Smart has an offensive rating of 92 and a defensive rating of 103. That means while Smart is on the court, Boston is scoring 92 points per 100 possessions and allowing 103 points per 100 possessions. We are being outscored by 11 points per 100 possessions with him on the court.
Are there any stat wizards that can weigh in on this? Basketball reference lists these numbers for Smart but then under "Play-by-Play" stats it shows his +/- as +11.7 which mirrors everything I've read about him. How can his DRtg be higher than his Ortg and this be so? I'm confused.
This is caused by basketball-references.com's confusing overload of the terms' "defensive rating" and "offensive rating".
For most sites, these terms,s are the measured change on the scoreboard, in points per 100 possessions. Indeed, even on basketball-reference, you can see that in the 'per 100' mode of their own "Lineup Finder" tool and on the team 'per 100' rankings on the league summary page.
But basketball-reference.com also uses the same terms for their "estimated" points scored / surrendered per 100 possessions that they list for individuals on the stat pages. And these are NOT measured changes in the scoreboard, but rather a derived estimate based on rather complex formula derived by Dean Oliver. The explanation is given here:
https://www.basketball-reference.com/about/ratings.htmlThis formula usually works okay as an estimate, but is subject to some very weird results on some players, especially this early in the year while the sample of input data is small.
I would take these numbers with a huge grain of salt.