So it's Cole Koepke leading the team, followed by Kastelic.
Which seems to reinforce the point. Koepke and his line had a red hot start to the year as per the statline and eye test and he's a plus 10 by Game 6, has been an even player from Game 7 onward which sounds about right for how he's played.
I honestly can't tell if you're attacking it or defending it in this post.
It's a dumb stat
I'm defending it. I've never claimed it was the most important stat or anywhere close. But it matters and has value when evaluating players.
Let's take a D-man for example. Let's say this D-man makes great break-outs passes and defends well, so he' getting piles of tertiary assists and teams generally aren't scoring much when they are on the ice. They constantly end up on the plus side of the ledger. Is there no correlation there? Are the consistent breakouts and consistent strong defending mutually exclusive from the high plus/minus?
What about a forward who struggles to get pucks out of the defensive zone and his team is constantly hemmed in when he is on the ice leading to goals against and has a bad plus/minus? Can we not draw a line between the bad +- and the inconsistent zone clears?
Individual +/- is not mutually exclusive to individual performance. There will be games where there are outliers both good and bad.
If you want to continue placing zero value in it, then by all means fill your boots.