MAVS 108, PELS 92

[mavsluvr]

Maybe on +/- the statement could be applied Trust but verify.    

Generally speaking I treat as a great summary statistic to quickly get a bottom line result from what happened when certain player and certain combination of players were on the floor.  Trust that as being meaningful to some degree because the score is the bottom line so to speak. 

In terms of drawing a lot detailed conclusions, verify by watching or as Kidd says put the eye test to the game and what happening. 

@"DanSchwartzgan" cited the -6 that came from the minutes with double centers.  I didn't know the +/- but just from the eye test it was clear the minutes didn't go well but there was also some clear indication at least one reason to why it wouldn't go well.   

NO really made a concerted effort to push the ball against the super sized lineups, particularly off of misses and beat the slower centers down the floor for great looks without a set defense. 

Dallas on the other hand didn't consistently leverage the big guys to get high % shots and be in rebounding position against the smaller lineup.  When they did use the size advantage it generally went well by my eyes but mostly they seemed to play off the same offensive schemes.  

Without knowing the +/- watching the game it was clear it wasn't working and to some degree it was pretty clear why.  So if you've got a guy on floor, any guy, in what capacity is he being used?  

In the case of the big guys for example if you're going to supersize then you better take advantage of the size shove the high % looks down their throat because your opponent will certainly try and run it down your throat.  Its kill or be killed. 

This is actually a legitimate use of short-term +/-. The team can use it to identify runs and use the information to look at video to analyze what went wrong (or right). They can use it for particular lineups in the sense of identifying what happened on the floor with certain lineups, and over time, determine whether there are issues when certain combinations of players are on the floor. 

They can examine, for example, a couple of possessions where the team lost points. Maybe they determine that a certain player made mistakes, and they can use that to try to help him do better. Or, maybe they discover that the problem consisted of a bad call, followed by an opponent hitting a well-defended, extremely low-probability shot, and determine that the players did what they were supposed to do, and no action is required.

The important thing here is that they would use short-term +/- as a tool for identifying what areas they want to take a closer look at. Certainly not to use as a stand-alone number labelling without further examination what players are "winners" and "losers" in terms of the season or their careers.