Compilation of Michael Jordan’s on-off data with the Bulls
Posted: Tue Aug 15, 2023 1:25 am
UPDATED JUNE 17, 2025
We have various sources of on-off data for Michael Jordan. This thread is meant to compile them all in one place.
Here is a list of the different sources of on-off data for that we have for Jordan with the Bulls:
1. We have normal play-by-play data from the 1996-1997 and 1997-1998 regular season and playoffs, which we can find on Basketball Reference.
2. We have Pollack plus-minus data for the 1994-1995 and 1995-1996 regular seasons.
3. We have on-off data provided by Thinking Basketball, where Ben Taylor tracked on-off for Jordan’s playoff games from 1988 through 1996
4. We have Squared plus-minus data for portions of the 1984-1985, 1987-1988, 1989-1990, 1990-1991, and 1992-1993 regular seasons, along with the entire 1984-1985 playoffs.
5. We have Djoker’s on-off tracking for Jordan in the 1986, 1987, 1989, 1990, and 1995 playoffs.
6. We have Dipper13’s on-off tracking for Jordan in the 1992 playoffs and a portion of the 1991-1992 regular season.
So let’s combine what we know. I will list data below, and will note which source each piece of data comes from and I’ll describe the methodology that I used to derive the data (as well as potential sources of error) at the bottom of the post.
Please note that, as of a January 2024 update of this post, the data in this post is in per-48-minute terms, rather than per-100-possession terms. Since there’s usually fewer than 100 possessions per game, on-off per 48 minutes should generally be lower than on-off per 100 possessions. So if you want to think about what these numbers would mean in per-100-possession terms, a good rule of thumb is probably to bump these values up a bit in your mind. An original version of this post tried to convert this stuff to per-100-possessions terms using Basketball-Reference’s pace estimations, but that inherently introduced some error (since basketball-reference only estimates pace, and the adjustment required assuming equal pace when a player was on and off the court), and it appears that those errors aren’t necessarily tiny, since applying this adjustment to plus-minus data for recent players often doesn’t really match basketball-reference’s on-off calculations for those same players. I’ve therefore decided to avoid this issue by putting the numbers in per-48-minute terms. Please keep that in mind.
Michael Jordan’s Per 48 Minutes On-Off Data
1984-1985
Regular Season (source: Squared data; 27 games):
- On: +2.20 (+47 in 1025 minutes)
- Off: -11.65 (-67 in 276 minutes)
- On-Off: +13.85
Playoffs (source: Squared data)
- On: +2.81 (+10 in 171 minutes)
- Off: -73.14 (-32 in 21 minutes)
- On-Off: +75.95
1985-1986
Playoffs (source: Djoker’s tracking)
- On: -7.47 (-21 in 135 minutes)
- Off: -50.53 (-20 in 19 minutes)
- On-Off: +43.06
1986-1987
Playoffs (source: Djoker’s tracking)
- On: -1.50 (-4 in 128 minutes)
- Off: -60.00 (-20 in 16 minutes)
- On-Off: +58.5
1987-1988
Regular Season (source: Squared data; 42 games)
- On: +5.65 (+205 in 1742 minutes)
- Off: -17.14 (-105 in 294 minutes)
- On-Off: +22.79
Playoffs (source: Thinking Basketball)
- On: -3.67 (-33 in 431.96 minutes)
- Off: -7.99 (-8 in 48.04 minutes)
- On-Off: +4.32
1988-1989
Playoffs (source: Djoker’s tracking)
- On: +3.41 (+51 in 718 minutes)
- Off: -20.89 (-47 in 108 minutes)
- On-Off: +24.30
1989-1990
Regular Season (source: Squared data; 56 games)
- On: +7.26 (+333 in 2201 minutes)
- Off: -17.23 (-182 in 507 minutes)
- On-Off: +24.49
Playoffs (source: Djoker’s tracking)
- On: +7.12 (+100 in 674 minutes)
- Off: -22.98 (-45 in 94 minutes)
- On-Off: +30.10
1990-1991
Regular Season (source: Squared data; 56 games)
- On: +10.03 (+432 in 2067 minutes)
- Off: -7.09 (-94 in 636 minutes)
- On-Off: +17.12
Playoffs (source: Thinking Basketball)
- On: +13.54 (+196 in 694.623 minutes)
- Off: +1.14 (+3 in 126.377 minutes)
- On-Off: +12.40
1991-1992
Regular Season (source: Dipper13’s tracking; 55 games, including 2 games Jordan missed)
- On: +12.56 (+554 in 2118 minutes)
- Off: -10.78 (-124 in 552 minutes)
- On-Off: +23.34
Playoffs (source: Dipper13’s tracking)
- On: +6.68 (+128 in 920 minutes)
- Off: +2.72 (+8 in 141 minutes)
- On-Off: +3.96
1992-1993
Regular Season (source: Squared data; 63 games)
