PDC Stats Analyst Christopher Kempf assesses the top ten PDC stars - based on their last 200 legs played - ahead of this week's BetMGM Premier League and Ladbrokes UK Open action.
#1 Averages - Luke Littler
#1 OChE - Gerwyn Price
#1 Doubles - Ryan Joyce
#1 171-180 - Luke Littler
#1 99, 101+ Checkout - Connor Scutt
Gerwyn Price made great strides this past week towards igniting his Premier League campaign with victories over the last two World Champions on his way to a nightly victory in Dublin.
Though Luke Littler's 100.97 average over his last 200 legs remains the best in the PDC, Price has become the first player of 2025 to surpass the World Champion's OChE rating.
He therefore has a legitimate claim to being the PDC's number-one form player, and while 'The Nuke' continues to impress with scoring that boosts his averages, Price would be expected to win one additional leg out of 100 that the two play on the ProTour.
Accordingly, Price already has a ranking title on his CV for 2025, while Littler has not yet advanced beyond a quarter-final, and despite Littler's dominance in his battles with nearly all other players, he has lost five in a row against Price.
The 2021 World Champion is now looking like a more balanced, well-rounded player than the teenaged sensation.
Price's doubles percentage of 48% compares very favourably to Littler's 41% (21st in the PDC), and the 39-year-old has only thrown eight fewer maxima.
If Littler is to repeat last year's heroics and retain his Premier League title, he will need to quickly come up with a solution for his lack of success against the Welsh star.
ProTour wins for Chris Dobey and Ryan Searle represent the culmination of improvements in form for both English players, who moved in tandem up the Form Guide rankings with approximately equal strides.
Dobey's average of 98.00 is 2.14 points higher than it was last week; Searle's is 2.11 points higher.
Both players are now members of the exclusive club of players, along with Premier League veterans Littler, Price, Luke Humphries and Michael van Gerwen, who are playing at a level that will win 60% of legs on the ProTour.
Searle has relied more on checkout accuracy (14 ton-plus finishes and 41% doubles) than Dobey, the 48th best finisher in the PDC, but only Littler and Price have usurped Dobey's total of 82 maxima.
Throughout the history of the Form Guide, the player ranking #1 amongst the 128 Tour Card Holders for doubles hit relative to attempts has rarely been the leading player in averages or the player enjoying success in PDC tournaments.
It certainly is no hindrance to either of those achievements, as Littler demonstrated last year, but the evidence has demonstrated that doubles alone earn players surprisingly little dough.
Take for instance Ryan Joyce, currently the PDC's number-one finisher. With 48.7% of his attempts finding their targets, this is a world-class percentage that is only ever exceeded by few players.
Even though Joyce also holds the 15th highest average in the PDC at the moment, his efforts have met with little success thus far in 2025: a 3-4 match record on the ProTour, a last 32 exit at the World Masters and one successful European Tour qualification.
The culprit appears to be under-powered scoring - just 51 maximums in 200 legs.
Joyce, to his credit, has taken advantage of nearly every checkout opportunity he has had, but without more trebles he will not have enough of them to achieve the success that his talent deserves.
Mickey Mansell ranks 65th in the PDC for his three-dart average of 90.97, putting him in the bottom half of PDC players, and he only has one match average above 95 thus far in 12 Players Championship matches.
However, he has scored important wins over TV champions Danny Noppert, Rob Cross and Ritchie Edhouse and has already earned £7,000 on the Pro Tour in 2025 - more than Stephen Bunting or Jonny Clayton.
Mansell is one of the players whose OChE rating has most outpaced his averages, suggesting that even though he may not hit lots of trebles in losing efforts in legs, he is extremely efficient with his darts at double and gets the job done in most of the winnable, tightly contested legs in his matches.
His 91 average may not be enough to take on Littler or Humphries at their best, but it enables Mansell to do what he has done for nearly two decades - secure qualification for more tournaments and keep his professional career alive.
*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