The Sentry Tournament of Champions: Who’s hot?

Looking at the field at Kapalua based on who’s hot in recent showings

Any assessment of which players are entering this week’s Sentry Tournament of Champions ‘hot’ has to first consider whether being ‘hot’ has any meaning this week.

After all, no Tour player has swung a club in anger in a month. For most of the better players, the layoff approaches two months since the conclusion of the Covid-delayed 2020 Masters in mid-November.

A total of 42 players are expected to tee it up on the Plantation Course at Kapalua. Most qualified by winning a 2020 season tournament. However, in deference to the fact that Covid-19 forced the cancellation of several tournaments – and thus several qualification opportunities – the field this year is being supplemented by qualifiers based on their showing in the FedEx Cup series.

Those supplemental qualifiers include 2019 TOC champion Xander Schauffele. The 2020 champion, Justin Thomas, qualified to defend his title based on his victory at the WGC Fed Ex St. Jude.

Only a brief glance at the list of 2020 champions provides plenty of reason to question whether being ‘hot’ means much of anything on Tour.

The last 10 winners of Tour events, dating back to Hudson Swafford’s victory at Puntacana in late September, were: Swafford, Sergio Garcia, Martin Laird, Jason Kokrak, Patrick Cantlay. Brian Gay. Carlos Ortiz, Dustin Johnson, Robert Streb and Viktor Hovland.

In the event immediately preceding their victories, the average finish of the 10 was 33rd with three missed cuts. Discounting four of the five most recent champions – who have not made a subsequent start – the average finish in the first tournament following their win has been 21st with two more missed cuts.

So for what it’s worth – and with a caution that it may not be worth much – here’s a look at which members of the Sentry starting field will bring the most momentum with them to Kapalua. Our formula is a weighted one based on the standard deviation of each player’s finish in their 10 most recent competitions since the start of the 2020-21 season.

The weighting gives triple weight to performance in majors and double weight to performance in the two big-money international events played since the start of the new season, the CJ Cup and the Zozo. The number you see beside each player’s name is the weighted average standard deviation of each player’s most recent performances. As you look at that number, keep in mind that in golf, lower is better. That means negative numbers are better than positive ones.