- On: +9.42 (+489 in 2490 minutes)
- Off: -6.44 (-75 in 559 minutes)
- On-Off: +15.86
Playoffs (source: Thinking Basketball)
- On: +7.33 (+120 in 786.29 minutes)
- Off: -3.07 (-9 in 140.71 minutes)
- On-Off: +10.40
1994-1995
Regular Season (source: Pollack plus-minus data; note: includes only the games after Jordan came back)
- On: +6.54 (+91 in 668 minutes)
- Off: +8.16 (+26 in 153 minutes)
- On-Off: -1.62
Playoffs (source: Djoker’s tracking)
- On: -1.60 (-14 in 420 minutes)
- Off: +17.72 (+24 in 65 minutes)
- On-Off: -19.32
1995-1996
Regular Season (source: Pollack plus-minus data)
- On: +15.22 (+980 in 3090 minutes)
- Off: +1.35 (+24 in 856 minutes)
- On-Off: +13.87
Playoffs (source: Thinking Basketball)
- On: +13.06 (+199 in 731.16 minutes)
- Off: -3.13 (-9 in 137.84 minutes)
- On-Off: +16.19
1996-1997
Regular Season (source: Basketball Reference via Statsmuse)
- On: +12.64 (+818 in 3106 minutes)
- Off: +3.89 (+68 in 840 minutes)
- On-Off: +8.75
Playoffs (source: Basketball Reference via Thinking Basketball)
- On: +8.12 (+136 in 804 minutes)
- Off: -13.78 (-31 in 108 minutes)
- On-Off: +21.90
1997-1998
Regular Season (source: Basketball Reference via Statsmuse)
- On: +9.02 (+598 in 3181 minutes)
- Off: -0.91 (-15 in 790 minutes)
- On-Off: +9.93
Playoffs (source: Basketball Reference via Thinking Basketball)
- On: +8.70 (+158 in 872 minutes)
- Off: -3.62 (-11 in 146 minutes)
- On-Off: +12.32
Single-year playoff on-off is very low sample size data, so it’s good to try to look at as large a sample size as possible. Fortunately, since we have data for every single playoffs Jordan played in, we can also derive from all this an estimate of Jordan’s playoff on-off for his entire career.
Michael Jordan Career Playoff On-Off Per 48 Minutes
- On: +6.58 (+1026 in 7486.033 minutes)
- Off: -8.08 (-197 in 1170.967 minutes)
- On-Off per 48 minutes: +14.66
Between all this regular season and playoff data, we also have on-off data for 739 games out of the 1,109 games Jordan played for the Bulls (66.63% of his Bulls games). Below is the on-off per 48 minutes for all the games included in the above data. Please note that this is not a representative sample, since it is skewed towards the specific years we have. In particular, it is obviously skewed towards the latter part of Jordan’s time at the Bulls, where we have all of his regular season data. Indeed, his last three years with the Bulls make up 304 out of the 739 games that we have. Given that the team was better in those years than they were on average throughout Jordan’s career and that Jordan wasn’t quite as his peak in those years, the sampling error here likely skews things up in terms of the “on” value but down in terms of the on-off. With that all in mind, it still seems worth presenting.
Michael Jordan Total On-Off Per 48 Minutes in all Bulls data we have (including 739 games out of Jordan’s 1,109 games with the Bulls; note: this is a large sample but not an entirely representative one)
- On: +9.17 (+5573 in 29,174.033 minutes)
- Off: -5.36 (-741 in 6633.967 minutes)
- On-Off per 48 minutes: +14.53
_____________________________________________________________________________________
Description of Methodology
1. Basketball Reference: While Basketball-Reference has per-100-possession on-off data for Jordan for 1996-1997 and 1997-1998, the rest of the data in the post is on a per-48-minute basis, so I pulled per-48-minute basis from Basketball-Reference data, to keep things consistent. This just involves using Basketball Reference’s plus-minus data and their minutes data. I pulled the plus-minus data for the 1996-1997 and 1997-1998 regular season by using Statsmuse and searching for “michael jordan plus minus 1996-1997 regular season” and “michael jordan plus minus 1997-1998 regular season.” I pulled the plus-minus data for the 1996-1997 and 1997-1998 playoffs by using the Thinking Basketball data set provided to us by DraymondGold (see this post: https://forums.realgm.com/boards/viewtopic.php?p=110611516#p110611516). In order to get the minutes Jordan was “on” the court, I just looked at Basketball Reference data. To get the minutes Jordan was “off” the court, I subtracted Jordan’s minutes from the team’s total minutes according to Basketball Reference.
