There's always that sports fan who will argue sports using nothing but stats. It becomes more and more obvious how little they actually know when you see the stats that this person starts using. This is where I'm going to bring up horrible stats that people will use to try to tell you that one player in a sport is better than another. Of course this list is only going to include team sports, as it's too obvious with individual sports, and even the dumbest fans know not to argue against who wins the most (unless comparing eras by saying one guy had to play against tougher competition, but even that isn't as easy as it would seem to figure out).
Wins
Pitchers in Baseball
I'm going to give you 2 pitchers and their win totals. Pitcher A had 171 career wins, pitcher B had 82 career wins. Pitcher A is Danny Darwin, and pitcher B is Mariano Rivera.
Okay, that comparison wasn't fair, but here's another. Pitcher A had 219 career wins, and pitcher B had 240 career wins. Pitcher A was Pedro Martinez, and pitcher B was Frank Tanana. It's obvious between the two that Martinez was the better pitcher. However, this isn't even the most glaring type of weakness for the win stat, it's really worse used when talking about single seasons. Take the 1996 season in the National League Cy Young race for instance. John Smoltz and his 24 wins took home the award. However, Kevin Brown, Trevor Hoffman, and Greg Maddux all pitched better that season. While Smoltz was magnificent that season with a ERA of 2.94, ERA+ of 149, and WHIP of 1.001, Kevin Brown was even more amazing with an ERA of 1.89(!), ERA+ of 215 (!), and a WHIP of .944 (!). He only had 17 wins though. Trevor Hoffman had an ERA of 2.25, ERA+ of 177, and an even more amazing WHIP of .920. He only had 9 wins, but to be fair, he was a closer and had 42 saves. Maddux had an ERA of 2.72 with an ERA+ of 162, and his WHIP that year was 1.033. Maddux was only able to muster 15 wins that season despite the great numbers due to horrible run support all season. Sure, his WHIP was slightly higher, but fewer of those runners crossed the plate against Maddux than did against Smoltz.
Again, this isn't to tear into Smoltz, he was great that year, but those 3 guys were just better. Smoltz won the award based on his win total, as anyone who remembers that season can back me up on. Maddux was actually seen as having a disappointing season that year despite the fact that he outpitched the eventual Cy Young winner. He just didn't have that same win total. The biggest problem I have with wins is that they depend on too many different factors. The biggest one is run support. Obviously a pitcher can't win if his team doesn't score. What goes along with that is the pitcher's place in the rotation. Maddux was the #1 guy in the Braves rotation. He was always going up against one of the top pitchers from the other team. The #2 guy that year was Tom Glavine. John Smoltz was going up against the #3 guy (#2 or #4 on occasion) from other teams. This helps to get a pitcher run support, and will generate more wins, all other things equal, for the #3 guy over the #1 guy. This is how Jon Garland was able to win 18 games in 2006 despite a 4.51 ERA. If winning more games with a lesser performance was rare that would be one thing, but this is a regular occurrence in baseball. It probably happens every year in each division, if not even more. I will say that they do get this right on occasion too. In 2010 CC Sabathia had 21 wins and an ERA of 3.18, which is impressive. However, Felix Hernandez had an ERA of 2.27 to go along with his mere 13 wins. However, Sabathia played on a Yankees team that was loaded with offensive power while Hernandez played on a Mariners team that constantly struggled to put runs on the board. The Mariners scored 513 runs all year while the Yankees scored 859 runs that season. King Felix was indeed the true Cy Young winner, even though he didn't have the run totals that Sabathia had.
Yards
NFL Quarterbacks and Running Backs
I'll be a little bit nicer on yards. Why? Because without getting a lot of yards a quarterback will really have a tough time getting the numbers that really count, and with running backs there are really very few numbers that are not dependent on other things.
