Warriors Plus-Minus Through 1/12/09

Tell us a story, 82games, a story that takes us through Monday's loss to Cleveland...

For all the Monta hype, you simply can not find an advanced basketball metric by which he rates as Corey Maggette's equal thus far. Monta may deserve more credit than defensive measurements give him because he's so often had to defend our opponents' stars; by the same token, though, Maggette may deserve more credit than defensive measurements give him because he's so often had to defend our opponents' power forwards. Maggette has pretty clearly been our best player, and any wistful All-Star talk should be pointed in his direction.

As discussed recently, both Anthony Morrow and C.J. Watson have seen their personal production decline, but both continue to post plus-minus numbers that are solidly in the black; interestingly, we defend better with each guy on the floor, dramatically so in CJ's case. Anthony Randolph sits on the other side of the spectrum, with plus-minus numbers far less impressive than his production would imply; this may have more to do with boxing out than anything else (another topic we discussed recently).

Monta Ellis's plus-minus has gotten significantly less horrible since the last time we checked, and it now seems safe to say that he will not, in fact, make history in this department. It's still damn bad, though, with all of the damage continuing to occur on the offensive end... the obvious prescription here is more rest. Ronny Turiaf's personal production has been piddling (understandable, given his injuries), but he has defended and passed well enough to rate as a viable player. Stephen Curry remains a below-par Warrior by plus-minus, and for obvious reasons... his poor defensive on/off showing is the diametric opposite of CJ's.

Chris Hunter no longer looks like much of a player, but his defense does move the dial at least a little, as only Ronny's results have been better amongst our bigs. Andris Biedrins will continue to rate poorly in plus-minus for a while, thanks to a Wade-induced minus-27 against Miami... we, however, are not Worried. Vladimir Radmanovic has a surprisingly decent showing here, but one that doesn't seem related to anything he's doing; we have allowed fewer free throws with him on the floor, despite him committing a good number of fouls himself. With all due respect to the big man, this one seems more or less like a fluke.

Mikki Moore has been wished well in his future endeavors, but his showing here is too striking to exclude. These numbers reflect the results of our first 36 games, a stretch in which we went 11-25 and played every bit that badly... our opponents outscored us by 4.4 points per 48 minutes. But the 77% of the time that Mikki had not been on the floor, our opponents only outscored us by a point per 48 minutes. We played like a 29-53 team overall, but like a 38-44 team whenever Mikki-less. That's not to say that all of our struggles in our 405 Mikki'ed minutes were his fault, but, man -- maybe it wasn't such a good idea to play him that much.