Month: June 2017

Simona Halep and Recoveries From Match Point Down

Italian translation at settesei.it

In yesterday’s French Open quarterfinals, Elina Svitolina held a commanding lead over Simona Halep, up a set and 5-1. Depending on what numbers you plug into the formula, Svitolina’s chance of winning the match at that stage was somewhere between 97% and 99%. Halep fought back to 5-5, and in the second-set tiebreak, Svitolina earned a match point at 6-5. Halep recovered again, won the breaker, and then cruised to a 6-0 victory in the third set.

It’s easy to fit a narrative to that sequence of events: After losing two leads, Svitolina was dispirited, and Halep was all but guaranteed a third-set victory. Maybe. It’s impossible to test that sort of thing on the evidence of a single match, but this is hardly the first time a player has failed to convert match point and needed to start fresh in a new set.

Even without a match point saved, the player who wins the second set has a small advantage going into the decider. In the last six-plus years of women’s Slam matches, the player who won the second set went on to win 51.3% of third sets. On the other hand, if the second set was a tiebreak, the winner of the second set won the decider only 43.7% of the time. Though it sounds contradictory at first, consider what we know about such sets. The second-set winner just barely claimed her set (in the tiebreak), while usually, her opponent took the first set more decisively. Momentum helps a little, but it can’t overcome much of a difference in skill level.

Let’s dig into the specific cases of second-set match points saved. Thanks to the data behind IBM’s Pointstream on Grand Slam websites, we have the point-by-point sequence for most Slam singles matches going back to 2011. (The missing matches are usually those on non-Hawkeye courts and a few small courts at Roland Garros.) That’s over 2,600 women’s singles matches. In just over 1,700 of them, one of the two players earned a match point in the second set. Over 97% of the time, that player converted–needing an average of 1.7 match points to do so–and avoiding playing a third set.

That leaves 45 matches in which one player held a match point in the second set, failed to finish the job, and was forced to play a third set. It’s a limited sample, and it doesn’t wholeheartedly support the third-set-collapse narrative suggested above. 60% of the time–27 of the 45 matches–the player who failed to convert match point in the second set, like Svitolina did, went on to lose the third set. The third set was often lopsided: 5 of the 27 were bagels (including yesterday’s match), and the average score was 6-2. None of the third sets went beyond 6-4.

The other 18 matches–the 40% of the time in which the player with the second-set match point bounced back to win the third set–featured rather one-way deciders, as well. In those, the third-set loser managed an average of only 2.3 games, also never doing better than 6-4.

This is a small sample, so it’s unwise to conclude that this 60/40 margin is anything close to an iron law of tennis. That said, it does provide some evidence that players don’t necessarily collapse after failing to convert a straight-sets win at match point. What happened to Svitolina yesterday is far from certain to happen next time.

Jelena Ostapenko and Teenage Slam Breakthroughs

Italian translation at settesei.it

Jelena Ostepenko is looking ahead to a big day on Thursday: She’ll celebrate her 20th birthday by playing her first Grand Slam semifinal.

A generation or two ago, a breakthrough accomplishment at age 20 would barely merit acknowledgement. In the late 1990s, women’s tennis was dominated by teens a recent teens: Serena Williams and Martina Hingis both won majors before their 20th birthday, and Venus Williams won her first Slam only a few days into her third decade. That youth brigade wasn’t just a couple of once-in-a-generation talents, either: 19-year-old Iva Majoli won a major, and Mirjana Lucic, Jelena Dokic, and Anna Kournikova all reached semifinals before their 18th birthdays.

Times have changed. The last teenage Slam champion was Maria Sharapova in 2006, and we haven’t had a teenager in a major final since Caroline Wozniacki in 2009. Since then, only four players–Ostapenko, Sloane Stephens, Eugenie Bouchard, and Madison Keys–have reached Grand Slam semifinals before their 20th birthdays. (To simplify matters, I’m defining tournament age as age at the beginning of the event, so Ostapenko is a 19-year-old for the purpose of this discussion.)

By just about any measure you can dream up, the sport is getting older. In 1990, the average age of the women in the French Open main draw was 21.8 years. In 2000, it was 23.5. This year, the average age at the start of the tournament was 25.6, just a tiny bit short of last year’s record–set at Roland Garros and Wimbledon–of 25.7. Veterans are sticking around longer, and it takes longer for young players to develop tour-ready games.

