Plus-minus is a statistic measuring the point differential while a player is on the floor: the team's score minus the opponent's score during that player's minutes.
Plus-minus is the box score's simplest attempt to answer its hardest question: did the team win while you played? The number is pure arithmetic, points scored minus points allowed during a player's minutes, and it appears in every modern box score. A bench player can lead a game in plus-minus without scoring, which is exactly the point of the statistic and exactly why arguments about it never end.
Its limits are written into its design. Plus-minus credits and blames a player for four teammates and five opponents at once, swings wildly in single games, and stabilizes only across seasons, where adjusted versions try to strip out teammate effects with regression. The raw version entered NBA box scores in the 2007 playoffs era of expanded statistics and became standard fan vocabulary within a decade.
For quizzes, plus-minus is a vocabulary term rather than a record term: stems use it to describe impact that scoring totals miss, and the definition's fine print, on court only, team differential, is the entire content. It pairs with this category's other attempts to price a player in one number, each of which answers a slightly different question.
In use"He scored only six points but finished plus twenty one, the best plus-minus in the game."