Plus/Minus Metrics
There have been several iterations of Plus/Minus metrics over the years. The most mainstream one currently is ESPN’s Real Plus/Minus, which was created by stats guru Jeremias Engelmann, and adapted from earlier forms like RAPM (Real Adjusted Plus/Minus). This is anecdotal, but if you want to see old metrics and how they’ve developed over time, I would encourage you to check out old archives of basketballprospectus.com and the APBRmetrics forums.
The basis behind Plus/Minus metrics is to solve this large problem in the NBA: player entanglement. Okay, so maybe I stole that idea from quantum entanglement, which is probably my favorite physics subject right now, but it is an important (and again, unique) part of basketball. In baseball, we can pretty easily identify the value of a player. It’s really an individual sport that disguises itself as a team one – one single pitcher goes against one single batter at a given time. As such, we get really easy-to-use, easy-to-read data points. There’s nothing dirtying up our picture, in a sense.
However, in basketball that’s not the case.
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