What Does Plus/Minus Mean in Hockey? +/- Explained

Bobby Orr once finished a season at plus-124, a number no skater has touched since 1971. That figure is the plus/minus stat at its flashiest, and plus/minus is the simplest line on any hockey box score: it counts the goals your team scores and allows at even strength while you are on the ice. Add one for a goal for, subtract one for a goal against, and the running total is your plus/minus. The catch is that the number says as much about your team as it does about you, and I call that blind spot The Goal-Differential Mirage.

Both records belong to defensemen who skated for juggernaut teams, and that is the first clue to what plus/minus really measures. A great player on a great team piles up plus goals; the same player on a bad team bleeds minus ones. Keep that in mind before you judge anyone by this column alone.

What does plus/minus mean?

Plus/minus measures goal differential while a player is on the ice. Every time your team scores at even strength or shorthanded, every skater on the ice for your side gets a plus. Every time your team gives one up in those situations, those skaters get a minus. Add the pluses, subtract the minuses, and the season-long total is the number you see in the box score next to +/-. It sits right alongside goals and assists in the same family of basic stats that drive how the standings work, the same cluster as our guides to how overtime works and how long a game lasts.

One thing to clear up before we go further, because the search results blur it. The player plus/minus has nothing to do with the puck line at a sportsbook, where a team is listed at -1.5 or +1.5 goals. Same symbols, completely different meaning. This guide is only about the on-ice player stat.

How plus/minus is calculated

The rules are simple once you see which goals count and which do not. Here is the full breakdown, straight from the league's own scoring definitions.

The power-play rule is the one that surprises people. If your team scores with the man advantage, nobody on the ice gets a plus, because the stat is built to reward five-on-five play rather than special teams. Score while shorthanded, though, and you are rewarded, since killing a penalty and scoring anyway is the hardest goal in the sport. That single design choice is why two players with the same goal totals can carry wildly different plus/minus numbers.

What is a good plus/minus?

Any number in the plus means your team outscored the opposition while you played, so even a modest plus is a fine sign. A full season above +20 is genuinely strong, and the league's best two-way players push into the +30s and beyond in their peak years. Drop into the minus and it is worth a second glance, but not a panic, because the team around you matters enormously. A defenseman stuck on a 25-win club can post a brutal number while doing nothing wrong. The all-time floor is Bill Mikkelson's -82 for the 1974-75 Washington Capitals, a number that reflects an 8-67-5 expansion team far more than the player who wore it.

That is also why coaches read plus/minus in blocks rather than single games. One bad bounce, one empty-netter against, and the column swings. Over half a season the noise settles, and the number starts to track which players are on the right side of the goal column most nights. For context on how those goals pile into points and playoff spots, our breakdown of the standings and the 16-win playoff map show where it all lands.

The Goal-Differential Mirage

Here is the trap that makes plus/minus so slippery. The stat hangs a team result on an individual name. Skate for a powerhouse and you look elite; skate for a tire fire and you look finished, even if your actual play never changed. That illusion is the Goal-Differential Mirage, and the people who watch the game closest know it well. Brian Engblom, a three-time Cup winner on defense for Montreal and later an ESPN analyst, put the flaw plainly.

"Playing on a good team or a bad team impacts a player's plus/minus rating in a big way." — Brian Engblom, via ESPN

The mirage cuts both ways. A defensive specialist buried on a bad roster gets punished for goals he had little to do with, while a passenger on a stacked team coasts to a shiny plus. It is the same reason a club can win the league in the regular season and still flame out, the kind of gap our Presidents' Trophy breakdown dug into. Goal differential is real, but pinning all of it on one skater is where the number lies.

The all-time records and the lost award

The plus/minus record book is a monument to the dynasties of the 1970s and 1980s. The NHL began tracking the stat officially in the 1967-68 season, and almost every untouchable mark was set soon after by a defenseman on a champion. Larry Robinson and the Montreal teams that won six Stanley Cups in his era sit at the top, part of the same most-Cups history the franchise still owns.

The league even handed out a trophy for it. The NHL Plus-Minus Award ran from the 1982-83 season until it was quietly retired after 2007-08, with Pavel Datsyuk as its final winner. The fact that the league stopped awarding it tells you where the stat now sits in the hierarchy. Orr, for the record, led the NHL in plus/minus six times, all before the trophy even existed.

Why analysts moved past it

Modern hockey analysis treats plus/minus as a starting point rather than a verdict. The fix was to measure the process behind the goals rather than just the goals themselves. Corsi counts shot attempts for and against while a player is on the ice, which produces a far bigger sample than goals alone. Expected goals, or xG, goes further and weighs the quality of every chance, so a player who drives good shots and suppresses dangerous ones grades well even on a night the puck does not bounce his way.

Those numbers also adjust for the things plus/minus ignores: who you start your shifts against, how often you begin in the offensive zone, and the strength of your linemates. None of that erases plus/minus, which still flags who is on the right side of the goal column. It just stops the stat from being the final word. As one analytics writer summed up after a deep dive on two defensemen with misleading numbers, the takeaway is blunt.

"Plus/minus is not a perfect stat, and this analysis reinforces that." — Blaiz Grubic, via Sound Of Hockey

The smarter way to use it today is as a quick gut check, then dig into the underlying numbers, the way a sharp front office weighs a defenseman before paying him. Our look at Cale Makar versus Adam Fox and the Werenski Norris case lean on exactly that mix of old and new, and the dollars that follow are mapped in our salary cap guide.

Sources and Reporting

• NHL.com: official scoring definitions for plus/minus and special-teams goals
• ESPN: Brian Engblom on why plus/minus can mislead
• Sound Of Hockey: a 2025 deep dive on misleading plus/minus numbers
• NHL Plus-Minus Award: award history, 1982-83 through 2007-08
• Hockey-Reference: career and single-season plus/minus leaders

The Verdict: The Goal-Differential Mirage

So what does plus/minus mean in hockey? It is goal differential while you are on the ice, even strength and shorthanded, scored as a simple plus or minus. Read it as a fast snapshot of who is on the right side of the goals, and it works. Read it as the final word on a player, and the Goal-Differential Mirage takes over, dressing up a team result as an individual one. The next time you see a defenseman at minus-20, check the standing of the team in front of him before you check his name. The column might be telling you about the roster, not the player.