I think it's a better indication of a players play than most people. There's a reason that a lot of defensive forwards and shut down d have higher +/- than more offensive geared players.
It paints with an overly broad brush. Often times only a handful of players will be involved in either creating a goal or responsible for allowing it. All get rewarded/punished equally. Also, how can a stat that assigns the same importance to empty net goals as regular goals be taken seriously?
Quote:
Originally Posted by Hecantscorefromthere
I think it's a better indication of a players play than most people. There's a reason that a lot of defensive forwards and shut down d have higher +/- than more offensive geared players.
It paints with an overly broad brush. Often times only a handful of players will be involved in either creating a goal or responsible for allowing it. All get rewarded/punished equally. Also, how can a stat that assigns the same importance to empty net goals as regular goals be taken seriously?
I've always been a big supporter of the stat. Call it a 'good aura' or whatever, but if a guy is usually a plus player, then he's doing something right a lot.
Also take a look at a number deeper stats when going a long with it, but for the most part I think it's a really accurate stat about a players skill and motivation.
Call it a 'good aura' or whatever, but if a guy is usually a plus player, then he's doing something right a lot.
This is a good way of looking at it. People run into trouble when they make statements like "because player X has the best +/-, they are therefore the best at defense, two-way play, etc."
Of course people don't make statements like that anymore because they get laughed off the forums if they do.
Just like every stat, you can't analyze it in a vacuum.
I've always been a big supporter of the stat. Call it a 'good aura' or whatever, but if a guy is usually a plus player, then he's doing something right a lot.
Also take a look at a number deeper stats when going a long with it, but for the most part I think it's a really accurate stat about a players skill and motivation.
One of the weaknesses of traditional +/- is that it tends to favor players on good teams - Bruins Ryder, Blake Wheeler, David Krejci, Phil Kessel and Marc Savard were all in the top ten in the league, which is not surprising given that Boston was the highest-scoring team at 5-on-5 in the NHL. At the same time, it penalizes players on bad teams - six New York Islanders were in the bottom 10.
We can make a small improvement on +/- by subtracting the +/- when a player is off the ice from it. That is, if a player was +1 goal per 60 minutes on the ice and his team was even when he was off, he ends up appearing the same as a guy who was even on the ice while his teammates were -1 per 60 minutes. It's not perfect, but it does make an adjustment for how good a player's teammates were. This statistic has several names - relative +/-, On-Ice/Off-Ice +/-, or simply "Rating", as I've called it on the stats page.
The stat rewards overall team play more so than individuals.
For sure. If I told you a player was -3 for a season, what does that tell you about the player? Really, it tells you nothing.
Exactly ... I don't know if Hamonic and Isles played last night, but he was +4 yesterday afternoon when I was looking up an example earlier. That's unimpressive until you consider Jurcina was -33 and Streit was -26. It's easy to look at that and just say both Jurcina and Streit sucked this year.
In reality, compared to teammates, yes Hamonic was the best with a relative +/- of 1.32, but Streit was only -0.35 compared to Jurcina's -1.65.
If you just look at GF and GA per 60 minutes you see that while Striet is on the ice, the team is scoring nearly 1 goal more per 60 minutes compared to Jurcina. They both get scored on at similar rates, but Streit makes up for most of that with his offense. +/- on it's own doesn't tell you that.
