My girlfriend major in Mathematics and Chemistry, both are useless degrees.
lol clearly we have different definition of useless :P
Okay to bring the talk back to basketball, if you think that 1-17 is better than 0-8 then consider the following:
Team A is playing Team B.
Team A and Team B have only lined up 5 players each.
Each player on Team A keeps his opponent to 0-8.
Each player on Team B keeps his opponent to 1-17.
At the end Team A is 5-85.
At the end Team B is 0-40.
Final score is Team A - 10 and Team B - 0.
So as you can see, 0-8 is more valuable than 1-17.