Counting stats in basketball are a product of two numbers multiplied together, and almost every research mistake comes from studying the second one while ignoring the first. Start with time on the floor, then ask what share of the offense runs through the player while he is on it.
Before a single round is played, two teams take turns removing maps from a pool until only the battlefields they could live with remain. That negotiation decides more about a player's statistical night than most of the analysis that follows it.
Every other sport gives researchers one enormous gift: the rules stay put. Only the players change. League of Legends withholds that gift, and the consequence for anyone building projections is that a chunk of your evidence quietly expires on a schedule.
In most sports the biggest research risk is getting a rate wrong. In soccer it is getting the team sheet wrong. A player who is rested rather than injured is perfectly fit, fully available, and simply not playing, and no amount of accuracy about his shot volume survives that. Here is how to think about rotation before the lineup lands.
A hold percentage is not a property of a player. It is a property of a player on a particular surface against a particular quality of returner, and moving it across surfaces without adjustment quietly changes the question it answers. This is a closer look at the rate stats tennis props are built from, and how much weight each one can carry.
The industry standard for a track record is selective memory: screenshots of the winners, a counter that resets after a bad month, units with no definition. A record that omits its losses cannot produce a hit rate, cannot produce calibration, and cannot be checked by anyone. This is the argument for publishing the whole ledger, and how to hold us to it.
Umpire notes are the most confidently repeated small factor in baseball prop research. The effect is real, it is measurable, and it sits several rungs below the things that actually decide a strikeout line.
Two offers can show the same player, the same stat, and the same number, and still be different products with different research questions behind them. The words for them get used interchangeably, which is how the confusion starts.
Six picks feel like six chances. They are one purchase that requires six separate things to happen. The arithmetic of stacking picks into a single entry is unforgiving, and the multiplier printed next to it is not evidence that the trade is a good one.
The markets most likely to be wrong are also the markets where you are least able to tell whether you are the one who is wrong. That is not a coincidence. It is the same property viewed from two sides.
Congested schedules produce the most confidently wrong research on any slate, because two very different effects get compressed into one word. Fatigue is the story. Availability is the variable.
Every ballpark has a reputation, and most of those reputations are directionally true and quantitatively overstated. A park factor is a measured average across seasons and weather, applied to one game it never saw.