2. Pollack: Pollack tracked Jordan’s (and other players’) plus-minus in the 1994-1995 and 1995-1996 regular seasons. While I cannot currently find record of the original data source for this anymore, this data was discussed in the following thread, where posters specifically referred to Jordan having a +980 plus minus in the 1995-1996 regular season according to Pollack (see this post in that thread, for example: https://forums.realgm.com/boards/viewtopic.php?p=41095328#p41095328). The data is also found in this spreadsheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Z-0DQCSQr5vMLUp1zY4DbsmzBM4UFghqG4dc1eHfBh4/edit#gid=1672058251. I used that data. From there, one can derive all the necessary on-off-per-48-minute data just by pulling the minutes data and overall MOV data for those seasons from Basketball Reference. Please note that, for 1994-1995, I am just using the MOV from the 17 games after Jordan got back in order to get the OFF data. There’s of course an argument to use the rest of the season in the OFF sample (and including it would make Jordan’s 1994-1995 on-off better), but I’m reticent to include it for various reasons, including that it’d skew the overall career OFF sample to be disproportionately based on just OFF minutes from that one season.
3. Thinking Basketball: Thinking Basketball created a video that went over their tracking of Jordan’s on-off data in the playoffs starting in 1988. The video itself provided charts but not the raw data. So the original version of this post was based on eyeballing the charts in the video. However, in the meantime, DraymondGold very helpfully contacted Thinking Basketball and got us the raw data. That data can be found in the first “spoiler” section of the following post: https://forums.realgm.com/boards/viewtopic.php?p=110611516#p110611516. I used the data found in that post.
That said, there was an issue that Djoker and I noticed here. Specifically, as Djoker explained in this post (see here: https://forums.realgm.com/boards/viewtopic.php?p=110656132#p110656132), not all the Thinking Basketball plus-minus data actually adds up to the total team margin of victor. Furthermore, in one year (1990), the “on” and “off” minutes didn’t add up to a whole number. Overall, there are issues with the Thinking Basketball data for the 1989, 1990, 1992, and 1995 playoffs. It’s unclear to me what the issue is, so I have no way to correct it. However, since 1989, 1990, 1992, and 1995 are the years where there’s issues with the Thinking Basketball data, and Djoker and Dipper13 also tracked Jordan’s plus-minus in those playoffs and their numbers actually add up to the total team margin of victory in those playoffs, I‘ve simply used that other data for those years instead of using Thinking Basketball’s numbers. Thus, these issues are not present for any of the years where I’ve reported Thinking Basketball’s data.
4. Squared Data: The Squared +/- data (which can be found here: https://squared2020.com/2022/07/31/some-michael-jordan-plus-minus-numbers/ and here: https://forums.realgm.com/boards/viewtopic.php?p=108089436#p108089436. UPDATE: for now, it seems like Squared has pulled this data down, after an argument on these forums got somewhat personal, but I did keep record of the data, and hopefully Squared will put it back up eventually. Djoker posted screenshots of the data (except for the 1989-1990 data) here: https://forums.realgm.com/boards/viewtopic.php?p=110674231#p110674231). For 1989-1990, Djoker posted a screenshot of the games that were not sampled (https://forums.realgm.com/boards/viewtopic.php?p=118978174#p118978174, from which we can determine the games that were sampled in Squared’s 1990 RAPM that Jordan has a +333 plus-minus in (https://squared2020.com/2025/01/26/1989-1990-nba-rapm/).
Squared’s data also lists offensive and defensive possessions when Jordan was on the court. Originally, I used that along with Basketball Reference’s pace data for each game to come up with per-100-possession numbers. However, since the rest of this post is now in per-48-minute terms, I’ve reported the Squared data in per-48-minute terms as well. This just involved taking the raw plus-minus in the Squared data and pulling the number of minutes Jordan played in those specific games from Basketball Reference and the plus-minus with Jordan off the court by comparing Jordan’s plus-minus with the team’s total MOV in those games. Note that, in order to get the number of “off” minutes, I did look into the number of OT periods in the relevant games in question.