Accordingly, we need to revise our notion of what constitutes a big breakthrough. 20 years ago, the semifinal debut of a 19-year-old was a nice achievement for the player herself, but nothing earth-shaking. Today, it’s a once-in-two-years event, and immediately puts the debutante in elite company. While Stephens and Bouchard have stumbled since their own breakthroughs, they (along with Keys) are still among the most promising young players in the game.

To quantify Ostapenko’s achievement, let’s consider her age relative to the average of all main draw players–just the raw difference between those two numbers. Ostapenko is 5.68 years younger than the average woman at Roland Garros this year, making her the 7th youngest (relative to the field) semifinalist at a major since 2000:

Slam     Youngest SF         Age  Avg Age  Diff  
2004 W   Maria Sharapova   17.17    24.17  7.00  
2006 FO  Nicole Vaidisova  17.10    23.63  6.53  
2000 W   Jelena Dokic      17.21    23.69  6.48  
2005 W   Maria Sharapova   18.17    24.45  6.28  
2005 AO  Maria Sharapova   17.75    23.99  6.24  
2007 AO  Nicole Vaidisova  17.73    23.48  5.75  
2017 FO  Jelena Ostapenko  19.97    25.65  5.68  
2001 FO  Kim Clijsters     17.97    23.62  5.65  
2005 US  Maria Sharapova   18.36    23.78  5.42  
2015 AO  Madison Keys      19.92    25.33  5.41

Only three players–Sharapova, Dokic, and Nicole Vaidisova–have reached a Slam semifinal this century at such a young age compared to the rest of the draw.

Of course, names like Dokic and Vaidisova aren’t the most encouraging comparisons for an emerging star. Both players peaked in the top ten, but neither ever reached a major final. The WTA’s past is littered with teenage rising stars who ultimately fizzled.

Yet if we are to see one historically great player come from among today’s young players, she should start building her trophy collection now. It’s tough to put together a Hall of Fame-caliber career without winning some big titles by one’s early 20s. Madison Keys has put herself in that conversation, and this week, Ostapenko has done so as well.

Smaller Swings In Big Moments

Italian translation at settesei.it

Despite the name, unforced errors aren’t necessarily bad. Sometimes, the right tactic is to play more aggressively, and in order to hit more winners, most players will commit more errors as well. Against some opponents, increasing the unforced error count–as long as there is a parallel improvement in winners or other positive point-ending shots–might be the only way to win.

Last week, I showed that one of the causes of Angelique Kerber’s first-round loss was her disproportionate number of errors in big moments. But as my podcasting partner Carl Bialik pointed out, that isn’t the whole story. If Kerber played more aggressively on the most important points–one possible cause of more errors–it might be the case that her winner rate was higher, as well. Since the 6-2 6-2 scoreline was so heavily tilted against her, it was a safe bet that Kerber recorded more high-leverage errors than winners. Still, Carl makes a valid point, and one worth testing.

To do so, let’s revisit the data: 500 women’s singles matches from the last four majors and the first four rounds of this year’s French Open. By measuring the importance of each point, we can determine the average leverage (LEV) of every point in each match, along with the average leverage of points which ended with a player hitting an unforced error, or a winner. Last week, we found that Kerber’s UEs in her first-round loss had an average LEV of 5.5%, compared to a LEV of 3.8% on all other points. For today’s purposes, let’s use match averages as a reference point: Her average UE LEV of 5.5% also compares unfavorably to the overall match average LEV of 4.1%.

What about winners? Kerber’s 15 winners came on points with an average LEV of 3.9%, below the match average. Case closed: On more important points, Kerber was more likely to commit an error, and less likely to hit a winner.

Across the whole population, players hit more errors and fewer winners in crucial moments, but only slightly. Points ending in errors are about one percent more important than average (percent, not percentage point, so 4.14% instead of 4.1%), and points ending in winners are about two percent less important than average. In bigger moments, players increase their winner rate about 39% of the time, and they improve their W-UE ratio about 45% of the time. Point being, there are tour-wide effects on more important points, but they are quite small.

