Had a mildly pleasant conversation on X yesterday in relation to a post saying that Connor Scutt was facing the highest opposing average on the Pro Tour this year. We each put our points forward, and weren't necessarily disagreeing, but the main point I was making was that Scutt being a good player helps that statistic. This is something we've been over before, and a huge part of the reason that, below the Pro Tour level, I am very selective as to what data I include in my database, but let's look at the facts. Just filtering down to the Pro Tour events, here are the top ten players in terms of winning legs average so far this year:
So the gist of this is that Scutt is killing the legs he won a clear two points per visit better than anyone that isn't the best player in the world, and even in comparsion to Littler, it's fairly close. The point of this is simple - Connor is extremely close to effectively winning every single leg he has won in five visits. He is less than a point behind (the mark would obviously be 100.2). What does this mean for the opposing average? On a basic level, it means that Scutt's level of play is such that he is preventing his opponents from throwing at doubles, or, more pertinently, not throwing at big trebles, on a much greater frequency than anyone else in the game right now.
To give an example, let's give a standard leg. This one I will admit is curated, and done in such a way to emphasise my point, but I don't think it's hugely misleading and in general you should be able to get the picture. Let's assume that you throw second in a leg, and you kick off with 100/100/140 in some order, leaving 161 after nine, then miss a couple at treble but hit 25 to leave 96, leave yourself in on tops after that visit, and clean up for an eighteen darter on the third dart. It's a solid leg, but let's see what happens dependent on your level of opposition.
If you are playing against me, and I am shit, you are going to be allowed to take all those throws, and go out in eighteen darts. That's a pretty trivial average for the leg of 83.5.
Now let's say you're playing against a decent Challenge Tour player, or lower level tour card player. They're able to take the game out in six visits themselves - so we never get to throw those three darts at tops. That increases our average to 92.2 - a near nine point increase already, just based on one visit.
Now let's say we're playing against an even better player, let's say a mid level card holder, or just anyone who clears the game in five visits. Now we don't even have those three darts from 96 to leave ourselves on a double - our average bumps again to 101.25, as we don't need to set anything up.
Now let's go full send, and play against Littler, who holds in four visits. Here, we just have our first three visits - where we are doing nothing but throwing at big trebles, and our average for the leg increases even more to 113.33.
With this, I hope you see why I don't use averages at all, and just look at how quickly someone wins a leg. With this sort of example, someone could win 6-0 against the same opponent, but finish higher or lower in average just because they have more time to fuck around. And I'd hope that you see that Scutt, in this instance, by not allowing opponents to fuck around, will naturally drive their opposing average up - regardless of what their opponent may be doing, it's just how it works.
Now in fairness to Connor, he has been running into some tricky draws. His opponent list so far has been Rock, Aspinall, Gotthardt (W), Griffin (W), Searle, Joyce, Owen, Klaasen (W), Huybrechts (W), van Veen, Anderson, Searle, van Veen, Reus (W), Wattimena (W), Dobey (W), M Smith. He's had seven first round exits, and those draws have been fucking brutal, the easiest he's had being Rob Owen who hasn't actually started the season badly at all. But when you look at the players he's beaten, and the raw averages he's beaten them with, he's gone 105, 106, 97, 107, 100, 105 and 102. In the games he's lost, he's not dropped below 88, so it is not as if he has had any stinkers that would drag things down. His opposing average is good because he has been playing good players, true, but when he's been beating players (or even in matches he's lost), he's been doing so in such a manner which is severely limiting the opportunities the opponents have to hit doubles in the first place.
That was a long one, and it is a redo, we did the same probably close to a decade ago by swapping out Noppert for MvG in the first BDO worlds Durrant won and seeing what happened (basically Glen's average went up 2-3 points but, rather than win the title, he lost 7-0), but it's just a timely reminder of how things can escalate and make players look better than they are on account of the quality of their opponent.
Should be back tomorrow with thoughts about the Riesa draw.
