[WyoNation Blog] Basketball Plus/Minus Tells The Story

[Wicks]

http://www.wyonation.com/2013/04/cowboy-basketball-season-review-plusminus-tells-the-story/

Here are some stats for you cats.

 

[Adv8RU12]

Interesting. One would expect the starters to have higher scores than the subs. But Adams is a glaring exception. And a sub playing against an opponent that has most of its starters in will probably score lower than if he is playing against a team that also has most of its subs in. I'm wondering if this statistic can be meaningfully tuned by incorporating other factors, like possibly score differential or total score. Remember, hockey is a low scoring game, unlike basketball.

 

[Wicks]

Yes, the plus/minus is simplistic and operates different than in hockey because basketball is higher scoring but it gets the same idea across. For a more complete evaluation PER (Player Effeciency Rating) can be used see this link for a quick description: http://www.basketball-reference.com/about/per.html

This is a statistic that looks to summarize all important data in one number. Here are the ratings for Wyoming with 15.0 being the score for an "average" player:

Player PER
Luke Martinez 24.8
Leonard Washington 24.1
Larry Nance 20.7
Derek Cooke 15.8
Derrious Gilmore 12.7
Nathan Sobey 11.5
Austin Haldorson 11.1
Matt Sellers 10.7
Jason McManamen 9.3
Aaron Tyser 8.2
Josh Adams 7.9
Riley Grabau 7.7
Jack Bentz 7.6

This stat shows the same trend as the plus/minus. Wyoming only had four above average players and Adams and Grabau were both rated very low but were still received significant minutes.

 

[laxwyo]

Cool stat but obviously doesn't tell whole story since sellers is rated higher than some. He played at times when game was out of hand.

 

[Wicks]

Cool stat but obviously doesn't tell whole story since sellers is rated higher than some. He played at times when game was out of hand.

Yeah, the stats is more accurate the more minutes a player plays so the numbers for Haldorson, Sellers, McManamen, Tyser and Bentz can be thrown out the window.

Grabau and Adams though really need to improve based on the minutes they played and I expect they will next fall.