Quote:
Originally Posted by flamesgod
This isn’t directed at you because I hear it a lot. Plus/minus is not a useless stat. Kind of like goal differential is not a useless stat.
|
The big problem is that plus/minus is heavily affected by linemates and usage. By itself it tells you very little about an individual player.
I'll give you an example from the Flames team that won the Cup in '89. Of their four regular centres – Gilmour, Nieuwendyk, Otto, Hrdina – Otto had the worst +/–. You might guess that he was bad defensively. Actually, he had a relatively bad +/– because he was the team's
best defensive centre and drew the toughest assignments. (He was also the centre whenever they were killing a 5-on-3, unless he was in the box himself.) Nieuwendyk was nothing special defensively at that point in his career, but he racked up big pluses because he didn't have to play against opponents' top lines.
Sometimes, on a really bad team, a big minus rating is practically a badge of honour. It means you're the least bad option at your position, and have the privilege of being caved in for more minutes than anyone else. In 1989–90, when the Quebec Nordiques were the joke of the league, Joe Sakic scored 102 points but was an awful –40 – worse than every other forward that played the whole season for the Nords.
Things like that make plus-minus a very fuzzy and noisy stat, and nobody relies on it for any kind of real analysis.