A baseline instead of a target
Fairways hit and putts per round always struggled to say much, because they treated every shot as equally difficult. A ten-foot putt made and a sixty-foot putt made were both just 'a putt', which flattened the game into noise. Strokes gained instead asks how many strokes a shot took compared with the average professional facing the identical distance, lie and surface. A approach that finishes closer than expected for its length gains strokes; one that finishes further away loses them, regardless of what club was used or how it looked on television.
Splitting the game into parts
Because every shot carries its own baseline, the total can be split cleanly into driving, approach, around-the-green and putting categories. That separation is the real value: a player can be gaining strokes overall while quietly losing them with the putter, a pattern that averages would have hidden inside a single scoring number. Coaches and broadcasters now describe players by shape — a strong ball-striker who putts poorly, say — because the data finally supports that kind of specific claim rather than a vague scoring impression.
What the number leaves out
The limitation is that strokes gained is entirely outcome-based. It cannot see a smart layup shot that avoided trouble and happened to finish average distance from the flag, nor a bold line that was correct in principle but slightly mistimed. It rewards results, not decisions, so two players can post identical approach numbers while one of them took far greater risks to get there. Read alongside course context, it is powerful; read alone, it can flatter caution and punish an aggressive strategy that simply had a bad week.