I should note the obvious here though: While the data here includes a very substantial portion of the season (particularly for 1987-1988, 1989-1990, 1990-1991, and 1992-1993), it is not all the games. So, there is obviously potential sampling error here, where the full sample might be different from the smaller sample we have. On this issue, I’d note that the Squared sample for 1990-1991 was substantially less good for the Bulls than the season as a whole (the Bulls had a +6.04 average MOV in the 56 games in the Squared sample, but had a +9.0 average MOV for the season as a whole). The Squared data is missing a bunch of Bulls blowouts and missing very few losses. It’s not really clear which way this would cut in terms of sampling error. Intuitively, I’d think blowouts help a star player’s on-off, since it tends to really juice up their “on” value, and the net rating when they’re off the court is often not actually good since there’s garbage time where the winning team usually doesn’t do well. But it’s also possible that the Bulls did better in those unsampled games because they did a lot better in Jordan’s “off” minutes. We don’t really know, but it’s a source of error. Please note, though, that there is no sampling error for the Squared data for the 1984-1985 playoffs, since we have the data there for every game.
5. Djoker’s Tracking Data: Djoker very helpfully went through video and tracked Jordan’s plus-minus in the 1986, 1987, 1989, 1990, and 1995 playoffs. Djoker’s initial post about this can be found here: https://forums.realgm.com/boards/viewtopic.php?p=110582209#p110582209. That included data for the 1986, 1987, and 1995 playoffs. There was a small correction to the data that was later made and can be found here: https://forums.realgm.com/boards/viewtopic.php?p=110650813#p110650813. I have incorporated that correction into the data. Djoker’s tracking of the 1989 and 1990 playoffs can be found here: https://forums.realgm.com/boards/viewtopic.php?p=111058861#p111058861. That link also includes a correction of the 1995 playoff data. As noted above, Thinking Basketball also tracked Jordan’s plus-minus in the 1989, 1990, and 1995 playoffs, and their numbers differ very slightly. As discussed above, since Djoker’s tracking actually matches the total team margin of victory, I’m going with that data for those playoffs.
6. Dipper13’s Tracking Data: RealGM poster Dipper13 tracked Jordan’s and the Bulls’ plus-minus in the 1992 playoffs, as well as in 53 games of the 1991-1992 regular season along with 2 games Jordan missed that season. That data can be found in this post: https://forums.realgm.com/boards/viewtopic.php?p=48842652#p48842652. Specifically, scroll down to the “Team Performance” section. That provides the plus-minus with Jordan on and off the court in the 1992 playoffs as well as in 55 games of the 1991-1992 regular season. I used that plus-minus data. For the playoffs, I used minutes data from Basketball-Reference to put that in per-48-minutes terms. In order to put the regular season games in per-48-minutes terms, I used the link at the very top of that post to see what games were tracked, and then manually tabulated how many minutes Jordan played in those games using Basketball Reference’s game logs. After accounting for how many OT periods there were in those games, I could then calculate the number of minutes the Bulls played in those games and therefore how many minutes Jordan was off the court.
I note that Thinking Basketball also tracked Jordan’s plus-minus in the 1992 playoffs, and their numbers differ a fair bit. As discussed above, since Dipper13’s tracking actually matches the total team margin of victory, I’m going with that data for the 1992 playoffs.
Please also note that, similar to what was discussed above with the Squared data, the 1991-1992 regular season data doesn’t include the whole season, and therefore is subject to potential sampling error. Like with the 1990-1991 Squared data, the Bulls actually did better in the unsampled games, though (they went 25-2 in the unsampled games and 42-13 in the sampled games; and they had an average MOV of +7.82 in the sampled games and +15.78 in the unsampled games).
7. Total Playoff On-Off and Total Career On-Off for data we have: This information was derived using the existing data I already provided. Basically, in order to do this, I needed to separately calculate both an “on” value and an “off” value for all of this data combined (for all the playoffs games for the career playoff on-off and for all the data we have for the on-off that uses all the data). To get the “on” value per 48 minutes, I just added up the combined plus-minus on the court, divided by the combined number of minutes on the court, and then multiplied by 48. I then did the same for the “off” value, using the combined plus-minus off the court, divided by the combined number of minutes off the court, and then multiplied by 48. Once we have both an “on” and “off” value for these playoffs, it’s obviously easy to get an on-off number, by simply taking the “on” value minus the “off” value.
Finally, in general, I’ll note that if anyone notices any data-entry errors or something, I’m happy to fix them. I tried to be quite thorough, but it’s certainly possible I made a mistake somewhere, so anyone should feel free to double-check and let me know if I made a mistake.
