The PGA TOUR heads to Kapalua for the Sentry Tournament of Champions. Matt Vincenzi already did the heavy lifting on what metrics he thinks matters most at Kapalua, so we can dive right in.
There are many variables when it comes to DFS, so I tend to take a minimalistic approach to how I approach this game, no matter what sport I am playing. I recently made the jump as a cash game grinder for the last six years to strictly playing GPP only.
Similar to my approach for NFL DFS — I stick to small-field single-entry tournaments — I make one team every week that I enter into every tournament. (I’ll still throw my lineup into some large-field tournaments because I have FOMO.)
There are a lot more losing weeks when you play with just one lineup and are a GPP only player, but the spike weeks make it worth it. Honestly, I enjoy the max variance.
Anyway, this article will focus on the three golfers I plan to build my lineup around for the upcoming week.
Don’t forget about the other tools that FantasyLabs has to offer, like our Lineup Optimizer to effortlessly create up to 150 lineups, or use our Lineup Builder if you like to hand-build your lineups.
This analysis may reference Strokes Gained, a set of proprietary metrics generated by the PGA TOUR using millions of data points to calculate how many shots on average it takes a player to get the ball in the hole from every distance and situation.
Strokes Gained is now available in the FantasyLabs PGA Models.
Viktor Hovland ($10,000 DraftKings)
Outside of Bryson DeChambeau, Hovland is checking in with the lowest Ownership Projection in this price range, per our Fanshare Ownership Projections (available in our marketplace). Most DFS players will likely lean towards Justin Thomas at $10,600 along with Patrick Cantlay and/or Xander Schaueffele at $9,700 and $9,500.
That said, you can still fit some combination of those players into your lineup if you use Hovland.
Hovland didn’t play well here last year, but I’m not going to weigh that too much considering where his game is at right now.
Last year, Hovland lost over 1.50 strokes on approach in two of his four rounds, which is an outlier performance for him.
Over Hovland’s last 50 rounds, he ranks seventh in this field in True Strokes Gained: Approach and fifth in Total Strokes Gained, per Data Golf. As always, birdies are king in DraftKings scoring, and nobody is averaging more birdies per tournament over the last 75 weeks than Hovland.
My personal PGA DFS Model on FantasyLabs (available in our Pro Models) is a minimalistic model that weighs T10 odds and other catch-all industry metrics — he is among the highest-rated at the time of writing.
