It should be blatantly obvious what he's trying to demonstrate. Also in the interest of fairness, Battier was a dismal -26 tonight, but I won't start a new thread about it. http://sports.yahoo.com/nba/boxscore;_ylt=AilTZkzgXOz9Xo4JJuWmyXe8vLYF?gid=2009111006
His is the spiritual leader of the team, and his role cannot be reflected on data. I have ever doubted Battier's ability. However, my prejudice on him is removed now.
I'm just trying to show that +/- for one game can be extremely misleading. Jason Williams didn't even do much in the game I referenced on the last page. I'm not saying that Battier's +36 was necessarily an inaccurate reflection of his actual impact on that game but it certainly could have been. If anything, you need to look at +/- over an extended period of time to get any real signficance out of it. You would have been better off making your argument using the long-term adjusted +/- that Morey referenced in the "No Stats All-Star" article last year. Battier was among the best in the league in that more meaningful statistic.
Would you also say there's no significance if we blow out another team by 30 points, because its just one game? So there's no point even talking about it? The point is that there are lots of things a player can do well that don't show up in a boxscore. The +/- stuff, particularly when its at an extreme, can reflect that. +36 with a player on the floor and -19 with the player off the floor, within a single game, does indicate that the player very likely did something really well. Of course, to know what he did well, you need to watch the games.
