PDC Stats Analyst Christopher Kempf assesses the top ten PDC stars - based on their last 200 legs played - following the recent ProTour double-header and last weekend's European Darts Trophy.
#1 Averages - Luke Littler
#1 OChE - Luke Littler
#1 Doubles - Rob Cross
#1 171-180 - Luke Littler
#1 99, 101+ Checkout - Gian van Veen
Luke Littler might still be the PDC's go-to player for high averages and lots of 180s, but he is only barely the #1 player in the game with respect to winning efficiency, i.e. translating those averages into legs won.
After a week in which the World Youth Champion reached back-to-back Players Championship finals, atoning for six championship darts missed on Tuesday by needing only one to win on the following day, Gian van Veen played at a pace which would win him 67.7% of legs against average ProTour opponents.
If Littler remains well ahead in three-dart averages, it is only because his prodigious output of 180s continues apace - he has thrown at least 80 maxima in every 200-leg period of the Form Guide for nearly a year, and now stands at 112, 14 maxima more than any other player in the history of the Form Guide.
While Van Veen threw 51 fewer maxima than Littler in the most recent period, he remains the superior player with regards to checkout accuracy, and leads the PDC in ton-plus checkouts, approaching a record with 22.
With Littler aged 18 and Van Veen not yet 23, the present and future clearly belongs to the Gen-Z cohort of darts stars.
One of the few players without a World Youth Championship title to his name achieving televised victories in the PDC is Gerwyn Price, the one remaining player against whom Luke Littler has failed to achieve consistent success.
Price has now won two nights of the Premier League with decisive wins against the reigning World Champion, his most recent being the more impressive by virture of the fact that the Welshman gained a 6-3 victory with barely a 94 average.
That was very much out of character for Price, whose last 200 legs have him on a 99 average, but more importantly an OChE rating of 65.5 (exceptionally high for an average under 100) and the PDC's 2nd highest doubles percentage.
The #1 spot belongs - for the first time - to Rob Cross, whose 170 finish defeated Price in last week's Premier League and pushed.his doubling accuracy to nearly 48%.
Rising fast up the Form Guide leaderboard is the man establishing himself as the dominant 'Smith' in darts, Ross; he has accomplished an 8.3-point boost to his OChE over the past three weeks thanks to quarter-final finishes in three of the last six Pro Tour events.
This complements nicely his highest-recorded total of ton-plus finishes in the Form Guide (21), including a spectacular 125 finish in his most recent Players Championship campaign.
Smith began the month of March at a winning efficiency of 52% of legs against the average ProTour player, and now he is on 60%, the largest increase of any player.
The second-largest increase belongs to European Darts Trophy champion Nathan Aspinall, whose victories put him on a 12-month high OChE rating of 58 and 80 maxima.
This is some of the most impressive form yet seen from Aspinall, but he will need to bring it to bear in the Premier League to avoid missing out on the season-ending Play-Offs.
*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