It would be interesting if I thought +/- meant anything.

I’ll grant you it doesn’t mean much in small samples, but, over a career, patterns emerge. There are few if any HoF defensemen who have a negative career plus/minus. I want to say there are none but I would have to check.

My favorite WTF stat in hockey concerns Brian Leetch. In 96/97 he was +31. The next year, 97/98 he was 36. Does that mean that Leetch went from Norris Trophy to bum in one year? Or does it just mean that the Rangers went from a good team to a lousy team in one year. I think the latter. I think +/ is more a reflection of how good a team you are playing on than your skill. And I think Mattias Norstrom is a career negative, but that’s because he played on lousy Kings teams, he was a fine defenseman.

+/- clearly reflects in part the quality of the team a player plays for. A good stat for comparison is +/- relative to team, but I don’t think anyone has calculated the stat for more than the last few seasons. I checked the HoF defensemen, and I was right that there aren’t any with negative +/- or even close. MacInnis, who played on two or three mediocre teams, never put up a negative +/- season (except the last one, where he played maybe 3 games, something like that). It will be interesting to see what happens to Leetch when he comes up for nomination to the HOF. I think (and hope) he’ll get in. He put up more points than Blake, better +/-, won a Conn Smythe, and won a cup with the team he essentially played his whole career for. In the case of Leetch, I think plus/minus tells you about how powerful he was offensively. In the case of Blake, I think it shows an often ignored liability. Blake is a highly-skilled player, but not “all that” in my opinion. He’s not a great leader and I don’t think he deserves to be in the HOF, much less to have his number retired by the Kings. You won’t get any argument from me about Blake being “good.” But when people start calling him a future HOF-er or a legend or whatever, that’s usually when I speak up.

Norstrom, by the way, was a career +8. Which is exceptionally good given, as you said, the crappy teams he played for and the fact that he was a defensive defenseman.