DFS Dish: Shriners Children’s Open

The PGA Tour heads to Las Vegas for this week’s Shriners Children’s Open.

If that sounds familiar, it’s because we’ve already been here this season. Similar to the recent Fortinet Championship and Sanderson Farms Championship, this will be the second running of the event during the 2022-23 campaign. This is the result of the reimagined, FedExCup Fall portion of the PGA Tour schedule.

The host course is TPC Summerlin, which has been hosting solo since the 2008 edition of the Shriners. We have a lot of history to lean on so we can dig into the history books when building DFS rosters this week. There is always a rotation of talent so many will be seeing the course for the first or second time. With that in mind, let’s focus on some course-fit stats and see what golfers have a history to playing well with the scores are low.

Going Low out West

We saw plenty of low rounds last week at the Sanderson Farms Championship and the scoring environment is historically even more generous in Las Vegas.

Five of the last six winners of this event have eclipsed the 20-under mark for the week with outlier weather conditions leading to a 9-under winner (Patrick Cantlay) in 2017.

Some golfers struggle to stay in the go-low mindset all week and prefer tougher, major-championship-like setups. We don’t want to target those names this week at TPC Summerlin.

Here are the top performers in adjusted strokes gained per round when playing on easy courses, over the last two years:

Tom Kim
Ludvig Aberg
Cam Davis
J.T. Poston
J.J. Spaun
Tom Hoge
Taylor Montgomery
Alex Noren
Andrew Putnam
Ben Griffin
Christiaan Bezuidenhout
Alex Smalley
Emiliano Grillo
Adam Hadwin
Nicolai Hojgaard

We can also look at performance versus baseline to see who shows the largest increase in performance compared to their typical scores:

Callum Tarren
Cam Davis
Kevin Yu
Hayden Buckley
Peter Kuest
Ben Griffin
J.T. Poston
Carson Young
J.J. Spaun
Garrick Higgo
Nicolai Hojgaard
Ludvig Aberg
Stewart Cink
Taylor Montgomery
Alex Smalley

Overlap List: Names that show up on both lists include Ludvig Aberg, Cam Davis, J.T. Poston, J.J. Spaun, Taylor Montgomery, Ben Griffin, Alex Smalley, and Nicolai Hojgaard.

It’s too early in Aberg’s career to bucket him as an easy-course specialist but that is where the early numbers lean so far.

Home cooking to snap a slump
Taylor Montgomery could do no wrong last year. He ended the 2022 Korn Ferry season with top 10s in eight of his last 10 starts. He then parlayed that into rookie success on the PGA Tour with top 20s in eight of his first nine events played. That included a T-15 at the Shriners, in what is a home game for the Vegas native. He’s gone 19 straight events since then without landing another top-15 finish. Perhaps some home cooking could get him to snap this slump. As you see from the lists above, much of his best work has been done on easy courses where he can get hot (and stay hot) with the putter.

Steady with Spaun
The San Diego State product took last week off but did pop with a T-11 finish in Napa. He’s now 64th in the FedEx Fall standings, so just outside of that key Top-60 number. This week presents a good chance to pad those point totals as he is 4-for-6 at TPC Summerlin with three of those doubling as top 15s. He’s also missed the cut in just one of his last nine starts so there is a nice floor for Spaun who is very comfortable out West.