interesting stat on lakers/blazers game

[uncfelix]

read some posts about this game, i was on the blazers small last night (you can check from my pick in the bracket buster contest), and my biggest reason for doing so was remembering the last game the lakers played in portland entailed that nasty takedown of rudy fernandez by trevor ariza. this along with jackson not making the trip were big intangibles. regardless of who i took, upon looking at the box score this morning, i noticed that by far and despite limited minutes, ariza had the worst plus-minus ratio in the game. on the other side, fernandez by far had the best plus-minus ration. yet both played limited minutes making this contrast in numbers all the more striking. and although fernandez did play well, ariza's numbers(except the +/-) were relatively harmless, and could be seen as having a neutral rather than negative impact on the team. i've been pretty hesitant to put much weight on these relatively new stats for nba players, but in this case, it seems way too random to think these numbers turned out the way they did by chance. sometimes a player goes off and it's easy to tell that they were the intangible, but the whole plus-minus ratio is supposed to suggest that the team plays well or doesn't when this person is in the game. that makes me really believe that both sides were still very cognizant of what happened the last time they played in portland. just my opinion.