Red Zone TD% is more important because TDs are worth more points! :rolleyes: Another stat that could stand improvement is turnover ratio in football. Better IMO is point differential off takeaways vs. giveaways. Because you could have a poor ratio, but if the other team can’t capitilize, no biggie.
Right…not only is a TD is worth twice as much as a FG (more if you include the nearly-automatic PAT), while settling for a FG after you get inside the 20 is usually better than getting nothing at all, it does represent at least a partial failure.
Also, NFL placekickers today are usually extremely accurate from within 50 yards (i.e,. the 33 yard line). You don’t need to make it into the red zone to have a very good shot at a field goal.
I hate when people try to list QB completion percentage like it’s the top stat to evaluate a quarterback by. That’s nuts. And what’s even more nuts is that no one talks about the single most important stat, which is Y/A. People (not so much here) will talk about one QB being better or more accurate than another because they’ve got a 63% vs 60% completion percentage, even if they have a lower YPA meaning they’re throwing easy 5 yard throws constantly and racking up easy completions.
TD aren’t worth more points than the points themselves.
Team A: 60% TD 10%FG —> Avg. Pts. 4.5
Team B: 50% TD 40% FG —> Avg. Pts. 4.7
If you change the 10 to 30 I could take that comparison seriously, otherwise it’s apples/oranges.
Wins and RBI may be overrated, but not nearly as much as saves. Not even close.
I mean, it’s possible for a lousy player to get a lot of wins or RBI, but it’s reasonably unusual. And someone who really, really piles up wins and RBI is going to be at least a pretty good player. Joe Carter had one year where he drove in a hundred runs and was one of the worst players in the major leagues, but that’s unusual, and nobody’s ever had 140 RBI and been anything less than a terrific player.
But pitchers can pile up tons of saves and suck. And even pitchers who do pile up tons of saves and are good are almost never all that valuable, because a save just isn’t a big deal most of the time.
Or look at it career wise. Look at the top 20 all time leaders in wins. They’re all Hall of Famers. No doubt about it, easy choices.
Look at the top 20 in RBI. How do they look? Pretty good bunch, wouldn’t you say?
Now look at the top 20 in saves. Are they all Hall of Famers? Nope. Anyone think Randy Myers is a Hall of Famer? And personally there’s exactly two of them I think deserve to be in there. Maybe three.
I agree that saves is the worst statistic in baseball. But I’m not sure how overrated it is.
You sort of touch on it in your post - writers and most fans value wins extremely highly, hence all of the top-20 are Hall of Famers. Saves are pretty derided even amongst fans and sportswriters. Nobody gets a free pass to the HoF for Saves - Lee Smith is #3 all time and can’t break 45% in the ballot.
Even in this thread you have people saying Wins is a valuable statistic - I don’t see anybody backing Saves as useful (although a few seem to like blown saves or save percentage for some reason…).
In the end, Saves is probably so bad that even though it’s rated much lower than Wins it’s still the most overrated. But Wins is much more annoying because you run into Wins evangelists everywhere.
*Any *stat other than the score is overrated.
To bring hockey into the discussion, I always thought total player points was a worthless stat – mostly because of the way assists are distributed and they carry the same weight as a goal. Goals should be worth 2pts and one assist per goal, where the assist had to directly lead to the goal.
For example, if del Zotto finds Gaborik on a long pass out of the zone that directly leads to a breakaway, Gaborik would get 2 points and del Zotto 1. If Girardi clears the puck out of the zone, but Haeglin is able to negate the icing, keep the puck away from the defenders and then score, I don’t see why Girardi should get a point.
The latter would be hard to enforce, but 2pts for a goal seems like a no brainer to me.
Points/game in basketball. The game today is diluted enough that on most nights, a good superstar can put up 50 points if they shoot enough. It’s more a function of endurance and desire than it is ability.
Since you alternate possessions in football, I’m having a hard time understanding how any team is going to regularly get more possessions per game than their opponent, regardless of how fast paced their offense is.
I think they should take away the second assist point. Sometimes it’s a brilliant tape to tape pass, but more often than not it seems like a guy is getting a point for dumping the puck, or just tossing it off to someone who can skate like a ton of bricks and ACTUALLY set up the play.
Well, I could say the same thing about wins for pitchers- that is, if you look at all the pitchers who’ve won 300 games in their careers, ALL of them were damn good! You CAN’T be a lousy pitcher and win 300 games… and similarly, it’s mighty hard to drive in 145 runs if you aren’t very, very good.
