"So where does this leave us? I will state my beliefs here:

1) In-game plus minus is useless. As you can see from the first trial above, there were games when my player looked very good and games when he looked bad. Sure there are things that a player does to help or hurt his team that are not reflected in the box score, but plus-minus for a single game is often not reflective of this. If a player has a significant effect on his team by doing things not accounted for in the box score, I suggest you actually see those things occur before giving the player credit or blame.

2) Multi-game plus-minus isn’t much better. I suppose there are cases where there’s enough of a difference over a few games to draw a meaningful conclusion about a player. But I think that pertains to the kinds of players for whom you already know the answer (like Greg Oden, although I don’t necessarily stand by everything I wrote in that piece).

3) Season-long adjusted plus-minus might have limited use. I haven’t talked about adjusted plus-minus, but in the simplest terms possible, it accounts for who a player is playing with and against. It’s useful in the NBA, but the NBA has many more games, more minutes per game, and its star players see a fair amount of time on the bench during non-garbage time. Even so, there are always some curious results with adjusted plus-minus and the most accurate version uses two years worth of data.

4) Respect randomness. This should really be the objective analyst’s credo because it’s where we have an advantage over people that fall in love with their own eyes. It’s true plus-minus captures everything that’s happening, but that includes a whole lot of random things that lead to a hoop or a stop. Things that have nothing to do with the ability of the player you want to analyze. In basketball analysis, we should be filtering out randomness, not embracing it.

In summary, plus-minus, while neat to look at, is a poor tool in college basketball analysis."