Any box score on ESPN or Yahoo! will have the +/- figure. You may not like it, but it's an actual statistic.
You want facts? The facts are that two of our starters (Blake and Webster) are not in the top 30 of their position when there are only 30 teams in the league. Both are being outperformed by every other starting player at their position in the league, plus several bench players and rookies. Blake is currently behind 6 rookies in point guard performance. The facts also are that the +/- results highly depend on which team members you are in the game with during your stretch of the game. Look at the turnvovers Miller had. Look at the turnovers Roy had. Look at the turnovers Joel had. Then look at Bayless. He had one turnover and it was near the end of the game, right before he got jerked out of the game by Dean. I hardly put the 20+ points we went down on this game on him. In fact, by the time he left, we were only down single digits and a huge part of it was because of him. http://www.cbssports.com/nba/playerrankings Now if you consider the fact that we already have Joel in the starting lineup and he is basically a zero for offensive production, we cannot afford to have Blake and Webster in the starting lineup. That is basically 0 production out of 3 starters at that point.
Now that last nights stats are in the books, Bayless is now shooting .540 from the field. Do most of you understand that at that efficiency, I really wouldn't give a shit if he took 50 shots a night?
Some here are blinded by I don't know what amigo, but Bayless deserves a shitload more minutes and they should come out of Blake's minutes.
Add up the +/- for all Blazers and divide that total by 5 and you should get the final score differential: total Blazer player +/- -45 / by 5 players = final score differential -9 84-93 = -9 If Blake's is messed up so is someone else's, that's an unlikely misprint...BRoy is -3...looks to me like Blake's is correct.
So you are saying that it's about the player, i.e. that +/- will help quantify the player's value on the court when you consider "chemistry." That may or may not be true, but it certainly isn't true in a single game and, statisticians say, isn't likely to be true even with a single season of data. All +/- for a single game says is that, for whatever reason, a player was on the floor when his team out-scored the other team by X or was outscored by the other team by X. That reason could be chemistry, good/bad luck, the quality of the players he happened to be up against during his time on the floor, small sample size, etc. The results are too noisy to tell us anything we can use. It's purely descriptive, not prescriptive.
So what does the fact that Andre Miller and Steve Blake are 1 and 2 on the team in +/- for the season mean?
Then the calculation worked and the number is correct. Please refer to Minstrel's post as it exactly mirrors my thoughts on the subject.
If the facts don't change the theory, change the theory. An interesting flip on an old debate technique.
It says nothing. Just because they are #1 and #2 doesn't mean it couldn't have been better than it was.
To me, it means nothing, as per my thoughts in the post you quoted. If a full season of +/- is still too noisy to be of much use, why would a fragment of a season be useful? What do you think it means?
It means that the team outscores the opponents most with Miller on the court, and second-most when Blake is on the court. The object of the game is to score more points than the opponent, at least that's what I was taught when I played competitively. According to 82games.com, the best line-up available now is Miller/Blake/Roy/LMA/Przy.
It does mean that. I thought you were asking if it meant anything about Blake and Miller as players. I don't think it does. Do you think it does? Nah. The object of the game is to hold your opponent to less points than you score. Easy mistake to make!
Nowhere does he claim the numbers must be wrong...I must be missing something I come from a financial background and I'm used to financial metrics that don't really tell you anything by themselves. A lot of times they just raise a flag that something unusual might be happening when a number falls outside the norm. There is so much static in these +/- numbers that I don't believe they say anything of substance about a player on their own...maybe the more advanced adjusted +/- do, I have no idea. Similar to finance, when you see a weird outlier it can be useful to dig in and understand the underlying causes...but oftentimes it is unrelated to the way the original metric is pointed...FOR EXAMPLE - Howard's +/- was +12 for the game. If you take that number at it's face...wow Howard rules! He won the game for us...err... But if you dig in, you realize he was on the court when Bayless made steals and started getting uber-aggresive and had a spurt of points while the Knicks were't scoring. What I think the +/- for Howard ends up saying - wow, Bayless was really on fire for a while in the 4th quarter. ...someone could make the argument it was somehow due to Juwan's play, but eyeballing the game he got a couple rebounds but it was mostly Bayless just taking on all comers for a while...nothing to do with Juwan's play.
So, doesn't that mean that Bayless was absolutely brutal earlier in the game, at least in terms of point differential of his unit versus the Knicks?
