CHARLOTTE, N.C. — Dean Wilson always believed he was a good putter, whether he was in Japan or on the PGA Tour. The trick was finding proof of that in the statistics.

So the 41-year-old from Hawaii was not surprised when told about a new PGA Tour statistic that became official Monday, one that uses Shotlink data over an entire year to measure how well a player putts compared with the field.

The statistic officially is called “Strokes Gained-Putting,” and it’s the first time in 15 years that the PGA Tour has introduced a new core statistic. Wilson would have been among the top 11 putters in four of the past five years.

“I always felt like I’m a good putter,” Wilson said. “I’m confident in my technique and the theories I use. I just don’t know what the correct way would be to measure it. They’re all skewed one way or another. I could never think there was another way to do it.”

The system was developed by Mark Broadie, who plays off a 4 handicap when he’s not working as a Columbia Business School professor. He has been crunching Shotlink numbers for the better part of a decade as he tries to find the most meaningful measure of a tour player’s game.

“A good putting stat should provide a pure measure of putting skill,” said Broadie, who developed the stat and then honed it with a team from Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

His philosophy is simple — the quality of every shot should be based on where it started and where it finished. The math is a little more complicated.

It starts with determining how many average putts it takes a PGA Tour player from each distance. Broadie discovered that at just under 8 feet, players have a 50 percent chance of making the putt — in other words, the average stroke for that length is 1.5. The average gets higher for the longer putts.

So if a golfer makes an 8-foot putt, he will have gained 0.5 strokes on the field. If he takes two putts from that distance, he will have lost 0.5 strokes. The average for a 20-foot putt is about 1.9. If he makes the putt, he gains 0.9 on the field, and loses only 0.1 strokes if he misses. Add these up at the end of each round and you have “Putts Gained.”