The basketball coaches at Santa Monica College had this kid.
A wisp of a player at 5 feet 3, he wasn’t a particularly strong shooter and didn’t score much. What he lacked in skill he more than compensated for by diving on the court, taking charges, stripping the ball from the guy he was defending.
The basketball coaches at Santa Monica College had this other kid.
A sturdy 6-5, he could score and was the sort of splendid physical specimen often selected first in pickup games. But he’d often lose those games because he lacked other qualities such as grit, hustle and determination.
As he pondered the differences between the players in 1976, Andy Hill, then the team’s assistant coach, searched for a way to reward the overachiever while trying to extract more out of his less selfless counterpart.
“I sat there thinking about all the things as a coach you try to get guys to do — dive on the floor, talk on defense, take a charge — and I’m going, that stuff makes you win,” said Hill, a veteran of valuing the team over the individual after three national championship seasons as a reserve guard at UCLA under coach John Wooden. “And literally in that moment, a lightbulb moment, it’s like, it’s the scoreboard, right?”
In other words, how did a player’s team do while he was on the court? Did the team increase its lead? Lose its lead? Keep the score the same? For instance, if his team outscored its opponent by nine points while he was on the court, the player was given a plus-nine. If his team lost six points off its lead, it earned him a minus-six.
Under this metric, the tally for each player reflected his influence on the team. Trumpeting the concept in an article in the January 1977 issue of Scholastic Coach magazine, Hill called it the Team Contribution Index.
Over the years, the basketball community went on to call it something else. Look at any box score or listen to almost any broadcast, and even the most casual observer will notice references to what was essentially Hill’s invention — the plus-minus.
“I just wish,” cracked Hill, who turns 75 in July, “I got a nickel every time an announcer or analyst mentions plus-minus.”
Mick Cronin stood in a hallway inside Purdue’s Mackey Arena studying the box score after a tough late February loss. UCLA’s inability to generate enough stops left its coach searching for answers.
“Will’s plus-five, everybody else is minus,” Cronin said, referring to center William Kyle III as he scanned the page. “We’ve got guys minus-10, minus-19, so we didn’t get the job done defensively.”
Cronin is among an army of coaches who routinely mention plus-minus figures as a gauge of how their players influence winning. Lakers coach JJ Redick agreed that the metric was “in general a useful tool” but cautioned that lineups and other factors needed to be taken into consideration.
“You can feel like a guy has a huge impact on the game and a huge impact on winning in a 10-point win and he’s a minus-nine,” Redick said. “And you can say, ‘Oh, this guy really cost us tonight’ and he’s a plus-seven. I think game to game, it doesn’t always tell the full story.
“But I think in the aggregate, it’s something as you can normalize things with lineups and with minutes you can see. For example, our team, Dorian Finney-Smith impacts winning when he is on the court.”
At plus-268 in his 43 regular-season games since arriving in a trade from Brooklyn, it’s Finney-Smith, a part-time starter — and not superstars Luka Doncic or LeBron James — who led the Lakers in season-long plus-minus. Austin Reaves ranked second on the team at plus-195, followed by Doncic (plus-176) and Rui Hachimura (plus-158).
A nine-year NBA veteran, Finney-Smith said he didn’t think about plus-minus until his coaches kept telling him that good things happened when he was on the court and encouraged him to keep playing his winning brand of basketball. What sorts of things were those coaches talking about?
“Just talking, being communicative, knowing my guys around me, being in the right spots for spacing — anything,” Finney-Smith said. “You know, me being a shooter with this team, being a stretch five, puts defenses at a disadvantage because now the center is out on the three-point line where now LeBron and Luka can get in the paint and get easy points, so I’d say it’s a whole bunch of things — playing hard, doing all the little things.”
Some metrics savants aren’t as sold on plus-minus. Ken Pomeroy, one of basketball’s most widely respected statistical analysts, pointed to a December 2022 game involving the Dallas Mavericks and New York Knicks. Doncic, then with the Mavericks, tallied 60 points, 21 rebounds and 10 assists on the way to finishing plus-seven. Teammate Dwight Powell, who logged two points, no rebounds and one assist in 30 minutes, finished plus-10.
But even going back to his original article, Hill has long acknowledged the limitations of his concept and its increased significance given a larger sample size. Just check the NBA’s leaders in season-long plus-minus — Oklahoma City’s Shai Gilgeous-Alexander (plus-918) and Denver’s Nikola Jokic (plus-594), two of the top candidates for the league’s most valuable player award.
Many of the traits that make Finney-Smith a plus-minus phenom also applied to one of those Santa Monica College kids. Katsumi “Kats” Chinen would pour every ounce of his 5-3 frame into defending taller counterparts who would invariably post him up, often to their great regret.
“He spent a lot more time getting posted up than any of the guys who were posting him up had spent on their low-post game,” Hill said, “and he’d strip ‘em clean, he’d be dribbling so fast the other way, your head would spin.”
Meanwhile, 6-5 forward Falstaff Hawkins might have caused eyes to roll by his singular focus on scoring.
“Here was a guy,” Hill said, “who, you know, a dunk and a date is a lot more important than whether we win.”
That dichotomy made Hill wonder how he could convince his boss, coach Jim Wagner, to motivate Falstaff to do more while rewarding Chinen with more playing time.
Studying for his master’s degree in education, Hill devised what became his de facto thesis: the Team Contribution Index. Using a typewriter at UCLA’s Moore Hall to write an article about the concept, he sent a copy to Scholastic Coach, wondering if he was onto something new or just regurgitating a system that coaches had been using for years.
