Italian translation at settesei.it
If you picked up only two stats about surprise Roland Garros champion Jelena Ostapenko, you probably heard that, first, her average forehand is faster than Andy Murray’s, and second, she hit 299 winners in her seven French Open matches. I’m not yet sure how much emphasis we should put on shot speed, and I instinctively distrust raw totals, but even with those caveats, it’s hard not to be impressed.
Compared to the likes of Simona Halep, Timea Bacsinszky, and Caroline Wozniacki, the last three women she upset en route to her maiden title, Ostapenko was practically playing a different game. Her style is more reminiscent of fellow Slam winners Petra Kvitova and Maria Sharapova, who don’t construct points so much as they destruct them. What I’d like to know, then, is how Ostapenko stacks up against the most aggressive players on the WTA tour.
Thankfully we already have a metric for this: Aggression Score, which I’ll abbreviate as AGG. This stat requires that we know three things about every point: How many shots were hit, who won it, and how. With that data, we figure out what percentage of a player’s shots resulted in winners, unforced errors, or her opponent’s forced errors. (Technically, the denominator is “shot opportunities,” which includes shots a player didn’t manage to hit after her opponent hit a winner. That doesn’t affect the results too much.) For today’s purposes, I’m calculating AGG without a player’s serves–both aces and forced return errors–so we’re capturing only rally aggression.
The typical range of this version AGG is between 0.1–very passive–and 0.3–extremely aggressive. Based on the nearly 1,600 women’s matches in the Match Charting Project dataset, Kvitova and Julia Goerges represent the aggressive end, with average AGGs around .275. We only have four Samantha Crawford matches in the database, but early signs suggest she could outpace even those women, as her average is at .312. At the other end of the spectrum, Madison Brengle is at 0.11, with Wozniacki and Sara Errani at 0.12. In the Match Charting data, there are single-day performances that rise as high as 0.44 (Serena Williams over Errani at the 2013 French Open) and fall as low as 0.06. In the final against Ostapenko, Halep’s aggression score was 0.08, half of her average of 0.16.
Context established, let’s see where Ostapenko fits in, starting with the Roland Garros final. Against Halep, her AGG was a whopping .327. That’s third highest of any player in a major final, behind Kvitova at Wimbledon in 2014 (.344) and Serena at the 2007 Australian Open (.328). (We have data for every Grand Slam final back to 1999, and most of them before that.) Using data from IBM Pointstream, which encompasses almost all matches at Roland Garros this year, Ostapenko’s aggression in the final was 7th-highest of any match in the tournament–out of 188 player-matches with the necessary data–behind two showings from Bethanie Mattek Sands, one each from Goerges, Madison Keys, and Mirjana Lucic … and Ostapenko’s first-round win against Louisa Chirico. It was also the third-highest recorded against Halep out of more than 200 Simona matches in the Match Charting dataset.
You get the picture: The French Open final was a serious display of aggression, at least from one side of the court. That level of ball-bashing was nothing new for the Latvian, either. We have charting data for her last three matches at Roland Garros, along with two matches from Charleston and one from Prague this clay season. Of those six performances, Ostapenko’s lowest AGG was .275, against Wozniacki in the Paris quarters. Her average across the six was .303.
If those recent matches indicate what we’ll see from her in the future, she will likely score as the most aggressive rallying player on the WTA tour. Because she played less aggressively in her earlier matches on tour, her career average still trails those of Kvitova and Goerges, but not by much–and probably not for long. It’s scary to consider what might happen as she gets stronger; we’ll have to wait and see how her tactics evolve, as well.
—
The Match Charting Project contains at least 15 matches on 62 different players–here is the rally-only aggression score for all of them:
PLAYER MATCHES RALLY AGG
Julia Goerges 15 0.277
Petra Kvitova 57 0.277
Jelena Ostapenko 17 0.271
Madison Keys 35 0.261
Camila Giorgi 17 0.257
Sabine Lisicki 19 0.246
Caroline Garcia 15 0.242
Coco Vandeweghe 17 0.238
Serena Williams 108 0.237
Laura Siegemund 19 0.235
Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova 17 0.230
Danka Kovinic 15 0.223
Kristina Mladenovic 28 0.222
Na Li 15 0.218
Maria Sharapova 73 0.217
PLAYER MATCHES RALLY AGG
Eugenie Bouchard 52 0.214
Ana Ivanovic 46 0.211
Garbine Muguruza 57 0.210
Lucie Safarova 29 0.209
Karolina Pliskova 42 0.207
Elena Vesnina 20 0.207
Venus Williams 46 0.205
Johanna Konta 31 0.205
Monica Puig 15 0.203
Dominika Cibulkova 38 0.198
Martina Navratilova 25 0.197
Steffi Graf 39 0.196
Anastasija Sevastova 17 0.194
Samantha Stosur 19 0.193
Sloane Stephens 15 0.190
PLAYER MATCHES RALLY AGG
Ekaterina Makarova 23 0.189
Lauren Davis 16 0.186
Heather Watson 16 0.185
Daria Gavrilova 20 0.183
Justine Henin 28 0.183
Kiki Bertens 15 0.181
Monica Seles 18 0.179
Svetlana Kuznetsova 28 0.174
Timea Bacsinszky 28 0.174
Victoria Azarenka 55 0.170
Andrea Petkovic 24 0.166
Roberta Vinci 23 0.164
Barbora Strycova 16 0.163
Belinda Bencic 31 0.163
Jelena Jankovic 24 0.162
PLAYER MATCHES RALLY AGG
Alison Riske 15 0.161
Angelique Kerber 83 0.161
Flavia Pennetta 23 0.160
Simona Halep 218 0.160
Carla Suarez Navarro 31 0.159
Martina Hingis 15 0.157
Chris Evert 20 0.152
Darya Kasatkina 18 0.148
Elina Svitolina 46 0.141
Yulia Putintseva 15 0.137
Alize Cornet 18 0.136
Agnieszka Radwanska 90 0.130
Annika Beck 16 0.126
Monica Niculescu 25 0.124
Caroline Wozniacki 62 0.122
Sara Errani 23 0.121
(A few of the match counts differ slightly from what you’ll find on the MCP home page. I’ve thrown out a few matches with too much missing data or in formats that didn’t play nice with the script I wrote to calculate aggression score.)