The obvious point is that JaVale needs to play more so that he can develop quicker and correct his mistakes. Assuming Ernie keeps the kid, that is a no-brainer. I merely wanted to point out that it is the defense that JaVale needs the most work on, specifically his on-ball defense, which you agree with me on. Improving in this one area alone would immensely improve his game and his consistency. And it would seem one of the easiest areas for him to improve on, since it is mostly just solid fundamentals.

Yes, I realize that the +/- was just from one game. Yet it is indicative of the two players’ performances all season, and what is more noteworthy about that stat is that Darius played 6 minutes less than JaVale. I wholeheartedly disagree that +/- is not a useful way to analyze an individual player’s contribution to his team. Just like points, though, not factoring in minutes played can skew the result.

Try this – take that same link that you gave above and copy the table into a spreadsheet. Sort by minutes played, and delete all players who have played less than 500 minutes this season in order to account for sample size. Then resort the table you have left by +/- /Min. Below is your new table, which does a much better job of demonstrating each player’s positive/negative impact on this team.

+------------+-------+-----+------+----+----------+--------+--+
|  Player 1  | Team  |  +  |  -   |+/- |   Min    |+/- /Min|G |
+------------+-------+-----+------+----+----------+--------+--+
|D. Songaila |Wizards|1,469|-1,497|-28 | 733:01:00| -0.038 |41|
+------------+-------+-----+------+----+----------+--------+--+
|N. Young    |Wizards|1,758|-1,794|-36 | 901:00:00| -0.039 |42|
+------------+-------+-----+------+----+----------+--------+--+
|A. Blatche  |Wizards|1,743|-1,819|-76 | 908:07:00| -0.083 |39|
+------------+-------+-----+------+----+----------+--------+--+
|A. Jamison  |Wizards|3,191|-3,475|-284|1611:57:00| -0.176 |42|
+------------+-------+-----+------+----+----------+--------+--+
|C. Butler   |Wizards|2,970|-3,254|-284|1493:24:00| -0.190 |39|
+------------+-------+-----+------+----+----------+--------+--+
|M. James    |Wizards|1,422|-1,562|-140| 735:26:00| -0.190 |25|
+------------+-------+-----+------+----+----------+--------+--+
|D. McGuire  |Wizards|1,561|-1,718|-157| 811:19:00| -0.193 |40|
+------------+-------+-----+------+----+----------+--------+--+
|D. Stevenson|Wizards|1,582|-1,763|-181| 805:24:00| -0.224 |29|
+------------+-------+-----+------+----+----------+--------+--+
|J. McGee    |Wizards|  983|-1,168|-185| 528:18:00| -0.350 |37|
+------------+-------+-----+------+----+----------+--------+--+

As you can see, Jamison and Butler are not the worst +/- offenders on this team. JaVale McGee is by far. Darius is the best, followed very closely by Nick Young. Antawn and Caron are in the middle of the pack, which is not surprising, considering that they are constantly being overworked on such a lousy team. In the first three quarters, I would speculate that they are both probably near the top of this table. But by the fourth quarter, both of those guys run out of gas, which is why our team collapses so often in the 4th quarter, in my opinion. Both of those guys average 1,500 minutes played this year. No other player has even played 1,000 minutes yet.

If you don’t exclude for sample size, JaVale is still last in +/-, but at least he has company – he’s tied with Etan Thomas. Opec takes the lead by far in this case, as he is the only player on the team that has a positive +/- for the season.