How to Read League of Legends Pro Stats: The Complete Guide | RFT.GG
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How to Read League of Legends Pro Stats: The Complete Guide
You're reading an RFT.GG recap and you stop on "G2 closed the series with a cumulative GD@15 of +1,800 across the Bo3." Here's the guide to never re-read that sentence twice again.
Competitive League of Legends has become a sport of data. Every action — a missed last-hit, a ward placed three seconds too late, a kill stolen from across the map — ends up translated into a number. RFT.GG analyses lean on this statistical grammar to explain what actually happened in a game, beyond the final score. The problem: acronyms (GPM, CSPM, XPD@15, KP%) are not easy to understand when you’re a newcomer. This guide walks through them, category by category.
Why stats matter in competitive LoL
A 1-0 score tells you nothing about a game. A team can lose a fight 20-5 and have controlled 30 minutes of map. Another can win with a negative kill differential by monopolising neutral objectives.
Stats exist to reconstruct what happened between the first wave hitting and the final Nexus going down. They also allow comparison — between players, between teams, between splits, between regions. That's where their editorial value sits.
Four categories structure the reading, mirroring the layout of RFT.GG Charts: General, Laning Phase, Vision, Fighting.
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General: kills, gold, and team contribution
KDA — (Kills + Assists) / Deaths
A KDA of 4.0 is solid, 6.0 excellent, 10+ signals either individual dominance or a support role on a team winning everything. The limit: a safe player who never dies but creates nothing inflates their KDA without weighing on games.
KP — Kill Participation
The percentage of team kills a player took part in, as kill or assist. A measure of teamfight presence and objective involvement.
Benchmark: 70-80% for a jungler or support, 55-70% for lanes. Below 50%, there's a disconnect with the rest of the team — bad splitpush execution, isolated lane, or worse.
FB — First Blood %
The percentage of games where a team or player takes the first kill. A measure of early aggression.
Above , an early-aggressive identity. Below , the team scales or absorbs.
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Gold/m — Gold Per Minute
Total gold generated, divided by game length. The simplest economic metric there is.
Context matters — high Gold/m on a carry in 35-minute games doesn't carry the same weight as in 22-minute stomps.
Kills, Deaths, Assists per game
Self-explanatory averages. Useful for spotting outliers rather than reading a split holistically — a midlaner averaging 5.2 deaths per game is either on a struggling team or playing high-variance picks.
Obj.% — Elite Monster Participation
The percentage of dragons, heralds and barons a player was present for. Maps directly to map control and rotation discipline.
Benchmark: 80%+ is common for junglers. Every other lanes have different percentage depending of their role. Typical ranges are around 10–30% for Toplane, 20–50% for Midlane, 35–60% for ADC, and 30–60% for Support.
Image Credit: Riot Games
Laning Phase: the first 15 minutes
CS/m — Creep Score Per Minute
Minions and monsters killed per minute. A raw measure of farming ability.
Benchmark: 8 to 9 CS/m on a solo lane at the top level, 9 to 10+ for the most disciplined midlaners. Below 7, there's usually a reason — constant lane pressure, parked jungler, forced rotations.
A GD15 above +500 is considered a clear advantage. Above +1,000, the lane is won. Negative GD15 means the lane is lost — without prejudging the rest of the game.
For a full team, the five GD15 values can be summed. A cumulative +2,000 signals an early game dominated across every role.
CSD15 — CS Difference at 15
The CS gap at 15 minutes. Combined with GD15, it separates lanes won on individual farming from those bailed out by jungle pressure.
A CSD15 of +15 alongside a flat GD15 suggests the opponent was helped by ganks. A negative CSD15 with a positive GD15 points to a lane snowballed by kills rather than farm.
XPD15 — XP Difference at 15
The XP gap at 15 minutes. Tells you who's level-ahead — meaning unlocked item passives, spell points, and teamfight weight.
An XPD15 above +400 generally maps to a full level lead. On solo lanes, XPD15 is often more telling than GD15: a toplaner can lose 800 gold and gain two levels by soaking two waves under tower.
KAD15 — Kill+Assist Difference at 15
The early game kill participation gap between a player and their direct opponent. Positive KAD15 shows a player on the right end of the first skirmishes — usually because their jungler picked their side, or because they snowballed a 2v2 bot.