First with quarterbacks. The ultimate goal of a quarterback is to get the ball into the end zone. Field goals are nice and all, but they're still just 3 points where a touchdown itself is twice that much, 7 if you add the point after, 8 if they go for and get the 2 point conversion. If a quarterback is great at getting the ball down the field, but then blows it in the red zone often, they're not doing as well as a guy who might not march it down to the 20 as well, but gets the ball in there when he does get that far. On top of that, there have been a lot of quarterbacks over the years who have been able to march the ball down the field only to throw an interception later in the drive. The ability to protect the ball is vital to getting it into the end zone. Another factor is how often the quarterback throws the ball. A quarterback who throws the ball on the vast majority of their snaps, like a Drew Brees or Aaron Rodgers, is going to have more passing yards just based on opportunity. Some statistics to look at instead for a quarterback are touchdowns, interception %, Y/A, Y/C, and of course completion %. Even with those, a quarterback needs adequate protection and adequate targets to throw to. Just look at Jay Cutler. He went from a quarterback with big numbers everywhere in his last year in Denver. He came to Chicago and had almost nobody to throw to (he did have Forte) along with almost no protection, and everything dropped like a rock for him. It took until his 5th year in Chicago for him to finally get a combination of both receiving targets and decent protection. This was last season, and he had his best season as a Bear, and that's despite playing in a couple of games he probably shouldn't have played in (injury), and one real bad game (1 or 2 happen to even the best every year). The bottom line is that having help in a team game is something that every great quarterback has had, and no great quarterback has done it without help.
With running backs there are a ton of factors. The best thing to look at, in my opinion, is yards per carry. Even then, a running back that gets good blocking is going to almost always do better than a running back with lesser blocking. However, many ex-defensive players have been quoted as naming one or two running backs who were great (Walter Payton and Barry Sanders are mentioned most often, but Adrian Peterson, Jim Brown, and Gayle Sayers are also mentioned), while the rest were all the same, it just all depended on their blocking. This means that another important thing to look at with running backs is their ability to catch the ball out of the backfield. Payton was great at this. LaDanian Tomlinson, Marshall Faulk, and Matt Forte are other running backs who give this distinct advantage out of the backfield. Adding a reliable option out of the backfield for the quarterback is adding a serious new dimension to the entire offense. It's the only reason the Bears were able to score at all during Cutler's first 3 years with the Bears and a major reason his 4th. Anyway, a major reason I'm not going with touchdowns is due to opportunities. If a running back is allowed to run all up and down the field only to defer to another running back in goal line situations, that doesn't really show the ability of that running back to get into the end zone, it just means his backup is probably bigger than him.
Points
Basketball
This is going to take a lot of explaining on my part, especially when I consider the player who scored the most points per game in NBA history to be the best player in NBA history. I should preface this by saying, like with the other stats I mentioned, points are not a bad measuring stick, just not something that are a good measurement on their own. There have been plenty of players who have put up high volume scoring numbers. Nick Young averaged over 17 points per game several years ago, but still hasn't seen 30 minutes per game since that season. Why? He's a poor defender who can jam up the flow of an offense. Ben Gordon was very much the same way when he actually got any playing time. Jerry Stackhouse was lucky enough to play before this was realized as much. Stackhouse was an insane volume scorer, but he shot a low percentage and relied too much on his one on one style of play, which killed any flow the offense ever had. Stackhouse also wasn't a good defender at all. Then you look at Jordan, sure, he went one on one on occasion, but this was also a guy who averaged over 5 assists per game throughout his career, including 8 per game in '88/'89. He was able to move the ball very well and was far from the ballhog that other top scorers tended to be, and that uneducated fans will claim that he was. Jordan shot 50% from the field during his career, going as high as 54%. Who's the last guard to score more than 20 ppg in a season while shooting 54% from the field? I don't know the answer myself, but I'm pretty sure we'll have to go back a bit to find them. Jordan did it whie averaging 32 points per game. Moving on, Jordan was an incredible defender, and it wasn't one of those cases where a guy is called a great defender because he's an offensive star like Kobe Bryant (getting him onto multiple all defensive teams despite being above average at best on defense), Jordan was legitimately one of the best defenders in the league year in and year out. The bottom line though is that scoring in volume doesn't make a player a great player. If they're giving up just as much as they score, or if they're throwing a wrench into the gears of the offense, then how much are they really helping? Especially if they are not scoring efficiently.
+/-
Hockey
I'll be even nicer on this one. In hockey, +/- can be a good stat, but when used with discretion. The biggest factor that has to be taken into account is what line the player is on. Also needing to be looked at is their team's relative depth, especially if they're not on an early line. The players on the line with that player really need to be looked at. If the given player is on a team that is not especially deep and is on, say, the 4th line, then of course they are going to have a +/- that makes them look worse than they really are. On top of that, of course they're going to have fewer scoring opportunities, and therefore fewer points. Hockey is one of the ultimate team sports, in my opinion, because there is so much depending on teammates, much like football. Therefore, in hockey the player's teammates do really need to be taken into consideration, especially with +/-, which seems to be a very popular stat these days with hockey fans.
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