+/- numbers - how accurate/relevant? (Luis Scola in game vs. Hornets)

No he played well, when the rockets went on that run coincedently is when he went to the bench but no he played very well!

 

This was all Ron's fault. Ron jacked up 3s and missed all of them.

 

+/- means nothing tbh.......

stats in general is overrated too. i hate people like hollinger that calculate everything with his PER and thinks he knows the game without even watching basketball

 

It's a pretty useless stat.

 

The numbers don't lie. The Hornets scored more than the Rockets while he was on the floor over the course of the game. The Hornets had a big run on the Rockets at the end of the first half and into the second half. I think it was an 18-3 run. That was done with Scola on the floor (or at least for most of it), and his +/- partly reflects that. Was it exclusively his fault? Of course not. But obviously as a group the Rockets weren't playing well in that stretch. We'd probably have to review the video to see what happened and which Rockets screwed up the most.

 

for one game, it doesn't show a whole lot. Too small a sample size. You have to look at it longer term than that.

 

You apparently have never actually read much that Hollinger has written. I bet he watches more basketball than most of the ESPN analysts. He's been doing preseason team and player reports, covering everybody in the league, for several years now. It's filled with information that show he watches a ton of games.

 

+/- is a deceiving stat. You can make a dream team of NBA players then throw somebody horrific like a Ryan Bowen out there and his +/- is going to be something ridiculous like a +25 because his teammates are incredible.

 

come on, a few years ago he wrote something about marion being the best player in the nba because of his PER...... if he watches anything, he'll know d antoni can make nate robinson look like kobe bryant. look at where marion is now? hes terrible

 

It's only deceiving if someone is foolish enough to consider +/- as a measure of how well he played. For one game, it isn't.

But it's not totally useless either, even if its one game. Suppose you have a player who doesn't put up many stats, but he plays pretty good defense, and he's on the floor for a good 30 minutes. Suppose while he's on the floor, his team outscores the other by 20, and when he's off the floor his team gets outscored by 25. Would it be fair, after the game, to say that the team lost because he didn't score more?

 

Actually, he never wrote that, and Marion's PER never showed him to be the best player in the NBA. Moreover, where Marion is now has no bearing on where he was two years ago. Did Hollinger ever say that Marion would be a great player two years out? No, he didn't.

Marion was a very good player with the Suns, and a huge reason for their success. He fit in perfectly with that group's offense, and he was easily their best and most versatile defender.

 

I have never given much credence to this stat. It is not a good tool to measure how well an individual player is playing because the +/- number is determined by how well the whole team is playing. The particular player in which this stat is being applied to is only contributing 1/5 to that number.

 

Agree and agree. Only people who don't have the patience or understanding to delve into stats say it's meaningless. That's why it's called statistical analysis, not stat reading.

 

so lets take todays game, okc vs san antonio. nick collison on the bench has +18 and durant has -6. u are telling me collison is a better player? sure he destroyed san antonio's bench, but the +/- doesnt tell u that now, does it?

 

He played some of his best defense of the season tonight, and I mean that in a good way.

 

+/- number means a lot, in long run, very little for one game.

 

he wrote it but i probably wont find the article so i have nothing to say

 

I hear ya. I follow hockey and they've used the +/- system for years. Since the NBA has started including it in the box scores and what not I haven't had a problem distinguishing it's meaning between the two sports and it's importance as an NBA stat. I was just giving an extreme example of how it can be deceiving by NBA standards.

 

I don't think +/- really is that relevant because it has so many factors it's too much trouble to dissect what caused what. The way I see it, +/- kinda' has a circular logic, which means the result should be N/A if you create it in excel.

Starter's +/-= sub's +/- + some other factors we don't know

however, sub's +/-= starter's +/- + some other factors we don't know.

In this case though, Scola's +/- was mostly due to Ron Artest jacking up shots. I noticed that they had the same +/- at several points in the game so Artest probably negated whatever gains scola had.