We have various sources of on-off data for Michael Jordan. This thread is meant to compile them all in one place.
Here is a list of the different sources of on-off data for that we have for Jordan with the Bulls:
1. We have normal play-by-play data from the 1996-1997 and 1997-1998 regular season and playoffs, which we can find on Basketball Reference.
2. We have Pollack plus-minus data for the 1994-1995 and 1995-1996 regular seasons.
3. We have on-off data provided by Thinking Basketball, where Ben Taylor tracked on-off for Jordan’s playoff games from 1988 through 1996
4. We have Squared plus-minus data for portions of the 1984-1985, 1987-1988, 1989-1990, 1990-1991, and 1992-1993 regular seasons, along with the entire 1984-1985 playoffs.
5. We have Djoker’s on-off tracking for Jordan in the 1986, 1987, 1989, 1990, and 1995 playoffs.
6. We have Dipper13’s on-off tracking for Jordan in the 1992 playoffs and a portion of the 1991-1992 regular season.
So let’s combine what we know. I will list data below, and will note which source each piece of data comes from and I’ll describe the methodology that I used to derive the data (as well as potential sources of error) at the bottom of the post.
Please note that, as of a January 2024 update of this post, the data in this post is in per-48-minute terms, rather than per-100-possession terms. Since there’s usually fewer than 100 possessions per game, on-off per 48 minutes should generally be lower than on-off per 100 possessions. So if you want to think about what these numbers would mean in per-100-possession terms, a good rule of thumb is probably to bump these values up a bit in your mind. An original version of this post tried to convert this stuff to per-100-possessions terms using Basketball-Reference’s pace estimations, but that inherently introduced some error (since basketball-reference only estimates pace, and the adjustment required assuming equal pace when a player was on and off the court), and it appears that those errors aren’t necessarily tiny, since applying this adjustment to plus-minus data for recent players often doesn’t really match basketball-reference’s on-off calculations for those same players. I’ve therefore decided to avoid this issue by putting the numbers in per-48-minute terms. Please keep that in mind.
Michael Jordan’s Per 48 Minutes On-Off Data
1984-1985
Regular Season (source: Squared data; 27 games):
- On: +2.20 (+47 in 1025 minutes)
- Off: -11.65 (-67 in 276 minutes)
- On-Off: +13.85
Playoffs (source: Squared data)
- On: +2.81 (+10 in 171 minutes)
- Off: -73.14 (-32 in 21 minutes)
- On-Off: +75.95
1985-1986
Playoffs (source: Djoker’s tracking)
- On: -7.47 (-21 in 135 minutes)
- Off: -50.53 (-20 in 19 minutes)
- On-Off: +43.06
1986-1987
Playoffs (source: Djoker’s tracking)
- On: -1.50 (-4 in 128 minutes)
- Off: -60.00 (-20 in 16 minutes)
- On-Off: +58.5
1987-1988
Regular Season (source: Squared data; 42 games)
- On: +5.65 (+205 in 1742 minutes)
- Off: -17.14 (-105 in 294 minutes)
- On-Off: +22.79
Playoffs (source: Thinking Basketball)
- On: -3.67 (-33 in 431.96 minutes)
- Off: -7.99 (-8 in 48.04 minutes)
- On-Off: +4.32
1988-1989
Playoffs (source: Djoker’s tracking)
- On: +3.41 (+51 in 718 minutes)
- Off: -20.89 (-47 in 108 minutes)
- On-Off: +24.30
1989-1990
Regular Season (source: Squared data; 56 games)
- On: +7.26 (+333 in 2201 minutes)
- Off: -17.23 (-182 in 507 minutes)
- On-Off: +24.49
Playoffs (source: Djoker’s tracking)
- On: +7.12 (+100 in 674 minutes)
- Off: -22.98 (-45 in 94 minutes)
- On-Off: +30.10
1990-1991
Regular Season (source: Squared data; 56 games)
- On: +10.03 (+432 in 2067 minutes)
- Off: -7.09 (-94 in 636 minutes)
- On-Off: +17.12
Playoffs (source: Thinking Basketball)
- On: +13.54 (+196 in 694.623 minutes)
- Off: +1.14 (+3 in 126.377 minutes)
- On-Off: +12.40
1991-1992
Regular Season (source: Dipper13’s tracking; 55 games, including 2 games Jordan missed)
- On: +12.56 (+554 in 2118 minutes)
- Off: -10.78 (-124 in 552 minutes)
- On-Off: +23.34
Playoffs (source: Dipper13’s tracking)
- On: +6.68 (+128 in 920 minutes)
- Off: +2.72 (+8 in 141 minutes)
- On-Off: +3.96
1992-1993
Regular Season (source: Squared data; 63 games)
- On: +9.42 (+489 in 2490 minutes)
