What You Need To Know
Although this is an official European Tour event the field at the WGC-HSBC Champions looks more like a Major Championship. In fact, all of the 2016 Major Champions — and 10 total Major winners — will be teeing it up in Shanghai this weekend. What’s more, 40 of the top-50 players in the world (including eight of the top-10) will be playing at this event.
Russell Knox won his first European Tour event here last season with a two-shot victory over Kevin Kisner. With a victory Knox would join Tiger Woods as the only other player to defend a WGC title successfully.
Sheshan Iternational Golf Club has hosted every HSBC Champions event since 2005 except for the 2012 tourney. The course is a picturesque beauty with lots of water features and bunkers to challenge the world’s best players. It’s proven to be beatable by both accurate players like Knox and the long bombers like Bubba Watson, who won in 2014.
Five of the last six event winners at Sheshan International have finished the week ranked inside the top 20 for both Greens In Regulation (GIR) and either Driving Distance (DD) or Driving Accuracy (DA). We’ll look for golfers who excel in both GIR and one of the two driving statistics.
Driving Stats
High-Priced Tier: $9,000 and Higher
Dustin Johnson leads the high-priced tier in Long-Term (LT) DD at 315 yards and ranks 35th with a 68.2 LT GIR percentage. Importantly, Johnson has the best LT Adjusted Round Score (Adj Rd Score) in the field (67.9) and his 16.8 LT Adjusted Birdies Per Tournament (Adj Bird Avg) ranks second.
Johnson won this event in 2013 and finished fifth in 2015. He has a win and two top-10 finishes in his three most recent starts. Johnson is currently a top-seven player in the Davy Player Model. Roster him with confidence this week.
Henrik Stenson is the most accurate player in the field off the tee with a 71.1 percent LT DA. He also ranks second with a 74.6 LT GIR percentage. He’s tied for second behind Johnson with a 68.1 LT Adj Rd Score, and his 16.3 LT Adj Bird Avg is third.
Perhaps the only concern with Stenson is potential rustiness — he hasn’t played in a tournament since the Deutsche Bank Championship the first weekend in September. He does have a long history at this course and has finished as high as fifth here.
Mid-Priced Tier: $7,000 to $8,900
Watson — the 2014 Champion — leads the mid-priced tier with a 312.8-yard LT DD, and his 70 percent LT GIR is 18th overall. His 68.6 LT Adj Rd Score ranks fourth and his 15 LT Adj Bird Avg is ninth.
Watson finished 35th here last season but prior to that had a win and an eighth-place finish in his only other two starts. His 68.3 Course Adj Rd Score is second among golfers who have made at least three starts at this track.
Per our Trends tool: In nine previous tournaments priced below $9,000, Bubba has produced a +8.92 Plus/Minus with 66.7 percent Consistency.
Frenchman Gregory Bourdy ranks second in the field with a LT DA of 68.6 percent, and his 71.2 percent LT GIR is ninth. Bourdy’s 70.5 LT Adj Rd Score is way down the list at 55th overall and may cause him to go overlooked in tournaments this week.
Bourdy’s game sets up well for this track, and he has improved his finish each time he’s played here. He finished 21st his last time here in 2013. Golfers in this pricing tier with comparable LT metrics have previously provided a +2.04 Plus/Minus.
Value Tier: $6,900 and Lower
The Burmenator: Dean Burmester leads the field with a mammoth LT DD of 317.2 yards. His 71.1 LT GIR percentage ranks 10th overall.
The big question with Burmester is whether he’ll be over-matched in this elite field. His fourth-worst 27.3 percent field score highlights the ‘quality’ of competition he has been facing. He most recently finished eighth in something called Vodacom Origins-Euphoria. That sounds like someplace I would have enjoyed being at around three o’clock in the morning in 1997, not an event on the Sunshine Tour. Burmester is worth a shot in a guaranteed prize pool.
Soren Kjeldsen‘s 66.9 percent LT DA ranks ninth in the field and is the best mark in the value tier. Kjeldsen’s 67.8 percent LT GIR is very respectable and his 69.6 LT Adj Rd Score ranks 31st.
Kjeldsen is one of just five golfers this week to have a salary of less than $7,000 and a LT Adj Rd Score of 69.8 or better. Value golfers with comparable LT metrics have generated a +2.82 Plus/Minus.
Greens In Regulation
High-Priced Tier: $9,000 and Higher
Rory McIlroy has the best LT GIR (71 percent) of the golfers in the high-priced tier. He also has a rare combination of both power and accuracy off the tee. His 303.5-yard LT DD is ninth, and his 61.8 percent LT DA ranks 30th. McIlroy is one of two golfers — Sergio Garcia is the other — who has an average DD of over 300 yards and a DA percentage of 60 percent or higher.
And McIlroy loves this track. In five starts here since 2009, McIlroy has four top-six finishes and one ‘outlier’ 11th-place finish. He has won two of the three most recent tournaments he’s played. McIlroy has the highest Odds to Win (16.7 percent) for good reason. Fade him at your own risk.
Mid-Priced Tier: $7,000 to $8,900
Rafael Cabrera-Bello leads the field with a 75.3 LT GIR percentage. His 62.8 percent LT DA ranks 23rd, and his 69.5 LT Adj Rd Score is 27th.
RCB has finished inside the top 12 in three of his last four tournaments. The few mid-priced golfers who have previously fit Cabrera-Bello’s profile have crushed their salary-based expectations very consistently.
Value Tier: $6,900 and Lower
Jhonattan Vegas leads the value tier with a 69.6 LT GIR. His 302.6-yard LT DD ranks 11th in the field. Vegas had a top-10 finish here in his only appearance in 2011.
Value golfers with comparable LT metrics have manufactured a +3.06 Plus/Minus with 54.2 percent Consistency.
Bonus
Course Adjusted Round Score
There’s plenty of course history to be examined at this event. In fact, in our Models there are 36 golfers who have a course count of at least two at Sheshan International.
Martin Kaymer is one of four golfers with a course count of five. His 68.4 Course Adj Rd Score is the best among those golfers and ranks sixth among the 36 golfers with two or more starts.
Kaymer won here in 2011 and finished inside the top 10 in four other starts between 2009 and 2014. He has three sixth-place finishes in his last four starts on the European Tour. Kaymer is an excellent play in all formats this week.
