The Boston Celtics' bench players have been outscored by opposing reserves in eight of the team's last nine games and 11-of-16 tilts overall. On Friday, the Celtics' bench was outscored by a whopping 63-29 margin, and Boston's four chief reserves (Glen Davis, Marquis Daniels, Nate Robinson and Semih Erden) were a combined minus-52 in plus/minus on a night Boston's starting five was a combined plus-96.

Coach Doc Rivers admitted it's unfair to judge based solely on the point differential, but the numbers are impossible to ignore.

"It's unfair, but let's be unfair for a second," Rivers said after Friday's game. "The first and third quarters, [the Raptors] scored 35 points on our starters. And you can make that case, especially in the third quarter because [Boston's starters] played the whole quarter. The other two quarters were 32 [points allowed] and 34, and that's our second unit. So that was the only thing I talked about after the game."

Expanding the first and third quarters versus the second and fourth quarters over the last eight games shows that the Celtics are plus-70 in the first and third periods (outscoring opponents 462-392) and a minus-6 in the second and fourth quarters (being outscored 437-431).

But we wanted to be more precise. So we reached out to the folks at Elias Sports Bureau and asked them to crunch the numbers based on whether the Celtics' starters or reserves were on the floor.

There's no exact science to this, but typically Boston's starters are on the court for the first nine minutes of the odd quarters and the final six minutes of the even quarters. Of course, there are variances. Shaquille O'Neal -- or whomever the starting center is on any given night -- generally checks out earlier than, say, Rajon Rondo, and Ray Allen has logged a lot of time with the second unit. But this seemed like a fair split for our purposes. Overtime points were ignored.

During the 30-minute window assigned to the starters, Boston outscored opponents 1,037-898 for an average point differential per game of about plus-8.7. During the 18-minute window examined for the bench, Boston was outscored 563-530 for an average point differential of minus-2.1.

The discrepancy isn't so bad when considering points allowed per minute. The starters give up 1.87 points per minute during their 30-minute block, while the reserves allow 1.95 points per minute during their 18-minute span. The problem is on offense, where the starters average 2.16 points per minute and the bench scores 1.84 per minute.

Going back to simpler metrics, Boston's reserves have been outscored by the opponents' reserves 517-421, or about 6 points per game.

The numbers are much worse when one factors in that Davis, despite his sixth-man role, has spent more minutes with the starting unit than any other center on the team. Davis accounts for 42.3 percent of Boston's total bench scoring (166 points). That is a staggering number, especially considering his recent struggles (shooting 31.3 percent over his last six games, connecting on 20-of-64 shots).