- Off: -6.44 (-75 in 559 minutes)
- On-Off: +15.86
Playoffs (source: Thinking Basketball)
- On: +7.33 (+120 in 786.29 minutes)
- Off: -3.07 (-9 in 140.71 minutes)
- On-Off: +10.40
1994-1995
Regular Season (source: Pollack plus-minus data; note: includes only the games after Jordan came back)
- On: +6.54 (+91 in 668 minutes)
- Off: +8.16 (+26 in 153 minutes)
- On-Off: -1.62
Playoffs (source: Djoker’s tracking)
- On: -1.60 (-14 in 420 minutes)
- Off: +17.72 (+24 in 65 minutes)
- On-Off: -19.32
1995-1996
Regular Season (source: Pollack plus-minus data)
- On: +15.22 (+980 in 3090 minutes)
- Off: +1.35 (+24 in 856 minutes)
- On-Off: +13.87
Playoffs (source: Thinking Basketball)
- On: +13.06 (+199 in 731.16 minutes)
- Off: -3.13 (-9 in 137.84 minutes)
- On-Off: +16.19
1996-1997
Regular Season (source: Basketball Reference via Statsmuse)
- On: +12.64 (+818 in 3106 minutes)
- Off: +3.89 (+68 in 840 minutes)
- On-Off: +8.75
Playoffs (source: Basketball Reference via Thinking Basketball)
- On: +8.12 (+136 in 804 minutes)
- Off: -13.78 (-31 in 108 minutes)
- On-Off: +21.90
1997-1998
Regular Season (source: Basketball Reference via Statsmuse)
- On: +9.02 (+598 in 3181 minutes)
- Off: -0.91 (-15 in 790 minutes)
- On-Off: +9.93
Playoffs (source: Basketball Reference via Thinking Basketball)
- On: +8.70 (+158 in 872 minutes)
- Off: -3.62 (-11 in 146 minutes)
- On-Off: +12.32
Single-year playoff on-off is very low sample size data, so it’s good to try to look at as large a sample size as possible. Fortunately, since we have data for every single playoffs Jordan played in, we can also derive from all this an estimate of Jordan’s playoff on-off for his entire career.
Michael Jordan Career Playoff On-Off Per 48 Minutes
- On: +6.58 (+1026 in 7486.033 minutes)
- Off: -8.08 (-197 in 1170.967 minutes)
- On-Off per 48 minutes: +14.66
Between all this regular season and playoff data, we also have on-off data for 739 games out of the 1,109 games Jordan played for the Bulls (66.63% of his Bulls games). Below is the on-off per 48 minutes for all the games included in the above data. Please note that this is not a representative sample, since it is skewed towards the specific years we have. In particular, it is obviously skewed towards the latter part of Jordan’s time at the Bulls, where we have all of his regular season data. Indeed, his last three years with the Bulls make up 304 out of the 739 games that we have. Given that the team was better in those years than they were on average throughout Jordan’s career and that Jordan wasn’t quite as his peak in those years, the sampling error here likely skews things up in terms of the “on” value but down in terms of the on-off. With that all in mind, it still seems worth presenting.
Michael Jordan Total On-Off Per 48 Minutes in all Bulls data we have (including 739 games out of Jordan’s 1,109 games with the Bulls; note: this is a large sample but not an entirely representative one)
- On: +9.17 (+5573 in 29,174.033 minutes)
- Off: -5.36 (-741 in 6633.967 minutes)
- On-Off per 48 minutes: +14.53
_____________________________________________________________________________________
Description of Methodology
1. Basketball Reference: While Basketball-Reference has per-100-possession on-off data for Jordan for 1996-1997 and 1997-1998, the rest of the data in the post is on a per-48-minute basis, so I pulled per-48-minute basis from Basketball-Reference data, to keep things consistent. This just involves using Basketball Reference’s plus-minus data and their minutes data. I pulled the plus-minus data for the 1996-1997 and 1997-1998 regular season by using Statsmuse and searching for “michael jordan plus minus 1996-1997 regular season” and “michael jordan plus minus 1997-1998 regular season.” I pulled the plus-minus data for the 1996-1997 and 1997-1998 playoffs by using the Thinking Basketball data set provided to us by DraymondGold (see this post: https://forums.realgm.com/boards/viewtopic.php?p=110611516#p110611516). In order to get the minutes Jordan was “on” the court, I just looked at Basketball Reference data. To get the minutes Jordan was “off” the court, I subtracted Jordan’s minutes from the team’s total minutes according to Basketball Reference.
