Official PDC stats analyst Christopher Kempf takes a look at how the nine Unibet Premier League players compare statistically over the last four years ahead of tonight's restart.
The coronavirus pandemic has caused the most severe disruption to the professional darts calendar in the history of the PDC.
Accordingly, the last few months of sporadic darts events do not provide an ideal guide to Premier League performances in the coming two weeks.
But we can zoom out even farther, taking a look at the long-term view of players' performance trajectories, and get a better insight as to where players have been and where they are headed.
The most intriguing long-term trend among the nine regular Premier League players is the slow decline of Michael van Gerwen's stats from stratospheric levels in 2017-18 to still excellent, but not outlandish, statistics in 2020.
Van Gerwen still leads the PDC in averages, legs won in 15 darts or fewer and 180s thrown per leg, but in each of these categories his lead over other top players has shrunk dramatically.
In 2016 Van Gerwen completed 14 more five-visit legs than Peter Wright for every 100 legs played; his lead in 2020 has shrunk to one.
Four years ago the Dutchman was completing ton-plus finishes at nearly twice the rate of Gerwyn Price; today Price is the more accurate player when it comes to high finishes.
The meteoric rise of other players also contributes to the current state of close competition exhibited in the 2020 Premier League.
The past four years have witnessed an incredible transformation in the performance of Price, who has added nine points to his averages, nearly doubled his output of 100+ finishes and decreased the rate at which he fails to complete 2-40 (even) checkouts from one in three to one in eight.
In 2016 Price ranked in the bottom quartile of nearly every statistic; in 2019 Price was ranked second (behind only MvG) in averages, combination finishes and completing legs in four visits.
Three of the last four televised ranking events have featured confrontations between world number one Van Gerwen and Price in the final session of the tournament, further solidifying the Welshman's elite status.
Though he has not attained the same heights of achievement as Price (a ranking TV title continues to elude him), Michael Smith has also turned around his game after a disastrous 2016 season.
Completing 9.6% of his legs in 12 darts or fewer in 2020 puts him at eighth out of 167 PDC past and present Tour Card Holders, and chalking up 3.69 scores of 171-180 per ten legs makes him the second-best player at completing three-treble visits. Every category has shown improvement in numerical terms, even if Smith's ranking among PDC players has fallen in places.
If the multi-year trends are to believed, two players most clearly on the wane are Rob Cross and Gary Anderson.
Cross in 2020 has shown little of the magic which propelled him to a World Championship after 11 months as a professional.
His averages are more than five points lower than they were in his debut year, he has fallen from 2nd to 64th in ton-plus finishes and from 6th to 32nd in maximums per leg, and shows no signs of overcoming a streak of lopsided Premier League losses to MvG.
Anderson, on the other hand, comes back to Milton Keynes having reached the final of the World Matchplay, but his inconsistency, especially on the doubles, could imperil his tenure in the Premier League.
His 96.11 average in 2020 still puts him in the top 10, but the PDC-wide ranking of Anderson's attempts at any category of checkout reveal his recent mediocrity in the field of checkouts. 66 players rank ahead of him when it comes to checkouts with three darts at double, but even this is an improvement over 2019, when 111 did.
His countryman Wright, moreover, has taken over from MvG as World Champion - and as the number one player at taking out 101+ finishes - and is now a much more consistent threat to MvG's dominance than the 2015-2016 World Champion.
The current state of the Premier League table suggests that Daryl Gurney, currently sitting on two points, may be too far removed in the standings from the other eight players to claw his way back into qualification for a semi-final spot.
Indeed, his 2020 results have shown little indication of his being able to match the best performances of other players; while Gurney ranks 7th in the PDC at completing legs by the end of his sixth visit, he ranks only 39th when it comes to locking up the leg after four visits.
Otherwise, the other eight competitors are all within three points of each other in the table - the fight for the top four positions could come down to a tiebreaker on leg difference.
The player at the top of the table, Glen Durrant, has two matches to play against Van Gerwen in the coming weeks, and in spite of MvG's 0-2 record against the three-time Lakeside Champion, the stats do not favour the Englishman.
Compare MvG's 80.5% checkout completion percentage with three darts at the double (sixth in the PDC) to Durrant's 74.0% (64th) and it becomes clear that MvG would be favoured to reclaim the lead from Durrant when the two meet this week.
If MvG tops the table at the end of group play, it will be the eighth year in a row that he has done so, but after a narrow seventh group stage win last year other players' claims to the throne, as it were, are becoming more credible.
While Phil Taylor is no longer on the scene to challenge the Dutchman's Premier League hegemony, Van Gerwen's difficulty at fending off his rivals in group play, as indicated by the slide in his stats, is growing.
To jump ahead of Durrant will require him winning one more match than Duzza, which is no certainty on the back of the two players' World Matchplay performances.
But any of the other top eight (especially Wright and Price) could easily jump ahead if their excellent 2020 overall statistics inform their play.
It's an unusual situation both to have so many legitimate potential claimants of the Premier League title and to have the group stages all over with in barely more than a week.
Follow Christopher on Twitter @ochepedia.
The Unibet Premier League will be broadcast live on Sky Sports in the UK, on PDCTV for Rest of the World Subscribers and through the PDC's worldwide broadcast partners including DAZN and RTL7.