Each team has up to two challenges over the course of an NBA game. If the first is successful, they retain the rights for a second. The cost of an unsuccessful challenge, in addition to losing the ability to challenge again, is a timeout. Most teams now hire video assistants to review plays that could be worth challenging.

Return Value (RV) is a points system that assigns weights to every outcome from a successfull challege and tallies the reward to the challenging team. It rewards teams for correctly challenging high-reward situations, like an offensive foul charged to the team's best player, ruling out his made basket and getting him into foul trouble. If overturned to a shooting foul, this challenge would charge the foul to the opponent, count the basket, and award the player a trip to the line. The resulting point swing could change the course of the game, making this a "high RV" challenge.

An example of a "low RV" challenge is an out-of-bounds call in the second quarter. The expected return (a new possession), even if seemingly guaranteed, isn't worth the risk of losing a timeout and the opportunity to challenge later.

To make them interpretable, the weights are chosen to represent the actual or expected value from a specific outcome. For instance, a change in possession counts as +1 because the average points per possession league-wide is ~1.1. A free throw awarded (or removed) is +1. A made field goal that had been initially ruled off counts as its face value (+2 or +3). Each foul charged (or redacted) counts as +0.75. This makes the cumulative return value of a successfull challenge roughly interpretable as "points scored." By default, an unsuccessful challenge carries an RV of 0.

Here are the full weights:

The rest of this page is structured as follows. First, challenges are aggregated by period, team, and type of call. Feel free to click through and compare teams' success rates and return values across the full season or a specific window. At the bottom of the page are the individual calls, along with the matching play-by-play events, a link to the video, and a breakdown of the weights calculation.

Note on the Method

Note that for a small number of cases, the RV cannot be captured perfectly from the play-by-play alone. The play-by-play only registers the final outcome, not the counterfactual. If a player scores an and-one and the play is overturned into an offensive foul, the feed does not record the basket that was deducted, so the full return cannot be measured. Video data could close this gap.

Data: NBA Coach's Challenge Reviews & NBA Play-By-Play, 2025-26.