2. Pollack: Pollack tracked Jordan’s (and other players’) plus-minus in the 1994-1995 and 1995-1996 regular seasons. While I cannot currently find record of the original data source for this anymore, this data was discussed in the following thread, where posters specifically referred to Jordan having a +980 plus minus in the 1995-1996 regular season according to Pollack (see this post in that thread, for example: https://forums.realgm.com/boards/viewtopic.php?p=41095328#p41095328). The data is also found in this spreadsheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Z-0DQCSQr5vMLUp1zY4DbsmzBM4UFghqG4dc1eHfBh4/edit#gid=1672058251. I used that data. From there, one can derive all the necessary on-off-per-48-minute data just by pulling the minutes data and overall MOV data for those seasons from Basketball Reference. Please note that, for 1994-1995, I am just using the MOV from the 17 games after Jordan got back in order to get the OFF data. There’s of course an argument to use the rest of the season in the OFF sample (and including it would make Jordan’s 1994-1995 on-off better), but I’m reticent to include it for various reasons, including that it’d skew the overall career OFF sample to be disproportionately based on just OFF minutes from that one season.
3. Thinking Basketball: Thinking Basketball created a video that went over their tracking of Jordan’s on-off data in the playoffs starting in 1988. The video itself provided charts but not the raw data. So the original version of this post was based on eyeballing the charts in the video. However, in the meantime, DraymondGold very helpfully contacted Thinking Basketball and got us the raw data. That data can be found in the first “spoiler” section of the following post: https://forums.realgm.com/boards/viewtopic.php?p=110611516#p110611516. I used the data found in that post.
That said, there was an issue that Djoker and I noticed here. Specifically, as Djoker explained in this post (see here: https://forums.realgm.com/boards/viewtopic.php?p=110656132#p110656132), not all the Thinking Basketball plus-minus data actually adds up to the total team margin of victor. Furthermore, in one year (1990), the “on” and “off” minutes didn’t add up to a whole number. Overall, there are issues with the Thinking Basketball data for the 1989, 1990, 1992, and 1995 playoffs. It’s unclear to me what the issue is, so I have no way to correct it. However, since 1989, 1990, 1992, and 1995 are the years where there’s issues with the Thinking Basketball data, and Djoker and Dipper13 also tracked Jordan’s plus-minus in those playoffs and their numbers actually add up to the total team margin of victory in those playoffs, I‘ve simply used that other data for those years instead of using Thinking Basketball’s numbers. Thus, these issues are not present for any of the years where I’ve reported Thinking Basketball’s data.
4. Squared Data: The Squared +/- data (which can be found here: https://squared2020.com/2022/07/31/some-michael-jordan-plus-minus-numbers/ and here: https://forums.realgm.com/boards/viewtopic.php?p=108089436#p108089436. UPDATE: for now, it seems like Squared has pulled this data down, after an argument on these forums got somewhat personal, but I did keep record of the data, and hopefully Squared will put it back up eventually. Djoker posted screenshots of the data (except for the 1989-1990 data) here: https://forums.realgm.com/boards/viewtopic.php?p=110674231#p110674231). For 1989-1990, Djoker posted a screenshot of the games that were not sampled (https://forums.realgm.com/boards/viewtopic.php?p=118978174#p118978174, from which we can determine the games that were sampled in Squared’s 1990 RAPM that Jordan has a +333 plus-minus in (https://squared2020.com/2025/01/26/1989-1990-nba-rapm/).
Squared’s data also lists offensive and defensive possessions when Jordan was on the court. Originally, I used that along with Basketball Reference’s pace data for each game to come up with per-100-possession numbers. However, since the rest of this post is now in per-48-minute terms, I’ve reported the Squared data in per-48-minute terms as well. This just involved taking the raw plus-minus in the Squared data and pulling the number of minutes Jordan played in those specific games from Basketball Reference and the plus-minus with Jordan off the court by comparing Jordan’s plus-minus with the team’s total MOV in those games. Note that, in order to get the number of “off” minutes, I did look into the number of OT periods in the relevant games in question.
