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Byline: Steve Buist
Source: The Hamilton Spectator
Date: March 06, 2003

KEEPING STATISTICS IN CURLING IS A WASTE OF TIME

Indulge me for a moment while I go off on a small rant. This obsession that curling has developed with statistics has gotten out of hand. In fact, I'll go a step further: statistics are essentially meaningless in curling.

God bless TSN and Sportsnet for their efforts to promote the sport of curling, but both networks have fallen into the trap of using player statistics as a crutch during broadcasts. Take the recent Scott Tournament of Hearts, for example. On several occasions, TSN kept harping away at the importance of statistics, but it was the winning team that had the lower percentages. In the final round-robin game between Ontario and Saskatchewan, the Ontario vice was clearly struggling and really putting skip Anne Dunn in some tough spots. She was obviously being outplayed by her Saskatchewan counterpart, yet when TSN flashed up the stats around the seventh end, the Ontario vice was shown with a higher percentage and it was up near 80 per cent. How she could have been scored that high was beyond comprehension.

Here are just some of the problems with curling stats:

* The scoring is subjective.

* The scoring for a shot doesn't reflect the skip's decision-making process.

A player could throw exactly what was called for, but if it was a dopey call or an impossible shot to begin with or if there were
sweeping errors or bad line calls, it's the player that suffers with a bad score.

* The scoring doesn't reflect the relative difficulties of each shot.
Let's use a golf analogy and compare two different shots: a one-foot tap-in putt and Tiger Woods' 210-yard four-iron shot out of the
bunker, over water onto the green on the 18th hole to win the Canadian Open. Both would be scored 100 per cent in curling.

* The scoring doesn't reflect the importance of each shot, or the context when shots were missed.
A skip could curl a perfect game with the exception of one missed shot, but if that one missed shot was a draw that came up light
when the skip was facing six opposition rocks, then it hardly matters that the skip curled 96 per cent for the game. Let's use another
example of two skips who each curl 50 per cent but in two very different ways. One skip curls 100 per cent for the first rock thrown in
each end and 0 per cent on every second rock. The other skip is 0 per cent on every first rock and 100 per cent on every second rock.
I'll guarantee you that the second skip would win such a game.

Now you see this obsession with statistics filtering down to junior and bantam levels. Coaches now show up at bantam bonspiels and competitions with laptop computers to dutifully mark scores for every shot of every end. To me, it seems like such a waste of time and effort for something that's inherently flawed to begin with.

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Comments, questions and information are always welcome. I can be reached by ...

Phone: 905-526-3226
Fax: 905-526-1395
E-mail/Courriel: sbuist@thespec.com 
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