Of course, Kerber’s first-round upset isn’t indicative of how she has played at Slams in general. In my article last week, I mentioned the four players who did the best job of reducing errors at big moments: Kerber, Agnieszka Radwanska, Timea Bacsinszky, and Kiki Bertens. Kerber and Radwanska both hit fewer winners on big points as well, but Bacsinszky and Bertens manage a perfect combination, hitting slightly more winners as the pressure cranks up. Among players with more than 10 Slam matches since last year’s French, Bacsinszky is the only one to hit winners on more important points than her unforced errors over 75% of the time.

Compared to her peers, Kerber’s big-moment tactics are remarkably passive. The following table shows the 21 women for whom I have data on at least 13 matches. “UE Rt.” (“UE Ratio”) is similar to the metric I used last week, comparing the average importance of points ending in errors to average points; “W Ratio” is the same, but for points ending in winners, and “W+UE Ratio” is–you guessed it–a (weighted) combination of the two. The combined measure serves as an rough approximation of aggression on big points, where ratios below 1 are more passive than the player’s typical tactics and ratios above 1 are more aggressive.

Player                     M  UE Rt.  W Rt.  W+UE Rt.  
Angelique Kerber          20    0.92   0.85      0.88  
Alize Cornet              13    0.92   0.87      0.94  
Agnieszka Radwanska       17    0.91   0.95      0.95  
Simona Halep              19    0.93   0.94      0.95  
Samantha Stosur           13    0.95   0.98      0.96  
Timea Bacsinszky          14    0.89   1.02      0.97  
Elina Svitolina           15    1.02   0.95      0.97  
Karolina Pliskova         18    0.97   0.98      0.97  
Caroline Wozniacki        14    0.93   1.00      0.97  
Johanna Konta             13    1.00   0.97      0.98  
Caroline Garcia           14    0.94   1.02      0.98  
Svetlana Kuznetsova       17    0.96   0.98      0.99  
Garbine Muguruza          20    1.02   0.94      0.99  
Venus Williams            25    1.00   0.97      0.99  
Elena Vesnina             13    0.96   1.03      0.99  
Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova  15    1.03   0.99      0.99  
Coco Vandeweghe           13    1.08   0.95      1.01  
Madison Keys              13    1.01   1.02      1.01  
Serena Williams           27    0.99   1.05      1.02  
Carla Suarez Navarro      14    1.00   1.14      1.05  
Dominika Cibulkova        14    1.11   1.03      1.07

Kerber’s combined measure stands out from the pack. Her point-ending shots–both winners and errors, but especially winners–occur disproportionately on less important points, and the overall effect is double that of the next most passive big-moment player, Alize Cornet. Every other player is close enough to neutral that I would hesitate before making any conclusions about their pressure-point tactics.

Even when Kerber wins, she does so with effective defense at key points. In only two of her last 20 matches at majors did her winners occur on particularly important points. (Incidentally, one of those two was last year’s US Open final.) In general, her brand of passivity works–she won 16 of those matches. But defensive play doesn’t leave very much room for error–figuratively or literally. The tactics were familiar and proven, but against Makarova, they were poorly executed.

Podcast Episode 10: On and Off Script at Roland Garros

In the Episode 10 of the Tennis Abstract Podcast, Carl Bialik and I check in on the French Open at the halfway point. Some of the topics we touched on:

  • what Pablo Carreno Busta will need to do to knock off Rafael Nadal
  • whether the rest of the top four seeds can round into form
  • Carlos Ramos’s audacity in calling time violations on Djokovic and Nadal
  • Simona Halep’s status as favorite
  • surprise quarterfinalist Caroline Wozniacki
  • the upset-ridden men’s doubles draw, and some clay-specialist teams to watch

Enjoy!

Click to listen, subscribe on iTunes, find us on Stitcher, or use our feed to get updates on your favorite podcast software.

The Negative Impact of Time of Court

Italian translation at settesei.it

With 96 men’s matches in the books so far at Roland Garros this year, we’ve seen only one go to the absolute limit, past 6-6 in the fifth set. Still, we’ve had our share of lengthy, brutal five-set fights, including three matches in the first round that exceeded the four-hour mark. The three winners of those battles–Victor Estrella, David Ferrer, and Rogerio Dutra Silva–all fell to their second-round opponent.

A few years ago, I identified a “hangover effect” after Grand Slam marathons, defined as those matches that reach 6-6 in the fifth. Players who emerge victorious from such lengthy struggles would often already be considered underdogs in their next matches–after all, elite players rarely need to work so hard to advance–but marathon winners underperform even when we take their underdog status into account. (Earlier this week, I showed that women suffer little or no hangover effect after marathon third sets.)