But it’s a lot easier to drive in 145 runs if you’re, say, Don Mattingly and have Rickey Henderson and Willie Randolph ahead of you. Mattingly WAS a great hitter in his prime, but a LOT of other guys could argue with some justice, “I’D drive in 145 runs, too, if I was always coming up to bat with Ric key Henderson on 2nd.”
It’s not that RBIs prove NOTHING, just that they don’t prove nearly as much as casual fans (and tons of award voters) have always assumed.
I’m not sure I agree with this one. Here are the top ten players in the NBA right now in terms of points per game (small sample size, blah blah blah):
Kobe Bryant
LeBron James
Kevin Durant
Kevin Love
Carmelo Anthony
Derrick Rose
LaMarcus Aldridge
Russell Westbrook
Monta Ellis
Blake Griffin
I mean, I think if you knew nothing about basketball, that PPG list alone would give you a decent outline of “who’s good,” right?
Certainly the strikeout is valuable in that it is one less ball put in play, one less opportunity for an error or runner advancement. I was thinking in terms of some recent discussions regarding Hall of Fame credibility. Pointing out that so-and-so only had 200 wins, an ERA of 3.80 but hey, his K/9 was 8.5 (all made up numbers) does not impress me.
This makes no sense at all. Scoring points helps you win games, so it’s hard to overvalue points. 50-point games are uncommon and even the best scorers these days average around 30 points a game, which isn’t anywhere close to 50. The dilution thing sounds ridiculous, too. Scoring was a lot greater a couple of decades ago.
It’s a pretty useless stat in hockey and the one I came in to mention.
Over a long period of time it can give a casual observer a general sense of a player’s abilities at a glance, but one could usually make the same determination just by watching the player play for a few minutes.
In the short term it’s pretty useless as players hopping over the boards for a line change can earn a +/- for a play they had nothing to do with or avoid a +/- for a play they had everything to do with; it’s a generic individual stat in a team game meaning that a defenseman could do everything right every single time but if his partner or one of the forwards do not, or their goalie kind of sucks, their rating is going to suffer.
Good players on bad teams tend to have worse ratings than they probably should, and vice versa.
Then there’s the case of guys like Ilya Kovalchuk (-110) who get bad raps as defensive liabilities because their career +/- numbers are awful. Without context (the biggest knock against the stat), one wouldn’t know that he spent many years as a purely offensive workhorse on a perennially bad team, who often got double-shifted on the fourth line (generally the weakest line, most often comprised of enforcers, “energy” guys and other borderline NHL caliber players not relied on to score). Or guys like John Madden (+23) who spent their entire careers playing against the toughest competition in the toughest situations for whom scoring was a bonus, not an expectation.
NHL stats have come a long way in recent years and there are now far better ways to describe a player’s contributions than +/-, but it’s still touted by some as relevant.
I waffle on this because it does seem sometimes like the second assist is unfairly earned by the guy who just happened to be the 3rd to last guy to touch the puck, but it’s also earned by the guy who made the breakout pass to the open man in the neutral zone, the guy on the blue line that keeps the puck in the zone and gets it going in the right direction again, the player who fought through one or more defenders along the boards in the cycle that set up the goal and the originators of tic-tac-toe passing that blows through the defense and ends in a highlight reel goal.
Also, on the flip side, would one not credit goals scored inadvertently by lucky bounces off of skates or arms, or by players who get threaded a perfect pass while standing alone on the side of a wide open net?
I think there are more than enough situations in which a second assist is earned to keep it around even if it means sometimes guys who probably shouldn’t get an assist do.
That’s my point, though. Certainly RBI is affected by your teammates, and Mattingly’s 145 RBI was inflated by having great players in front of him. But Mattingly did have an awesome year.
But saves is even less meaningful. You can pile up a lot of saves and not even be a good pitcher. Brad Lidge got 31 saves in a season in which he might have been the worst pitcher in the major leagues. Hell, closers aren’t even full time players.
So while RBI is overrated, saves are way, way, way more overrated. It’s a useless, near-meaningless stat.
I agree with brickbacon to a point. Points per game is highly dependent on shots per game, which is a function of the offensive strategy and a player’s propensity to take shots. It’s easy to see how a middle of the road player can get more points by just shooting more often. He’s not helping the team score more points overall, he’s just taking a higher percentage of the team’s shots.
Compare to baseball, a hitter can’t take 3-4 extra at bats per game that would have gone to his teammates.
I agree that points per game alone doesn’t tell you everything, which is why it’s nice to see newer stats related to usage and efficiency. But the argument he made is ridiculous - he said points per game don’t because “any good superstar” can score lots of points. Even if that were true it wouldn’t make points or points per game less valuable.