn't. So people do one of two things, and both are traps.
The first trap is trusting a possession estimate that was never really measured. Possessions get back-calculated from a formula — field-goal attempts, turnovers, rebounds, free throws. At this level the inputs are noisy enough that the "per 100 possessions" number carries a false precision. It looks like a clean rating. It's a clean-looking guess.
The second trap is mixing conventions without saying so. Per 100 possessions and per 100 minutes are different denominators, and a number means nothing until you know which one it's on. Compare one team's per-100-possessions rating to another's per-100-minutes and you've compared nothing — you've just made two unlike things look comparable because they both say "per 100."
So here's how I handle it. When the possession data isn't trustworthy, I rate per 100 minutes, and I say so every time. Points per minute, scaled to 100, for both ends. It's not the textbook definition, and that's the point — it's honest about what was actually counted. Same denominator for every team, stated on the page, no false precision borrowed from possession maths that doesn't really exist at this level.
Then I put pace back in as its own number, separately, because it's intel in its own right. A team that wants a track meet is telling you how to beat them. You don't need that smuggled inside the rating — you need it named.
The lesson isn't "ratings are bad." Ratings are the right idea. It's that a rating is only as honest as its denominator — and at this level, the useful move is to admit what you could actually count, and label it plainly, rather than dress a guess up as precision.