It’s time for more serve-speed research notes. Most of the matches at the 2011 U.S. Open were tracked by Pointstream, and serve speed was recorded for the vast majority of those points. The Open website published some serve speed numbers, but not as conveniently as I would like.
Below, find the average first and second serve speeds for every man who played three or more Pointstream-tracked matches. Oddly enough, the top and bottom of the list are held by Americans; John Isner is where you’d expect him, while Donald Young barely kept his first-serve average in the triple digits.
I didn’t expect to see nearly so much variation in the difference between first and second serve averages. Sure, Isner and Young are the endpoints in both lists, but David Nalbandian–below average on firsts–is third of 22 on seconds. To take another angle, both Marin Cilic and Jo-Wilfried Tsonga each have more than double the difference in averages than does either Alex Bogomolov or Fernando Verdasco.
(“M” is the number of matches tracked by Pointstream for each player.)
Player M 1sts 1stAvg 2nds 2ndAvg John Isner 4 313 124.5 125 106.2 Andy Roddick 5 249 122.1 118 100.5 Tomas Berdych 3 85 120.3 71 95.0 Jo-Wilfried Tsonga 5 289 119.7 206 90.6 Marin Cilic 3 125 118.7 121 86.3 Janko Tipsarevic 3 148 116.5 84 90.5 Roger Federer 6 355 115.6 186 94.6 Juan Martin Del Potro 3 180 114.5 96 88.2 Julien Benneteau 3 177 114.0 86 89.9 Tommy Haas 3 211 113.9 124 94.1 Novak Djokovic 7 421 113.7 226 91.4 Player M 1sts 1stAvg 2nds 2ndAvg Andy Murray 6 338 112.6 204 85.2 Mardy Fish 4 231 112.4 165 88.0 David Nalbandian 3 165 112.3 125 96.1 David Ferrer 3 128 112.2 74 88.9 Rafael Nadal 7 435 110.5 176 84.5 Juan Monaco 3 167 109.4 70 90.4 Gilles Simon 3 235 108.3 179 81.6 Fernando Verdasco 3 175 107.3 72 92.6 Alex Bogomolov Jr. 3 264 103.1 96 89.1 Donald Young 4 213 101.9 111 80.6
Have you got stats for average 1st/2nd serve speeds?
Averages from the tracked US Open men’s matches are:
First serves: 113.1 Seconds: 90.5