Getting the season started has been rough for a Sacramento Kings team still going through changes. But there was a positive sign of life in their win over the Golden State Warriors. Specifically, every King had a positive plus/minus rating, the first time that's happened this season.
Plus/minus is a stat that tracks the difference in each teams' scores while specific players are on the court. The calculation involves subtracting points scored by the opposing team from the points the player's team scored while he was in action. It's based on tracking performance minute by minute.
A positive plus/minus score means a player's team outscored their opponents while he was playing. The other side of the coin is the negative, which means the opponent outscored the player's team while he was out there. It says something about both the offense and the defense of that individual.
Keeping all of that in mind, a lot of players and pundits question how much the plus/minus stats actually prove. It poses a particular problems when looking at individual games, and works better with more data from several games. Analysis can then pick out trends about players and lines.
What changed about the Kings' plus/minus
For the most part, the Kings' combined plus/minus has been in the negative. That's not a shock since they have a record of three wins and five losses. It's hard to get an overall plus/minus rating in the positive when you are getting outscored by the other team,
While Kings picked up overall positives in plus/minus ratings in their wins against the Jazz and the Bucks, the Warriors win was unique. It is the only game this season where every team member who played received a positive plus/minus rating. No one was in the negative.
That includes guys like Keon Ellis and Devin Carter who didn't score a single point last night. They still had a positive rating because the Kings outscored the Warriors while they were on the court. In fact, Ellis actually tied the debuting Precious Achiuwa for best plus/minus rating on the team.
Take all of this with a grain of salt. As previously mentioned, analyzing the plus/minus stat really requires a larger, long-term data set to pull anything meaningful from. Still, it was interesting to see the plus/minus reflect the effort that went into that victory and the great play that came out of it.