Hey,
Now as I can see the idea would be to have an item for each player and then a property "ranking" containing the value. But that would mean we have to split up data given in a list and spread it over thousands of items (update all of them) in order to use a query to re-collect them into a list and deliver it to the infobox as before.
In case of player rankings, this does not seem that horrible to me. Having the info set as regular claims for regular items makes the info available for the items themselves and allows doing any other type of query the system supports against it, as opposed to only having the info available in the specific aggregation you have in mind. Alternatively you could have an item for "season foo in sport bar" where you have multiple "player baz has score bah". Not sure how we're actually supporting the later though, but it should be possible IIRC.
Cheers
-- Jeroen De Dauw http://www.bn2vs.com Don't panic. Don't be evil. --