Of the 192 total minutes of basketball the Nuggets have played ... Melo has been on the floor for 146 of them aka 76% of the time.

Pretty obvious that Melo can't pitch a shut-out over that course of time when the majority of points are being scored.

I'll take 4-0 over +/- any day of the week.

1) +/- intellectually is very appealing 'cause it should catch all actions on the court and the end result is demonstrative of win/loss, so where could there be errors?

2) +/- is famously inconsistent from season to season. One of the reason Hollinger defends PER is predictibility over time. If it represents true individual ability why the large std deviation?

3) Role players are much easier to find than stars (virtually by defination). Just because a role player can statistically be shown to contribute significantly to a team's ability to win does not equate to greater value. Some skills, while very valuable to winning are not hard to find. That is: effort, picking, blocking out, rotations are pretty easy things to do. Thus a player that does them well like Najera (or Dantay Jones) are not that hard to replace. Gaudy +/- from these types of players are just not as valuable as bringing hard to replicate skills to the table such as height (thus overpaying big men) and the abilty to create high % shots no matter what the defensive is. Anthony is very effective at creating high % scoring opportunities even when the defense is focused on him (FT and good FG%), there just aren't a lot of guys with that skill.

FYI Melo was +9 last night. To recap that's:

+4 v. Memphis
+4 v. Portland
-7 v. Utah
+9 v. Indiana

LeBron and MJ is above all.Are you satisfied?

A player can play well and lose, or play shitty and win. The point is - there are multiple factors that a player can not control or affect that will be erroneously represented in a simultaneous broad and non-tangible stat like +/-.

Points ARE something. They equate to a quantifiable entity. Melo scored 41 out of 97 points v. Portland. That's 42% of tangible contribution.

And I agree that an empirical judgment is subjective, but I'd rather debate the minutiae of actual game tape vs. legitimacy of a player's contributions in a stat that can not be placed within a reasonable context.

Anthony Carter career stats without playing without Anthony:
4.5 ppg, 3.5 apg, 37.0% FG

Anthony Carter career stats playing WITH Anthony:
6.6 ppg, 5.1 apg, 44.5% FG

If you can tell me how that is not making a player better, then I don't know what not. And maybe AC is not the worst player in the NBA, but he is darn close. Bottom 1-5 probably. Bottom 10 without a doubt. Hell name me worst players in the league.

And yes, Carter does affect Carmelo's +/- stats. Apart from the Indiana Pacers game tonight, the Nuggets have trialed every 1st quarter when Carter was in the game and have cut deficits when Arron Afflalo/Ty Lawson enter the game for Carter at that point. That is when Carmelo was also playing hence why he gets a - stat at that point, and when he comes off the bench.

Now this article is just silly. You're telling me that the Nuggets would start 4-0 if Carmelo didn't play and provide the 35 whatever ppg he averaged?

It's a stat with too many unknown variables."

You start to decrease those unknown variables as the season goes on, though. Everyone here agrees it is a small sample size, but you can't disregard it. So many fans hate advanced statistics but they basically don't reaffirm their long standing beliefs about players. +/- is a nice tool to weed through all the crap.

And for all the people saying, "we watch the games and it's obvious that this player or that player is dominant" - maybe so, but maybe your subjective view of the NBA isn't exactly accurate.