Hard Court Rankings, Post French-Open

It’s been a little while since I’ve posted anything from my ranking system.  If you’re new around here and don’t know what I’m talking about, you can read up on how my rankings are calculated here.  The short version is that they take into account results, giving you more points for beating good players than beating weaker players.  There are many other factors that go into it, and once the stew is stirred, these rankings do a better job of predicting match results than do the ATP rankings.

One odd thing about surface rankings is that they are most interesting when they are most unreliable.  Right now, we’re shifting gears from clay to grass, and no one has played a match on a hard court since Miami.  But because we’ve switched over, hard court results matter.  (Because there are so few grass-court events, I have to group hard and grass together.)

Without further ado, here is the top 40 through the French Open, rated for current hard-court ability level.

1   Novak Djokovic          6836  
2   Rafael Nadal            5090  
3   Roger Federer           4902  
4   Juan Martin del Potro   4207  
5   Andy Murray             3726  
6   Robin Soderling         2682  
7   Stanislas Wawrinka      2244  
8   Mardy Fish              2072  
9   Gael Monfils            1909  
10  Tomas Berdych           1862  
                                  
11  Andy Roddick            1858  
12  Marin Cilic             1826  
13  David Ferrer            1742  
14  Nikolay Davydenko       1721  
15  Marcos Baghdatis        1603  
16  Milos Raonic            1477  
17  Alexander Dolgopolov    1416  
18  Jo-Wilfried Tsonga      1393  
19  Richard Gasquet         1389  
20  Florian Mayer           1354  
                                  
21  Gilles Simon            1333  
22  Viktor Troicki          1226  
23  Fernando Verdasco       1192  
24  Kei Nishikori           1180  
25  Mikhail Youzhny         1156  
26  Jurgen Melzer           1116  
27  Samuel Querrey          1031  
28  Janko Tipsarevic        1015  
29  Ivan Ljubicic            993  
30  Guillermo Garcia-Lopez   983  
                                  
31  Juan Monaco              967  
32  Michael Llodra           914  
33  John Isner               907  
34  Philipp Kohlschreiber    890  
35  Jeremy Chardy            872  
36  Nicolas Almagro          852  
37  David Nalbandian         846  
38  Feliciano Lopez          784  
39  Radek Stepanek           759  
40  Lleyton Hewitt           753

(The points don’t mean anything concrete, though they do give you an idea of the differences between adjacent players.)

The biggest surprise in the top 10 is Stanislas Wawrinka, and of course, he’s made me look dumb by losing in his first match to British wild card James Ward.  Yikes.  That will probably knock him down a spot or three before next week’s rankings.  Seeing Lleyton Hewitt at the bottom of this list is a reminder that he’s only a year removed from some very good hard-court results, and if healthy, he could generate some upsets at Halle and Wimbledon.

One thought on “Hard Court Rankings, Post French-Open”

  1. This sort of upset happens all the time when players switch to grass. Remember that while Wawrinka was playing on clay in Paris, Ward was getting 11 sets of grass-court tennis under his belt in Nottingham. Besides which, he is the type of player who is at his best on grass. Unless they also flourish on hard courts, good grass players might never get up the rankings as there are so few grass tournaments nowadays.

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