A number of readers suggested I take a broader look at the effect of match length. After all, there are plenty of slugfests that fall just short of the marathon threshold, and some of those, like Ferrer’s loss yesterday to Feliciano Lopez, 6-4 in the final set, are more physically testing than some of those that reach 6-6. Match time still isn’t a perfect metric for potential fatigue–a four-hour match against Ferrer is qualitatively different from four hours on court with Ivo Karlovic–but it’s the best proxy we have for a very large sample of matches.

What happens next?

I took over 7,200 completed men’s singles matches from Grand Slams back to 2001 and separated them into groups by match time: one hour to 1:29, 1:30 to 2:00, and so on, up to a final category of 4:30 and above. Then I looked at how the winners of all those matches fared against their next opponents:

Prev Length   Matches  Wins  Win %  
1:00 to 1:29      448   275  61.4%  
1:30 to 1:59     1918  1107  57.7%  
2:00 to 2:29     1734   875  50.5%  
2:30 to 2:59     1384   632  45.7%  
3:00 to 3:29      976   430  44.1%  
3:30 to 3:59      539   232  43.0%  
4:00 to 4:29      188    64  34.0%  
4:30 and up        72    23  31.9%

The trend couldn’t be any clearer. If the only thing you know about a Slam matchup is how long the players spent on court in their previous match, you’d bet on the guy who recorded his last win in the shortest amount of time.

Of course, we know a lot more about the players than that. Andy Murray spent 3:34 on court yesterday, but even with his clay-court struggles this year, we would favor him in the third round against most of the men in the draw. As I’ve done in previous studies, let’s account for overall player skill by estimating the probability of each player winning each of these 7,200+ matches. Here are the same match-length categories, with “expected wins” (based on surface-specific Elo, or sElo) shown as well:

Prev Length   Wins  Exp Wins  Exp Win %  Ratio  
1:00 to 1:29   275       258      57.5%   1.07  
1:30 to 1:59  1107      1058      55.2%   1.05  
2:00 to 2:29   875       881      50.8%   0.99  
2:30 to 2:59   632       657      47.5%   0.96  
3:00 to 3:29   430       445      45.6%   0.97  
3:30 to 3:59   232       244      45.3%   0.95  
4:00 to 4:29    64        77      41.2%   0.83  
4:30 and up     23        30      42.1%   0.76

Again, there’s not much ambiguity in the trend here. Better players spend less time on court, so if you know someone beat their previous opponent in 1:14, you can infer that he’s a very good player. Often that assumption is wrong, but in the aggregate, it holds up.

The “Ratio” column shows the relationship between actual winning percentage (from the first table) and expected winning percentage. If previous match time had no effect, we’d expect to see ratios randomly hovering around 1. Instead, we see a steady decline from 1.07 at the top–meaning that players coming off of short matches win 7% more often than their skill level would otherwise lead us to forecast–to 0.76 at the bottom, indicating that competitors tend to underperform following a battle of 4:30 or longer.

It’s difficult to know whether we’re seeing a direct effect of time of court or a proxy for form. As good as surface-specific Elo ratings are, they don’t capture everything that could possibly predict the outcome of a match, especially micro-level considerations like a player’s comfort on a specific type of surface or at a certain tournament. sElo also needs a little time to catch up with players making fast improvements, particularly when they are very young. All this is to say that our correction for overall skill level will never be perfect.

Thus, a 75-minute win may improve a player’s chances by keeping him fresh for the next round … or it might tell us that–for whatever reason–he’s a stronger competitor right now than our model gives him credit for. One point in favor of the latter is that, at the most extreme, less time on court doesn’t help: Players don’t appear to benefit from advancing via walkover. That isn’t a slam-dunk argument–some commentators believe that walkovers could be detrimental due to the long resulting layoff at a Slam–but it does show us that less time on court isn’t always a positive.

Whatever the underlying cause, we can tweak our projections accordingly. Murray could be a little weaker than usual tomorrow after his length battle yesterday with Martin Klizan. Albert Ramos, the only man to complete a second-rounder in less than 90 minutes, might be playing a bit better than his rating suggest. It’s certainly evident that match time has something to tell us even when players aren’t stretched to the breaking point of a marathon fifth set.

