I was reading the debate about whether to rest Lillard and when, so I went to BBREF to look at the plus/minus-on/off for the playoffs: Damian Lillard +36.1 Meyers Leonard +32.3 (only 33 minutes) Rodney Hood +10.4 Enes Kanter +3.4 Seth Curry -1.7 Al-Farouq Aminu -6.3 Maurice Harkless -7.9 Evan Turner -8.8 CJ McCollum -9.8 Zach Collins -25.8 I wasn't surprised that Dame is the best at this, but I was kind of surprised about how poorly most others were showing in these numbers maybe a contrast with the regular season would be useful: Damian Lillard +14.6 Jusuf Nurkic +12.9 Al-Farouq Aminu +10.0 CJ McCollum +6.3 Maurice Harkless +5.8 Seth Curry -0.9 Rodney Hood -0.9 Enes Kanter -1.4 Evan Turner -4.8 Zach Collins -6.2 Meyers Leonard -11.7 some fairly easy conclusions from those 2 rankings that match eyeball tests: * Dame has been awesome in the playoffs and as usual, he's carrying the team...big time * Meyers does well when he plays with Dame * Portland really really misses Nurkic * Zach has had no real positive impact and then there are the debatable conclusions/theories: * the first obviously is that a 3 game sample size of plus/minus numbers might be pretty suspect * as is often the case, CJ can post great numbers for himself, individually, but his shoulders aren't nearly broad enough, like Dame's are, to carry along teammates and make them better. And he sure as hell can't run the offense with any consistency * the gap between when Dame is on the floor and when he's off, is just too large. It hurt the Blazers in the 4th Q last night, clearly, and it needs to be addressed...but maybe the Blazers don't have any way to amend it * theory: Olshey's stubborn refusal to give Stotts a competent backup PG option because he's such a believer in CJ at PG is hamstringing the 2nd unit and making the time Dame rests a much bigger issue than it should be. The deficit when Dame is off the floor and the offense sputters is a huge vulnerability that gives OKC opportunities to take momentum away from Portland and build some for themselves again, I could be reading this all wrong or crediting these number too much. At the same time, those numbers do rather match what my eyes have seen
