Sorry I didn’t get this up yesterday, but I got back from Cincinnati and had to cover the Hermann Trophy presentation at the MAC.

The usual disclaimer on blowout plus-minuses: The more minuets you play, the worse your number. Unless the winning team has a 20-0 run in three minutes, the minuses are spread out over the course of the game. But even with that qualification, there’s an interesting number in here: Brian Conklin played 28 minutes and was a minus-8. That’s better than Brett Thompson, who played 16 minutes and Willie Reed, who played 18 and Barry Eberhardt, who played 18. I looked back through the substitution patters and Conklin was a +3 in the tail end of the game (after Xavier had gone up 24), and was -8 in the first half, which actually wasn’t quite as good as Reed’s first half number (-5). In the first half, Conklin usually subbed with Thompson and in the second half, he usually subbed with Eberhardt, meaning he played alongside both Thompson and Reed at various points. A quick look says the best big-man combo may actually have been Conklin and Thompson in this game, though you start getting into some pretty small sample sizes. In any case, Conklin’s number is pretty good in a game like this and it doesn’t appear to be inflated by blowout time.

The numbers:

Cassity -4

Eckerle -5

Conklin -8

Thompson -11

Reed -13

Eberhardt -20

Lisch -21

Mitchell -22

Liddell -26