Hi all – I’ve been curious about the plus/minus for each of my players/teams so I put together a spreadsheet that filters through the play-by-play data to calculate plus/minus. And I figured it's best to share in case anyone else wants to see the same for their teams.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1QWqqzVLoLXtcaxPKya8_4z8qwP6Kh1mwyW6JHFDSMLU/edit?usp=sharing
The analysis covers up to 5 games (5 games is enough to establish some patterns, and I just didn’t want to keep building it out further than that). So you can analyze how your team did against 5 press teams that you faced, or how you did in five tough road games, or against the five highest RPI teams you faced (which is the example in the calculation that I put together for my team), or you could just do one game and ignore the other rows.
It takes about 5 minutes to import your team’s data into the calculation. See below for details and if you come across any issues with the functionality or have other thoughts, feel free to post about them or send me a Site mail and I can take a look—it seems to work well with my teams, but there might be some other bugs still to work out.
Plus/Minus – Hoops Dynasty
To update the spreadsheet for your team, you’ll need to first click File/Make a Copy. Once you have a copy, you need to update the cells highlighted in yellow on the “Plus-Minus” tab by doing the following:
- Copy & paste your team URL into cell B1.
- Copy & paste the URL for the game(s) you’d like to analyze the plus/minus for in cells B2, B4, B6, B8 and B10. You can just do one game if you want or multiple games.
- Enter either a 1 or 0 in cells B3, B5, B7, B9 and B11 to indicate whether your team is the home team or away team for each respective game. (Away = 0, Home = 1)
- Review the check figures (red font) in cells B15:B53. If any aren’t equal to zero, you’ll need to go to the Ratings tab and adjust the names for your players in column A—usually 2 or 3 of the centers (or pf’s if no centers) need to be updated to reflect just their first name or last name due to some difficulty in connecting the names to the data in the play-by-play. You can see two names highlighted in yellow that I had to do this for on the Ratings tab (you can put the formula used for the other players back in for those two to see if they work without the override first but there’s a good chance you’ll just have to override).
- The cause is the last name of the C (or whoever you have playing C) is formatted a little different at times in the substitution play-by-play. So you can bet it’s probably your two Centers that need the name override. Pick the first or last name, whichever is more unique (i.e. if his name is Jon Saltalamacchia, pick his last name).
- Back on the Plus/Minus tab, you’ll also see yellow highlights in row 13 of the Plus/Minus tab… I’ll explain that in just a second, for now you can start reviewing the results.
After you’ve got the above items input, you’ll have 1-5 games worth of plus/minus data for each of your players. Just scroll down and see the breakout for each player by game and by half. You can also click over to the other tabs and filter within the play-by-play for each game if you really want to get into the details. I prefer to review the main tab, see which players have high plus/minus and which combos of players are doing well together—speaking of which…
back to step 5…
In column S, you’ll find a row titled “2-5 Player Lineup”. If you want to see the plus/minus for a specific 5-man lineup in this column or maybe how just 2 players do with each other on the court, put a “1” above the players you want to see on row 13. The results will show for however many players you pick (obviously, you can’t pick more than 5 players though). With my USCG team in there, I noticed my starters are actually a net negative while they’re on the court together. I’m not sure why that is yet, but definitely something I’m thinking about. I have not come up with a way to show “minutes on the court together" for those lineups, so instead I added a column to show “scoring plays”. This is just the total number of times either team scored while those players were on the court together… I just wanted some sort of gauge for how many plays those players have spent on the court together, relative to their plus/minus rating.
One thing that isn’t perfect is that substitutions will sometimes happen right before a free throw is taken. I think the free throws should count for/against the players on the court at the time of the foul (not sure if that is how they track it in real life though), but there isn’t an easy way for me to set the formulas up that way. So the free throws will count for/against the players after the substitution occurs.
I also ran into various naming issues when trying to get the formulas to parse the data and pull what is needed, like what I mentioned in step #4 above. So if you’ve got three players named William Williams, you’re just outta luck, sorry!
No single metric or calculation tells the whole story, but it’s another fun way to analyze the results we see in our games. I hope some of you find it useful.