Monta Ellis, Superstar... er?

You may have heard the kerfluffe in the hoops world about Kevin Durant's plus-minus numbers this summer. For all of his prodigious scoring and highlight-reelin', Durant didn't seem to be making a bad team better: the Thunder got outscored by over eight points per 48 when he played, and essentially played even with their opponents when he didn't. If Durant was so good, why were his teammates having better success without him? Was his defense that bad? Was he stifling his teammates? Did his absence make the coaching staff run simpler plays for the more limited Thunderers, actually improving their efficiency? Whatever the reason, Durant has made the whole conversation more or less moot with his results this season... he has a +9.2 plus-minus to go with his huge individual production, and has clearly been the main engine driving the Thunder to their suprising 10-9 record. His meteoric rise has continued unchecked, leaving many thinking it was a mistake to worry about him in the first place. Maybe a plus-minus of -8.3 isn't all that big a deal.

How about a plus-minus of -20.2?

That's what Monta's sporting right now. When he's on the court for us -- which is 82% of the time, tied with Gerald Wallace for first in the league -- we get outscored by 7.8 points per 48 minutes. Only truly awful teams get outscored by that much per game; some seasons go by without any team sucking to that degree. Whenever Monta, our star, our rock, our beacon of hope, has been out there this year, we've played like a 20-62 team.

"That's depressing," you think, "but we do suck. It'd be even worse if Monta wasn't busting his ass out there." Here's the thing: when Monta's not been on the floor, we've outscored our opponents by 12.4 points per 48 minutes. The record for point differential in a season is held by the '71-'72 Lakers, the Jerry West/Wilt Chamberlain 33-wins-in-a-row world-champion Lakers. Their point differential was... 12.3. When Monta's been on the bench, we have outscored our opponents at a pace that would make us the most dominant team of all time.

When you combine the two numbers -- -7.8 with Monta, +12.4 without him -- you get a total plus-minus of 20.2. Monta's plus-minus is more than twice as bad as Durant's much-discussed one last year. Monta's plus-minus is, in fact the worst of any NBA starter by far. The five worst plus-minuses for guys who've played at least 50% of their team's minutes so far:

Updated Plus-Minus Numbers, 12/09/09

Per the always lovely 82games.com. Updated early yesterday, so last night's heartbreaker is not accounted for in these numbers.

Caveats: this is only one narrow way of looking at production, it's still early in the season, and the opponent production numbers (the aggregate PER of the opponents each guy has been slotted against) are dicey at best. Nellie doesn't even seem to know who plays what position for us out there; it's not likely that 82games has been able to account for individual matchups with much accuracy. Grains of salt abound, and really the data sets for Law, Bell, Biedrins and Turiaf are so small that they should be ignored entirely. But let's take a gander at the other folks.