Angelique Kerber’s Unclutch Unforced Errors

Italian translation at settesei.it

It’s been a rough year for Angelique Kerber. Despite her No. 1 WTA ranking and place at the top of the French Open draw, she lost her opening match on Sunday against the unseeded Ekaterina Makarova. Adding insult to injury, the loss goes down in the record books as a lopsided-looking 6-2 6-2.

Andrea Petkovic chimed in with her diagnosis of Kerber’s woes:

She’s simply playing without confidence right now. It was tight, even though the scoreline was 2 and 2 but everyone who knows a thing about tennis knew that Angie made errors whenever it mattered because she’s playing without any confidence right now – errors she didn’t make last year.

This is one version of a common analysis: A player lost because she crumbled on the big points. While that probably doesn’t cover all of Kerber’s issues on Sunday–Makarova won 72 points to her 55–it is true that big points have a disproportionate effect on the end result. For every player who squanders a dozen break points yet still wins the match, there are others who falter at crucial moments and ultimately lose.

This family of theories–that a player over- or under-performed at big moments–is testable. For instance, I showed last summer that Roger Federer’s Wimbledon loss to Milos Raonic was due in part to his weaker performance on more important points. We can do the same with Kerber’s early exit.

Here’s how it works. Once we calculate each player’s probability of winning the match before each point, we can assign each point a measure of importance–I prefer to call it leverage, or LEV–that quantifies how much the single point could effect the outcome of the match. At 3-0, 40-0, it’s almost zero. At 3-3, 40-AD in the deciding set, it might be over 10%. Across an entire tournament’s worth of matches, the average LEV is around 5% to 6%.

If Petko is right, we’ll find that the average LEV of Kerber’s unforced errors was higher than on other points. (I’ve excluded points that ended with the serve, since neither player had a chance to commit an unforced error.) Sure enough, Kerber’s 13 groundstroke UEs (that is, excluding double faults) had an average LEV of 5.5%, compared to 3.8% on points that ended some other way. Her UE points were 45% more important than non-UE points.

Let’s put that number in perspective. Among the 86 women for whom I have point-by-point UE data for their first-round matches this week*, ten timed their errors even worse than Kerber did. Magdalena Rybarikova was the most extreme: Her eight UEs against Coco Vandeweghe were more than twice as important, on average, as the rest of the points in that match. Seven of the ten women with bad timing lost their matches, and two others–Agnieszka Radwanska and Marketa Vondrousova–committed so few errors (3 and 4, respectively), that it didn’t really matter. Only Dominika Cibulkova, whose 15 errors were about as badly timed as Kerber’s, suffered from unclutch UEs yet managed to advance.

* This data comes from the Roland Garros website. I aggregate it after each major and make it available here.

Another important reference point: Unforced errors are evenly distributed across all leverage levels. Our instincts might tell us otherwise–we might disproportionately recall UEs that came under pressure—-but the numbers don’t bear it out. Thus, Kerber’s badly timed errors are just as badly timed when we compare her to tour average.

They are also poorly timed when compared to her other recent performances at majors. Petkovic implied as much when she said her compatriot was making “errors she didn’t make last year.” Across her 19 matches at the previous four Slams, her UEs occurred on points that were 11% less important than non-UE points. Her errors caused her to lose relatively more important points in only 5 of the 19 matches, and even in those matches, the ratio of UE leverage to non-UE leverage never exceeded 31%, her ratio in Melbourne this year against Tsurenko. That’s still better than her performance on Sunday.

Across so many matches, a difference of 11% is substantial. Of the 30 players with point-by-point UE data for at least eight matches at the previous four majors, only three did a better job timing their unforced errors. Radwanska heads the list, at 16%, followed by Timea Bacsinszky at 14% and Kiki Bertens at 12%. The other 26 players committed their unforced errors at more important moments than Kerber did.

As is so often the case in tennis, it’s difficult to establish if a stat like this is indicative of a longer-trend trend, or if it is mostly noise. We don’t have point-by-point data for most of Kerber’s matches, so we can’t take the obvious next step of checking the rest of her 2017 matches for similarly unclutch performances. Instead, we’ll have to keep tabs on how well she limits UEs at big moments on those occasions where we have the data necessary to do so.