League of Legends: Six Stats that Show Whether You Carried or Not

1. KDA

Don’t let what streamers and high elo players tell you this doesn’t matter. It does. In fact, it has about an 87.7% correlation between having a good KDA and winning a given game.

Now, before you start high-fiving and cackling that you knew your 4.00 KDA on Yasuo justifies playing him, remember that this is one of six metrics that you should use to evaluate your success. Getting a high KDA by kill-whoring is not going to end up with you grading well in a game.

From my own perspective, getting consistently high KDAs on a champion is a measure of a player’s mechanical competence. The better your KDAs, the more likely it is that you have an understanding of how to execute with that champion. But if you have high KDAs and a poor win rate on a champion, chances are you’re not doing enough to impact the game and need to improve your macro.

As far as numbers, you should be aiming for a KDA of at least 3.00 in a game or on a given champion. To track your performance in game, you should consider your game “score” as follows based on your KDA:

Below 1.00 = -3
Below 2.00 = -2
Below 3.00 = -1
Above 3.00 = +1
Above 4.00 = +2
Above 5.00 = +3

2. Deaths

When looking at KDA, one aspect stood out clear as day: kills and deaths really have no correlation to winning, losing, or overall performance. That’s right, if you were high-fiving over your high KDAs, you might still be in trouble if you have a poor score on perhaps the biggest indicator how you did in a game or with a particular champion.

Your number of deaths per game has a 94.9% correlation to wins and losses. That was actually mind-boggling when I looked at the numbers. Dying more directly correlates to losing more games and is an even stronger indicator of success than KDA is.

Not dying is, in my opinion, one of the greatest skills a player can have in mitigating their odds to throw the game. It’s also a good balance to the KDA indicator, because if you have a high KDA but also high deaths, that likely means that you’re playing to fight rather than take objectives, or you’re letting games drag out longer than they should.

In a given gave, you should be aiming to die no more than five times. Under five deaths is solid and more is an indication that you maybe didn’t play quite as well as your KDA indicated. Here’s how your deaths affects your score in a game:

1 or 0 deaths = +3
2 deaths = +2
3 or 4 deaths = +1
5 deaths = +0
6 or 7 deaths = -1
8 deaths = -2
9 or more deaths = -3