Reads best paired with GD15. High GD15 with high KAD15 means a lane won through aggression; high GD15 with low KAD15 means a lane won through pure farming.
Photo Credit: Riot Games
Vision: map control and information
CW — Control Wards placed per game
The number of control wards purchased and placed per game. An indicator of defensive investment and objective setup.
The in-game vision score (calculated on wards placed, kept alive, and destroyed) divided by game length.
Support benchmark: 2.8-3.5 VS/m. Jungler: 1.4-1.8. Solo lanes: 0.6-0.9. A support under 2.3 VS/m is usually either struggling or playing a full-time engage role.
Fighting: damage, kills, efficiency
DMG/m — Damage per minute
Damage to champions per minute. To champions — not to minions, not to towers.
High DMG/m without wins is suspicious: it can mean poorly placed damage (useless poke, AoE that doesn't kill) rather than real impact.
DMG% — Damage Share
The percentage of a team's total damage attributed to one player. Contextualises raw DMG/m.
An ADC usually sits at 28-32%, a midlaner at 24-28%. When a jungler hits 25%, they're carrying the composition — Viego, Graves, Nidalee are typical examples.
SK — Solo Kills
Solo kills per game. The cleanest measure of individual outplay in lane — no jungler involvement, no skirmish noise.
A toplaner above 0.5 SK per game is winning matchups individually. Above 1.0, dominating them. Particularly relevant on lane bullies.
DMG/kill — Damage per Kill Scored
Champion damage divided by kills participated in. Tells you whether a player's damage actually contributes to closing kills.
The efficiency metric. Champion damage divided by gold spent.
A high DMG/gold means the player extracts maximum output from every item bought. Particularly telling on assassins and burst mages — a Zed at high DMG/gold is converting his economy; a Zed at low DMG/gold is itemising into nothing.
Trade — Trade Efficiency
A laning-phase metric measuring whether a player comes out of trades ahead in HP and resources. Timeline-derived — calculated from the in-game timeline data, not from kills or deaths alone.
Positive Trade values signal a lane being won in the small skirmishes, even when GD15 and CSD15 are flat. Particularly useful for tracking matchups where the early game looks even on paper but tilts one way under the surface.
SD — Solo Deaths
Solo deaths per game, which mean the player died while being isolated from the rest of his team, so not only 1v1 deaths.
A toplaner at 1.5+ SD per game is either getting outplayed individually, getting camped, or both. A laner with low SD but high overall deaths is dying in fights, not in lane — a very different problem to diagnose.
Image Credit: Riot Games
Reading these stats in an RFT.GG article
Numbers rarely appear in isolation. They're combined to produce a verdict.
Standard pattern: "G2 came out of the laning phase with a cumulative GD15 of +3,200, a 100% First Blood rate, and full control of the first three dragons."
Reading: the team won the early game across all five lanes, took early pressure, and converted that lead into objective control. Three different metrics, one story — total grip on the first twenty minutes.
Another pattern: "Supa closes the series at 28% DMG%, 78% KP, but with a negative XPD15 of -380 across the Bo3."
Reading: he carried his weight in teamfights and participated in the kills, but lost the laning phase. Which usually means either his jungler didn't cover him, or he accepted sacrificing his lane to free up resources elsewhere on the map.
Common traps
Isolated KDA. A KDA of 12 on a team finishing 1-2 says almost nothing — it tells you the player survived, not that they shaped the games.
DMG/m without DMG%. High raw DMG/m can come from long games where a player poked for 40 minutes without ever closing a kill. DMG/kill is the cleanest follow-up to check.
GD15 without matchup context. Certain lanes (Kayle into Akali, Smolder into Lucian) are scaling matchups where -300 at 15 is expected.
Going further with RFT.GG Charts
Every statistic defined in this guide is available directly on the site. The Charts feature lets readers pull up any team or player, select metrics across the four categories above, and visualise performance in graph form — across splits, matchups, and head-to-heads.
This is where the reading framework becomes practical. A GD15 line on its own is just a curve — viewed alongside DMG%, VS/m, and Obj.% trends, it produces the layered analysis competitive coverage is built on.
The most useful rule still applies: a single statistic never explains a game on its own. It's the combination — General, Laning Phase, Vision, Fighting — that produces a reliable account of what happened. Even then, sometimes raw statistics don't tell the full story.
