Rudy Gay Bans Stat Sheets from Raptors' Postgame Locker Room

Apparently, Rudy Gay's ugly shooting numbers have gotten so bad that even he doesn't want to see them anymore.

According to Mike Ganter of the Toronto Sun, Gay—who apparently has the authority to do so—issued a ban on stat sheets in the Toronto Raptors locker room after games.

Per Ganter: "Gay sees the scoresheets as an unnecessary barrier to team unity or even a temptation to be more focused on what is best for the individual as opposed to what is best for the team."

That sound you're hearing from the north is actually the growing chorus of Raptors fans screaming that maybe Gay's shots, not the statistical evidence of their existence, should be subject to a ban.

On the season, Toronto's small forward is hitting just 38.1 percent of his attempts from the field. His 11-of-37 effort against the Houston Rockets on Nov. 11 got detractors buzzing, and the criticism of Gay's horrible shot selection only got louder as his ongoing inefficiency continued to hamstring the Raptors' offense.

In fact, it's been an almost comically long time since Gay has made 50 percent of his field-goal attempts.

Truth be told, there's actually some wisdom in Gay's reasoning that goes beyond a desire to avoid looking at his own atrocious shooting numbers.

Per Ganter, Gay said: 

"

We’re not playing for stats...I wanted to just nip it in the butt before it became an issue. We come in here after losses, after wins and people are staring at those stat sheets, but that’s not what we’re about. We’re a team and the stat that matters is the W.

"

That makes sense. The most important thing the Raptors—or any team, really—should be worried about is winning. Stat-hungry, individualistic play can get in the way of that pursuit.

But here's a news flash for Gay: The war is over, and statistics won.

Right now, any team that isn't arming itself with as much statistical information as possible is falling behind the rest of the league. That's certainly true for front offices and coaches, but it also applies to every player on the roster. More information is unequivocally a good thing.

If there are players on the Raps' roster who allow the pursuit of individual stats to get in the way of winning games, that's not the fault of the statistics. It's the fault of the players themselves.

Gay seems to have noble intentions. But it's a little convenient that the NBA's worst high-volume shooter wants the evidence of his epic inaccuracy to disappear from the locker room. Furthermore, it's setting a backward-thinking precedent for a team that needs to be utilizing every resource at its disposal to move forward.