FanPost

Ben Ball + / - Numbers

After dumping on certain aspects of the + / - stat in DCBruin's post-Villanova Fanpost, I felt obligated to put some work in and calculate the + / - numbers that I do find valuable. As I noted in the above-mentioned Fanpost, I feel for various reasons that + / - is best used to measure the effectiveness of full five-man line-ups. With that in mind, I broke down the play-by-plays for each of our seven games (I included Westmont and CSLA for the sake of sample size) and found the net gain or loss generated by each line-up.

Of course, this exercise served to remind me of the wonders of permutations as I found that CBH has used 57 different line-ups, with most five man groups having spent less than five minutes of game time together for the entire season. So with the importance of sample size in mind, I decided to publish only my findings for groups that have spent more than 10 minutes on the court together throughout the course of the young season. Here they are ranked from top to bottom in order of points-gained-per-minute.

Fivemanplusminus_medium

via i217.photobucket.com

To reiterate, the group at the top (JS, BL, TH, ML and LJ) has gained an average of 1.12 points-per-minute on its opponents in the 14.32 minutes that it has played together this season. Unfortunately, at this point, the original data has been so jumbled in spreadsheets that I couldn't tell you which games those 14.32 minutes came from but I would note that each of the above lineups has seen action together in multiple games.

Now, with slight reservation, I offer the + / - for each player through seven games. By comparing only heavy rotation players and looking at their per/min numbers rather than totals I would hope to avoid some of the basic pitfalls of the statistic. Anyway, without further ado:

Individualplusminus_medium

via i217.photobucket.com

And again, just to make sure everyone's understands what is being depicted here, the number in blue represents the average points-per-minute that the Bruins gain on their opponents when that particular player is in the ballgame.

Alright, having worked my butt off to bring your that, I'm going to skip the commentary/analysis portion of this Fanpost and simply say "discuss". . .

This is a FanPost and does not necessarily reflect the views of BruinsNation's (BN) editors. It does reflect the views of this particular fan though, which is as important as the views of BN's editors.

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