Italian translation at settesei.it
In Rafael Nadal’s comprehensive victory over Kevin Anderson in the 2017 US Open final, Nadal didn’t face a single break point. Anderson didn’t even earn very many deuces. Nadal, on the other hand, constantly challenged in his opponent’s service games.
This produced an unusual ratio: Anderson had to play way more service points than Nadal did, even though they served the same number of games. Rafa toed the line only 72 times to the South African’s 108, for a ratio of 2/3 or, rounded, 0.67. In this week’s podcast, I speculated that this service point ratio is a handy way of spotting winners–if one man is getting through his service games much quicker than the other, it’s probably because he is holding easily and his opponent is not.
It wasn’t the best hypothesis I’ve ever put forward. It’s true, but not by an overwhelming margin. In the average ATP match, the ratio of the winner’s service points played to the loser’s service points played is 0.96 — equivalent to Rafa serving 88 times to Anderson’s 92. The winnner plays fewer service points in 57% of contests. We’ve hardly discovered the next IBM Key to the Match here.
Instead of discovering a useful proxy for success in the most basic of match stats, we’ve come upon yet another item to add to the list of Nadal’s extreme accomplishments. Of nearly 13,000 completed grand slam singles matches since 1991, only 147 of the winners–barely one percent–had service point ratios below 0.67. Out of 106 major finals with stats available, Rafa’s ratio on Sunday was the lowest on record. He just edged out Roger Federer‘s 0.68 ratio from the 2007 Australian Open final against Fernando Gonzalez.
It turns out that the service point ratio is as fluky for Rafa as it is for men as a whole. Of his 16 victories in grand slam finals, he has posted a ratio below 1.0 in eight of them, equal to 1.0 once, and above 1.0 seven times. His average is an uninteresting 0.98.
There you have it: Over the course of a single week, we’ve seen an oddity, devised a stat to capture it, and determined that it doesn’t tell us much. Analytics, anyone?
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For a more serious look at Rafa’s career accomplishments after bringing home his 16th major title, check out my analysis posted yesterday at The Economist’s Game theory blog.