A treatise on plus/minus
by Ken Pomeroy on Monday, January 10, 2011
As people who have followed my twitter feed have figured out, I’m more than a little uncomfortable with the use of plus/minus data in college basketball analysis.
I once produced something called an HD Box score which contained +/- data. It was a thrill to make the breakthrough to compute such data because after all, plus-minus captures everything. All of those hustle plays that lead to points are rewarded. The guy who’s able to force his man into repeatedly missing shots gets rewarded for this defense. It’s perfect. And I basically said some dumb things along those lines back then.
Only, my experience since then has led me to believe that it’s far from perfect. This well-intentioned analysis (which is accompanied with plenty of caution) indicates that Kyrie Irving was a huge drain on Duke at the beginning of the season. Would you go to Coach K…