I should note the obvious here though: While the data here includes a very substantial portion of the season (particularly for 1987-1988, 1989-1990, 1990-1991, and 1992-1993), it is not all the games. So, there is obviously potential sampling error here, where the full sample might be different from the smaller sample we have. On this issue, I’d note that the Squared sample for 1990-1991 was substantially less good for the Bulls than the season as a whole (the Bulls had a +6.04 average MOV in the 56 games in the Squared sample, but had a +9.0 average MOV for the season as a whole). The Squared data is missing a bunch of Bulls blowouts and missing very few losses. It’s not really clear which way this would cut in terms of sampling error. Intuitively, I’d think blowouts help a star player’s on-off, since it tends to really juice up their “on” value, and the net rating when they’re off the court is often not actually good since there’s garbage time where the winning team usually doesn’t do well. But it’s also possible that the Bulls did better in those unsampled games because they did a lot better in Jordan’s “off” minutes. We don’t really know, but it’s a source of error. Please note, though, that there is no sampling error for the Squared data for the 1984-1985 playoffs, since we have the data there for every game.
5. Djoker’s Tracking Data: Djoker very helpfully went through video and tracked Jordan’s plus-minus in the 1986, 1987, 1989, 1990, and 1995 playoffs. Djoker’s initial post about this can be found here: https://forums.realgm.com/boards/viewtopic.php?p=110582209#p110582209. That included data for the 1986, 1987, and 1995 playoffs. There was a small correction to the data that was later made and can be found here: https://forums.realgm.com/boards/viewtopic.php?p=110650813#p110650813. I have incorporated that correction into the data. Djoker’s tracking of the 1989 and 1990 playoffs can be found here: https://forums.realgm.com/boards/viewtopic.php?p=111058861#p111058861. That link also includes a correction of the 1995 playoff data. As noted above, Thinking Basketball also tracked Jordan’s plus-minus in the 1989, 1990, and 1995 playoffs, and their numbers differ very slightly. As discussed above, since Djoker’s tracking actually matches the total team margin of victory, I’m going with that data for those playoffs.
6. Dipper13’s Tracking Data: RealGM poster Dipper13 tracked Jordan’s and the Bulls’ plus-minus in the 1992 playoffs, as well as in 53 games of the 1991-1992 regular season along with 2 games Jordan missed that season. That data can be found in this post: https://forums.realgm.com/boards/viewtopic.php?p=48842652#p48842652. Specifically, scroll down to the “Team Performance” section. That provides the plus-minus with Jordan on and off the court in the 1992 playoffs as well as in 55 games of the 1991-1992 regular season. I used that plus-minus data. For the playoffs, I used minutes data from Basketball-Reference to put that in per-48-minutes terms. In order to put the regular season games in per-48-minutes terms, I used the link at the very top of that post to see what games were tracked, and then manually tabulated how many minutes Jordan played in those games using Basketball Reference’s game logs. After accounting for how many OT periods there were in those games, I could then calculate the number of minutes the Bulls played in those games and therefore how many minutes Jordan was off the court.
I note that Thinking Basketball also tracked Jordan’s plus-minus in the 1992 playoffs, and their numbers differ a fair bit. As discussed above, since Dipper13’s tracking actually matches the total team margin of victory, I’m going with that data for the 1992 playoffs.
Please also note that, similar to what was discussed above with the Squared data, the 1991-1992 regular season data doesn’t include the whole season, and therefore is subject to potential sampling error. Like with the 1990-1991 Squared data, the Bulls actually did better in the unsampled games, though (they went 25-2 in the unsampled games and 42-13 in the sampled games; and they had an average MOV of +7.82 in the sampled games and +15.78 in the unsampled games).
7. Total Playoff On-Off and Total Career On-Off for data we have: This information was derived using the existing data I already provided. Basically, in order to do this, I needed to separately calculate both an “on” value and an “off” value for all of this data combined (for all the playoffs games for the career playoff on-off and for all the data we have for the on-off that uses all the data). To get the “on” value per 48 minutes, I just added up the combined plus-minus on the court, divided by the combined number of minutes on the court, and then multiplied by 48. I then did the same for the “off” value, using the combined plus-minus off the court, divided by the combined number of minutes off the court, and then multiplied by 48. Once we have both an “on” and “off” value for these playoffs, it’s obviously easy to get an on-off number, by simply taking the “on” value minus the “off” value.
Finally, in general, I’ll note that if anyone notices any data-entry errors or something, I’m happy to fix them. I tried to be quite thorough, but it’s certainly possible I made a mistake somewhere, so anyone should feel free to double-check and let me know if I made a mistake.