Net Plus-Minus (also called the Roland Rating) is the simplest version of plus-minus: the raw point differential per game (or per 48 minutes) while a player is on the floor minus the team's differential when the player is off the floor.
Completely transparent — no regression, no adjustment. Directly measures team impact. The most basic form of outcome-based player evaluation.
Highly sensitive to teammate quality. Stars on great teams have inflated net plus-minus; stars on bad teams look worse than they are. No opponent quality adjustment. Small sample sizes produce extremely noisy estimates. Zimmer, Snyder & Zimmer (2025, Economics Bulletin) specifically identify this lack of opponent quality control as the core flaw of unadjusted plus-minus approaches.
Not scored as a standalone metric in APEX. The raw on/off differential is conceptually the foundation that DefOnOff builds on — APEX uses DefOnOff (the defensive component of on/off differential) because it is the most reliable available version of this signal for a single season. All RAPM-family metrics in APEX's Impact pillar — EPM, LEBRON, DARKO DPM — are regularized and opponent-adjusted improvements on raw net plus-minus.