What is SG: Putting?
Strokes gained on the greens, accounting for how hard each putt's distance is. The noisiest SG category year to year.
Strokes Gained needs ShotLink-measured rounds; opposite-field and some international events are excluded, and a season shows no SG until a player logs enough measured rounds.
How it's calculated
Strokes gained is computed by the PGA Tour from ShotLink-measured rounds. Every shot is compared with what the field average would have taken from the same place — the same distance, the same lie, the same surface — and the difference is credited to the player. Summed over a round, that is how many shots better or worse than the field they played. OTIS restates the tour's published per-round figures; it does not recompute them.
How to read it
Positive is better than the field, but this is the noisiest category. Treat a big number over a few weeks as a hot streak until a large sample says otherwise.
What it doesn't say
Strokes gained is a comparison, not an absolute: a positive figure means better than the field that week, so the same play can produce different numbers in different fields. It also needs a real sample. Putting in particular swings enormously over a handful of rounds, and a hot fortnight on the greens tells you far less about a player than the same gain in approach play would. A blank is not a zero — it means the rounds were never ShotLink-measured.
OTIS tracks this stat across 15 PGA Tour seasons — see it for every player, or read how the numbers are sourced in the methodology.