Hockey had employed a plus-minus system since the 1950s, though it had little relevance to basketball given the low-scoring nature of its game. Hill’s Team Contribution Index involved seemingly countless ways that players could help their team.
“Perhaps more important than cold numbers are the ‘intangibles’ that make up the ‘winner’ — guts, leadership, pride, toughness, concentration, attitude, etc.,” Hill wrote in his article. “It’s those little things that win for you — playing good defense, taking the charge, setting a solid pick, diving after a loose ball and encouraging teammates. It’s easy to find a shooter; it’s much harder to find a winner. Yet most of the statistical reinforcement is for the shooter; the player who does the little things has to be satisfied with a pat on the rear.”
If anyone could render a verdict on Team Contribution Index, it was Wooden, recently retired after a record run of 10 national titles in 12 years. Nervously, Hill went to see his old coach at his modest office inside the Morgan Center.
“I walk it down to coach and my heart’s going boom-boom-boom,” Hill said, tapping his chest with his hand. “Why am I doing this? But he reads this article, very thoughtfully, quite attentively, and he looked up and said, ‘That’s a great idea.’ ”
It was their first positive interaction in years.
Hill arrived at UCLA in 1968 with hopes of becoming the team’s next great point guard.
An All-Los Angeles City Section player who had averaged 27.2 points per game at University High, he lived up to his billing on the Bruins’ freshman team while earning co-MVP honors alongside Henry Bibby.
Their careers diverged from there. Bibby went on to become a starter on three national championship teams while Hill played sparingly off the bench as his backup, averaging 2.1 points in 69 varsity games.
“I thought Andy was better than I was,” Bibby said, “but sometimes people can be better than you but the coach sees something different in you and they go in your direction and I think they went in my direction. I saw Andy as a superior player than me — he just knew basketball and I didn’t know basketball, I just had probably more talent than he did, athleticism.
“But as I look back now, if I hadn’t known Andy Hill was going to be the point guard with me, I wouldn’t have probably gone to UCLA. I thought Andy was that good.”
Hill played so little that a golfing buddy later joked that he was “the man who starts 5,000 cars” because when he entered the game everyone left. In truth, even one eventual star thought he should be playing more only to learn he couldn’t until he fit into the larger group.
Sidney Wicks, who would go on to become one of college basketball’s all-time greats at power forward in his final two seasons, lagged behind others in the rotation as a sophomore even though he could have made a case for being one of the best players on the team.
“He was awesomely talented,” Hill said, explaining Wicks’ delayed emergence, “but awesomely talented fitting in within a system was unbeatable.”
One of Hill’s most enduring memories of playing for Wooden was the coach yelling his name in half the time it took others to say it, reflecting his level of agitation. Feedback was limited about why he wasn’t playing more.
“Coach just shut himself off,” Hill said, “and as a young person, my thought understandably was, he just doesn’t see it, he doesn’t care, whatever. And I felt really bad.”
Many years later, sitting in the den of his Encino condominium, Wooden relayed a story that explained the way he had handled the situation. When he was a sophomore in high school, Wooden was forced to come off the bench as the sixth man even though he knew he was the best player on the team. The humiliation of not starting prompted Wooden to strip to his jockstrap and storm out of the gym.
It was another lightbulb moment for Hill.
“I said, ‘Wow,’” Hill said, recalling his reaction. “It wasn’t that you didn’t know [what it felt like]. It’s just that you couldn’t deal with it.’ And he apologized, he [said he] should have done better, but it’s so human — I understand; I mean, you’re crushing this kid’s dream and you know it, and it was like, ‘Oh, OK, you just couldn’t deal with it.‘”
The men reconciled their differences long before Wooden died in 2010. After Hill left coaching following his brief stint at Santa Monica College, he enjoyed immediate success in the entertainment industry. Rising from a movie and television executive to head of his own production company to president of CBS Productions, Hill presided over some of the most successful shows of the 1990s, including “Walker, Texas Ranger,” “Touched by an Angel” and “Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman.”
Realizing that Wooden’s teachings about collaboration and teamwork had fueled his achievements, Hill called his old coach — with a considerable sense of dread — to share this revelation. Would Wooden take the call? Would he even remember him?
Hill’s apprehension dissolved when Wooden not only picked up as Hill spoke his name on the answering machine but also asked him to visit, leading to an instant reconnection. They went on to co-author the bestselling book “Be Quick — But Don’t Hurry!”
After the publication of his article, Hill charted the Team Contribution Index with his Santa Monica College players in what turned out to be his final year of coaching.
The concept made a limited impact with the team because his boss didn’t believe in its usefulness.
“The guy I was working with,” Hill said, “was far less impressed than John Wooden.”
Hill didn’t think much about it again until several years ago, when he started hearing broadcasters routinely mention plus-minus and seeing it listed in box scores. While the NBA adopted the metric in its box scores in 2007, college basketball started using it in 2018.
“At that point,” Hill said, “I kind of went, whoa, this has really turned from something off to the side and become totally mainstream.”
Ultimately, Hill considered plus-minus an ode to a beloved friend.
“This is all really a Coach Wooden story, in my mind, you know you dial it back to sort of who he was and what he was about,” Hill said. “If the assignment was, summarize coach, it’s a pretty good summary because the underlying principle was, it is about doing all these little things right.”
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