The Portland Trail Blazers are down in the standings at the end of the 2023-24 season, raising many questions regarding the talent and suitability of the players on the roster. Among the usual assortment was one on plus/minus statistics, which is one of the measures sometimes used to evaluate players. It was applicable at the time the question was asked, but it became a hot topic over the weekend, so let's cut to the chase.
Dave, in the social media article about Dalano Blanton's scoring against Houston, I pointed out that he was -25 in that game as well, and that ANT has a lot of games at -20 or lower. The answer said that this is a useless statistic. So what does +/- represent?
Sam
Hi Sam. Your question was a bit of a warm-up for Scoot Henderson, who had an incredible plus-minus of 58 in his last game against the Miami Heat.it is genuine NBA record. That's a little misleading.
For those who don't know, plus/minus indicates how many points a team gained or lost compared to their opponents when a player was on the floor. If Player A enters the game and his team is ahead of him by 10 points, but they are tied when he exits the game, his plus/minus for that interval will be -10. If you add up all of his stretches that night, you get the cumulative plus/minus stat for that game. Obviously, a positive score is better than a negative one.
The good thing about plus/minus is that it shows, at least in part, how a player's performance can affect the team. If a player is scoring his 20 points per game, but notices that his plus-minus is consistently negative, his points may not be as valuable as they seem on the surface. You may begin to suspect that there isn't.
On the other hand, this may not be the case. The problem with plus/minus is the statistical “noise” that comes with it. The team's performance is the baseline for the statistics, but the statistics apply to her one player. they don't match.
If you sent Damian Lillard onto the floor of an NBA game with four preschoolers, he would suffer a terrible plus/minus despite being a great player. His individual playmaking and skill will not be able to overcome the severity of the team's collapse. Also, that loss (and the awful plus/minus stat on the box scoreline) wasn't his fault either.
that would be true Any Single plus/minus ratings from individual games. For statistics to be meaningful with such a small sample size, too many variables will affect the numbers.
Let's take a look at Henderson's -58 rating against Miami. do you know what that means? That means he played 41 of 48 minutes in a game his team lost by 60 points. His play was not good. No one on the Blazers did that that night. But that -58 doesn't mean he's the worst player in the NBA, or that he had the worst night of anyone on the team. In fact, that night he had 20 points, six assists, and six rebounds while shooting 44.4 percent from the floor. He's had far worse games than that.
Whether out of an option or a conscious choice, head coach Chauncey Billups chose to keep Henderson out for nearly every barbecue the Heat gave the Blazers that night. When Portland lost by 60 points, Henderson's plus/minus was destined to reflect that. Even if he scored his 30 points, the final plus/minus could have been him finishing with 50 points. There was nothing he could do as an individual to get that outing back.
Only time plus/minus maybe Used implicitly when observing a group of players, such as the starters or bench, in a single-game scenario. If most of your bench is positive but all of your starters are hovering around a plus/minus of 25, then the opposing starters are probably better as a group and that's why your team lost the game. I can say that there is. This is still not a complete debate, but this statistic is as close as you can get.
In most cases, it's better to leave plus/minus completely alone, at least for individual players, until about halfway through the season. At that point, enough iterations have been made for the anomaly to level out. Then the statistics start to become more true. “Considering different situations, teammates, and opponents, I would say that teams generally experience either negative or positive swings against opponents when this player is on the floor.”
Scoot Henderson has a cumulative plus/minus of -7.7 in 55 games this season. That's not a good thing. Ranked 557th out of 566 NBA players. A quick look at the chart shows that Shedon Sharpe is at -7.7 and he is just behind Scoot at #558. Anfernee Simons is ranked 555th, two places ahead of Scoot, at -7.2. Either all of these guards stink badly, or the Blazers' performance as a team is helping to push down the plus/minus of each individual player.
If you look a little deeper, you'll see that the Blazers are averaging 9.0 points per game against their opponents this season. Only the Washington Wizards and Charlotte Hornets are worse. So it's no surprise that the majority of Portland's roster is negative on the plus/minus. It's a matter of degree.
It's true that this player composition is not working well for Portland. You can't point to Mr. Henderson's (or Mr. Simmons' or Mr. Sharp's) negative plus/minus and say, “That's the cause!” They're all part of a larger trend of losing, somewhat embarrassingly for all participants. One or more of them could turn out to be great players. At this point in their development, they are not very compatible.
In summary, you should never look at single game plus/minus statistics and use them for anything other than party trivia answers. That number has little correlation to the ability of the player who owns it. You can look at plus/minus trends over the season to see who seems to be helping the team, but you can't draw a direct line between a player's plus/minus numbers and their ability. It is dangerous. Obviously a high plus/minus is desirable, but you might not see that much on a losing team. If you move a player with a low plus/minus to a better team, the numbers will probably go up.
Plus/Minus serves as a general “passive radar” rating that shows where a player stands in comparison to his teammates and team. It's entirely possible to look at Henderson's and say, “So-so.” He hasn't helped buck the trend at all. ” That’s valid. It's not justifiable to take the next step and say he's a bad player, at least just looking at the plus/minus. There's a lot more to that assessment, both in terms of data and nuance.
Thank you for your question! You can always send it to blazersub@gmail.com and I'll do my best to answer as many as I can.
