Justin Thomas is going to win this week’s WM Phoenix Open. Well, at least it’s easy to convince one’s self that this is how the event at TPC Scottsdale will play out. With a slightly watered-down field compared to last week (and last year at this same venue), there are not many players who are hitting it better than Thomas right now, nor are there many who have a better history at this golf course.
J.T. is back. Have you noticed that? Perhaps not. It’s still football season, and the major championships have not yet arrived. But the numbers don’t lie; Thomas, who struggled for almost all of 2023, is hitting it as well as he has in a long time and is once again among the best iron players in the world.
Among the top 150 players who have played a minimum of 10 Shotlink rounds over the last three months, J.T. ranks No. 6 in the world in approach play. From January-September of last year, he ranked No. 36, which is fine but certainly not the level to which Thomas is accustomed.
There’s more.
After dropping all the way to No. 70 in the Data Golf rankings last fall, J.T. is back up to No. 13, the neighborhood in which he has traditionally resided. He went from the Luke Lists and Taylor Montgomerys of the world to the Tommy Fleetwoods and Ludvig Abergs.
You can see when the switch flipped. Starting in the fall, with a fifth-place finish at the Fortinet Championship, he’s been on a run. No finishes outside the top six. No strokes lost to the field on approach or around the greens. He’s been mostly the J.T. of old.
Data Golf
The caveat here is that he started off 2023 pretty well, too. There were no real signs that last year would be a bad year for him until he missed the cut at the Masters. So, in some ways, we’ve been here before. This does feel different, though, partly because Thomas went through some real swing changes at the end of the summer (and you can see them hit starting in the fall).
“Honestly, it was after the British Open, obviously air very long flight home,” Thomas said this week, describing when he started adjusting his swing.”I really just was looking at current videos, old videos. I have a folder on my phone of all of my favorite swing videos over the years and ones that I liked the most, and I really couldn’t fathom or understand how I got that far off.
“Just trying to, kind of like you said, get back into some old habits, some things that maybe I don’t like how it looks as much, but that’s in my DNA. That makes me who I am. It’s taken, and still is, a lot of golf balls to get that muscle memory back and get it in a spot that I’m comfortable with. But I sure like this version a lot better.”
Consistency matters to pros, and especially more so to the greats. That was where it went sideways for Thomas last year. He would have a great start (Travelers Championship) sandwiched by two terrible ones (U.S. Open and Open Championship). It’s important to keep the momentum going right now, and there are few places better for J.T. to do that than TPC Scottsdale, where he has absolutely crushed.
In his last five starts at this tournament, Thomas has four top 10s and a T13. Of the players in this field, only Scottie Scheffler (3.1) and Hideki Matsuyama (2.5) gain more strokes at TPC Scottsdale than Thomas does at 2.2. It’s a perfect course for his skillset (incredible iron play) because, as my colleague Rick Gehman, pointed out in his recent newsletter, TPC Scottsdale has big greens but small targets. That’s a good recipe for Thomas.
The greens at TPC Scottsdale are easy to hit but the pins are difficult to access. At 7,000 sq. feet on average, they boast a 63.78% GIR rate — certainly reasonable by Tour standards. The differentiator is that it’s hard to hit it close to the pin. On the Tour, 12.29% of all birdie opportunities come from 4′-8′. That number drops to 9.69% at TPC Scottsdale.
Even with his iron play struggles of 2023, Thomas has still been incredible when it comes to proximity over the last two years. Data Golf has some cool charts that show this. The first shows J.T.’s average shot from 100-150 yards compared to the Tour average. The second shows the same thing from 150-200 yards.
Data Golf (100-150)
Data Golf (150-200)
So, yes, Justin Thomas is going to win the Phoenix Open. His run of incredible play points to it. So does his three top-four finishes in his last five starts at TPC Scottsdale. His consistent iron play says so. As does his rise in both the Data Golf Rankings (13th), Official World Golf Rankings (19th) as well as the fact that only five top 15 players in the world are playing this event. He has not won since the 2022 PGA Championship, which is almost two years now. It’s going to happen, and it’s going to happen soon.
Justin Thomas is going to win the Phoenix Open. Unless, of course, Scottie Scheffler does for the third year in a row.