Ranked on who you beat, and where.
Penta is a resume ranking for the NBA. Every regular-season game is scored on who it was against and where it was played. Beat good teams, especially on the road, and you climb. Lose to bad ones and you fall. The points add up, and the team at the top has the best body of work.
Go to the rankings →Two 20–10 records are not the same
The standings count wins. They don’t say who the wins came against. Three months into a season one team has played eleven games against the top six and another has played four, and their records can match. Penta separates them.
It is a resume ranking, not a power ranking: it adds up what a team has already done rather than estimating how good it is. Penta uses a power rating — Massey’s — but only to measure how hard each opponent was to beat. A team’s own ranking comes entirely from its results against them.
How a game is scored
- Start with the opponent’s rank. Opponent strength is Massey’s NBA rating. One rank per team, 1 to 30.
- Adjust for where the game was played.
A road win is harder, so the opponent counts as better than their rank. A home win counts
as easier.
That adjusted rank places the game in one of five bands.Away rank × 0.7Home rank × 1.3Neutral site rank, unchanged - Score the result. A win is worth 25 points for beating the best possible opponent, down to 1 for the worst. A loss is the mirror image: 1 point for losing to the best, 25 for losing to the worst. A win over any team plus a loss to that same team always adds up to 26. It is the same scale as Penta’s college rankings.
The five bands
| Band | Adjusted rank | A win is worth | A loss costs | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| P1Elite | Elite | 1–6 | 25 → 18 | (1) → (8) |
| P2Strong | Strong | 7–12 | 18 → 13 | (8) → (13) |
| P3Decent | Decent | 13–18 | 13 → 9 | (13) → (17) |
| P4Weak | Weak | 19–24 | 9 → 5 | (17) → (21) |
| P5Cellar | Cellar | 25–30 | 5 → 1 | (21) → (25) |
Within each band, points fall on a straight line. Beating #1 is worth 25, beating #6 is worth 18. Losses work the same way in reverse: losing to a top team costs little, and losing to a bad one costs the most.
Only the regular season counts, including the NBA Cup quarterfinals and semifinals, which count in the standings. The Cup final, play-in and playoffs do not. Negative numbers appear in parentheses, so a loss worth −2.2 shows as (2.2).
What’s on the site
- RankingsAll 30 teams with their record in each band and movement since last week. Pick a conference and two lines appear: under #6, the playoff spots, and under #10, the play-in. Click a row for a quick look at any team.
- The RaceThis week’s biggest games by what’s at stake, the top 10 traced week by week, and each team’s ceiling if it wins out.
- Best Wins, Worst LossesEvery result in the league, ranked by what it was worth.
- Team pagesResults and the remaining schedule, with what each upcoming game is worth to win or lose; the team’s rank by week; and every season back to 2023–24.
- FAQThe full method, including the parts people argue about.
Does it work?
By the end of a season, it agrees with the standings. In each of the last three seasons, Penta’s top six in each conference were the same six teams that finished top six, and its top ten were the same ten. Its #1 in each conference had the best record all six times.
It is not a forecast. Halfway through a season it predicts the final standings about as well as the standings themselves do. What it adds is the middle of the season, when schedules are uneven and matching records hide different accomplishments.
Also: Penta Rankings for college basketball and college football.
Game results, schedules and ratings come from Massey Ratings.