He is the most consistent player on that team. And is usually on the floor the most whe they are getting the crap beat out of them.
Sure, and I think that type of thing is applicable in sports as well. For example, a coach tracking shot charts for players, or success rate of various plays with different combinations of players. They may not necessarily know why it works, just that it does.
Anyone who uses the word orthogonal in a sentence must be mathematically savvy enough that can understand statistics. Please provide a textbook reference that will agree with your claim because I am not buying it! I have attached a plot that perhaps would be more useful to understand these numbers. In a nutshell, as long as these bars overlap there is no statistical difference between players in terms of the +/- stat. These stats should improve as the season continues as the standard error is the standard deviation divided by the square root of the sample population, N. So as N gets larger the standard error will get smaller. With that being said, the only thing that we can say from the mid-season report of the +/- stats is that Rafer Alston is "better" than Yao Ming. I put better in quotes because Rafer is better that Yao in the sense of whatever the +/- stat is trying to describe. Please don't attack me as I didn't come up with the numbers. Hopefully this helps! <a href="http://picasaweb.google.com/jsmee2000/Adjusted/photo#5164434249450868738"><img src="http://lh3.google.com/jsmee2000/R6vBlmhhUAI/AAAAAAAAAYQ/Za06KebYl5o/s800/adjusted_pm.jpg" /></a>
http://basketballvalue.com/teamplayers.php?year=2007-2008&team=HOU Yao's adjusted +/- (albeit with an enormous standard error) is still negative as of 2/26, though improved from a month ago. As I stated in the first post, I'm highly skeptical that this indicates we're a better team (or even not much worse of a team) without him. But, right now, I'm hoping that it's true.
