Clrnc wrote:
If only football is that simple to be measured by goals and assists. Iniesta will probably be the most pointless player on earth.
I kinda agree that assists is a pointless stat in itself. It's notoriously useless when it comes to predicting performances, for instance. Even among top-rate assisting players like Özil, Xavi and Fabregas there's very little correlation between how many assists they got during the previous season and how many they will get throughout the current one... because you're still depending on another player to put the ball in the net regardless of the quality of the final pass.
Another issue is that it's not a good measurement of creativity. Any striker worth his salt will get 7-8 assists in a season simply by being in the box more often than anyone else. This isn't necessarily an efficient measure of how goals are created (consider Özil getting an assist for simply handing the ball over to Walcott against City, for instance, while getting nothing for the goals he created against Olympiacos).
Stats work best when you take all the factors into consideration. Chances created, clearcut chances, keypasses, assists... people look at these in isolation when they should look at them as a whole. Hleb did have an unusually high number of key passes, but he was disappointing in other areas - nevermind actual goals and assists. His effectiveness dropped every time he was moved to the wing too. He was at his best in the Özil position behind the striker, but he didn't quite have the creative influence you need to play there at top level imo. He had a questionable mentality too.
