In this morning's [Sunday's] New York Times, writer Vincent M. Mallozzi touts the NBA's Lenovo Stat, which is just a commercially-sponsored version of 'plus-minus.' For the first time ever, the NBA made official plus-minus stats available to the public, which was kinda cool if you had never heard of, say, 82games.com or BasketballValue or PopcornMachine.

Mallozzi uses Lenovo to prop up Detroit's chances against the Spurs. (I'm guessing this piece was written before Cleveland destroyed Detroit on Saturday.) Detroit has the best five-man 'Lenovo' during the postseason, with 503 points for and 433 against for the Wallace/Webber/Hamilton/Billups/Prince lineup. This gives the Detroit lineup a +70 Lenovo, and according to Mallozzi, makes them the best team in the playoffs. (After Saturday's game, this lineup is now +77.)

But Mallozzi fails to account that this Detroit lineup plays together a hell of a lot more than other top lineups on other teams (due at least partly to Detroit's weak bench). That +77 came in a whopping 267 minutes. Cleveland's LeBron/Damon/Varejao/Boobie/Donyell lineup -- Mallozzi's fourth-best on Friday but now Lenovo's #3 line -- is +41... in only 47 minutes.

If Mallozzi -- or Lenovo, for that matter -- had done this most minor of calculations to adjust for equal minutes before ranking the lineups, then they'd have seen Cleveland's line has been stronger than Detroit's -- +.864 per minute for Cleveland, +.288 for Detroit. Maybe they could even put it into a tangible form, like per-48 minutes. (Detroit: +13.8. Cleveland: +41.8.)

But doing these calculations would put the biggest weaknesses of raw, unadjusted plus-minus on display: Sample size and lack of perspective. It's very hard to compare something a team does in the equivalent of six full games with something done in 47 minutes. Many of Detroit's lineup's minutes came against Orlando, while the Cleveland line was displayed almost strictly against Detroit. Why am I upset about this? Because the New York Times just told everyone stats say Detroit's the best team in the league. That's not the case (by a longshot), and Detroit just lost. And where does the widescale resistance to new stats from NBA fans come from again?

(via The Fanhouse)

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