PDC Stats Analyst Christopher Kempf assesses the top ten PDC stars - based on their last 200 legs played - ahead of next week's BoyleSports World Grand Prix in Leicester.
#1 Averages - Gary Anderson
#1 OChE - Gary Anderson
#1 Doubles - Michael van Gerwen
#1 171-180 - Dirk van Duijvenbode
#1 99, 101+ Checkout - Michael van Gerwen
Gary Anderson came into Wigan all guns blazing this past week, dispatching World Champion Luke Humphries with a 114 average, unleashing a perfect leg on Jamie Hughes and taking a near-110 tournament average all the way to the semi-finals before losing to Tuesday's eventual champion Wessel Nijman.
A player recently written off for his failure to win any ranking TV events in more than six years, Anderson is the player with the 2024 season's highest average.
Against Joe Cullen on Wednesday, the two-time World Champion produced his tenth match of the 2024 Players Championship circuit in which he scored more than 110 points per visit (no other player has done so more than twice).
Only his inconsistency derailed his campaign for a third floor title of the year; just minutes after averaging 112 and hitting 60% of his doubles, Anderson lost to a player averaging 89 largely due to 20% checkout accuracy.
Anderson is filling up highlight reels with his heavy scoring and high averages frequently enough to take him back to the top of the Form Guide, but not enough to earn him another trophy.
One player who had no difficulty winning a title was Wessel Nijman, who were it not for Luke Littler's Premier League and ProTour titles would certainly have earned more recognition as a break-out young star for his exploits this season.
At the moment he is the highest-ranked player born in the 2000s, the #1 Dutch player and #2 overall, playing at a pace that would win him 63.3% of legs against a theoretical average ProTour opponent.
Only a few thousand pounds more in Order of Merit income will see him secure his Tour Card straight through to 2027; with 45% doubles accuracy and an output of 180s on par with that of Luke Littler, Nijman's talent appears poised to take him well beyond world #64.
Stephen Bunting - the unlucky runner-up in five Players Championships so far this year - has also never reached the #1 position in the Form Guide but maintains a consistent presence in the top ten.
Bunting is on course to be a top ten seed for the first time in a PDC World Championship and is producing the highest known averages of his career this season, finishing the week on a 97.73 average for his last 200 legs.
Even these excellent stats have not enabled him to win a fourth ranking title after a decade in the PDC, and his 15th best OChE rating suggests why: he is not converting those averages efficiently into legs won and return-to-the-board denials of his opponents.
Bunting out-averaged his opponent Luke Humphries in the Players Championship 26 final, but missed an opportunity to take a 6-3 lead when he twice failed to check out by the end of his sixth visit to the board. 'The Bullet' is clearly on the rise, but a player averaging nearly 98 should be meeting with much more success.
Credit where it's due for a player never before mentioned in the Form Guide: Callum Goffin, from Wales, aged 28, was the most improved player of the PDC Pro Tour's three-day stop in Wigan.
A boost of 8.28 points to his OChE brought him into the top 64 of the world in this metric this week, with credit largely due to a 102.53 average against reigning world champion Humphries, his highest of the year.
Goffin is the world #100 and unlikely to qualify for the World Championship this year, but similar results against elite players like World Champion Humphries will bring him into contention for more than just £1,000 floor tournament prizes.
*OChE (Ordinal Checkout Efficiency) explained:
OChE is a metric designed to evaluate the efficiency at which players convert their averages into legs won.
The statistic is the % of legs a player would expect to win on the ProTour, calculated from a weighted average of 4,5, 6 & 7 visit checkout rates.
Follow Christopher on Twitter @ochepedia