Italian translation at settesei.it
Last week, Sloane Stephens reeled off an impressive series of victories, defeating Garbine Muguruza, Angelique Kerber, Victoria Azarenka, and Jelena Ostapenko to secure the title at the WTA Premier Mandatory event in Miami. The trophy isn’t quite as life-changing as the one she claimed at the US Open last September, but it’s a close second, and the competition she faced along the way was every bit as good.
The Miami title comes with 1,000 WTA ranking points, and by adding those to her previous tally, Stephens moved into the top ten, reaching a career high No. 9 on Monday. With two high-profile championships to her name, not to mention semifinal showings last summer in Toronto and Cincinnati, there’s little doubt she deserves it. Elo isn’t quite convinced, but its more sophisticated algorithm (and its disregard for the magnitude of the US Open and Miami titles) puts her within spitting distance of the top ten as well.
What makes Stephens’s rise to the top ten so remarkable is her efficiency in converting wins to ranking points. Since her return from injury at Wimbledon last year, she has played only 38 matches, winning 24 of them. She has suffered six first-round losses, plus two more defeats at last year’s Zhuhai Elite Trophy round-robin and another pair in the Fed Cup final against Belarus. All told, in the last nine months, she has won matches at only six different events. Her unusual record illustrates some of the quirks in the ranking system, and how a player who peaks at the right times can exploit them.
24 wins is almost never enough for a spot in the vaunted top ten. From 1990 to 2017, a player has finished a season with a top-ten ranking only seven times while winning fewer than 30 matches. Only two of those involved fewer wins than Sloane’s 24: Monica Seles‘s 1993 and 1995, the timespans leading up to her tragic on-court stabbing and following her eventual comeback. Here are the top-ten seasons with the fewest victories, including the last 52 weeks of a few players currently near the top of the WTA table:
Year Player YE Rk W L W-L % 1995 Monica Seles* 1 11 1 92% 1993 Monica Seles 8 17 2 89% 2018 Sloane Stephens** 9 24 14 63% 2010 Serena Williams 4 25 4 86% 1993 Jennifer Capriati 9 28 10 74% 2015 Flavia Pennetta 8 28 20 58% 2000 Mary Pierce 7 29 11 73% 2004 Jennifer Capriati 10 29 12 71% 1993 Mary Joe Fernandez 7 31 12 72% 1995 Iva Majoli 9 31 13 70% 2018 Venus Williams** 8 31 14 69% 1995 Mary Joe Fernandez 8 31 15 67% 2015 Lucie Safarova 9 32 21 60% 2008 Maria Sharapova 9 33 6 85% 1998 Steffi Graf 9 33 9 79% 2018 Petra Kvitova** 10 33 14 70%
* ranking frozen after her assault
** rankings as of April 2, 2018; wins and losses based on previous 52 weeks
What almost all of these seasons have in common is exceptional performances at grand slams. Sloane won the US Open; Seles won the 1993 Australian; Serena Williams won a pair of majors in 2010; Flavia Pennetta capped an otherwise anonymous 2015 campaign with a title in New York. The slams are where the rankings points are.
Even within this group of slam successes, Sloane stands out. Of the 16 players on that list, only two–Pennetta and Lucie Safarova–won matches at a lower rate than Stephens has since her comeback. In other words, most women who are this efficient with their victories don’t lose quite so early or often at lesser events.
That 63% won-loss record is even more extreme than the above list makes it look. Of the nearly 300 year-end top-tenners since 1990, only eight finished the season with a lower win rate. Here’s that list, expanded to the top 11 to include another noteworthy recent season:
Year Player YE Rk W L W-L % 2014 Dominika Cibulkova 10 33 24 58% 2000 Nathalie Tauziat 10 36 26 58% 2015 Flavia Pennetta 8 28 20 58% 1999 Nathalie Tauziat 7 37 25 60% 2007 Marion Bartoli 10 47 31 60% 2015 Lucie Safarova 9 32 21 60% 2000 Anna Kournikova 8 47 29 62% 2010 Jelena Jankovic 8 38 23 62% 2018 Sloane Stephens* 9 24 14 63% 2004 Elena Dementieva 6 40 23 63% 2016 Garbine Muguruza 7 35 20 64%
* ranking as of April 2, 2018; wins and losses based on previous 52 weeks
There’s not much overlap between these lists; the first group generally missed some time, then made up for it by scoring big at slams, while the second group slogged through a long season and leveled up with a strong finish or two at a major. The typical player with a 63% winning percentage doesn’t end up in the top ten: She wraps up the season, on average, in the mid-twenties. At least that’s better than the average 24-win season: Those result in year-end finishes near No. 40.
Stephens has always been a big-match player: She made an early splash at the 2013 Australian Open, reaching the semifinals and upsetting Serena as a 19-year-old, and her overall career record at majors (66%) is nearly ten percentage points higher than her record at other tour events (57%). For all that, she will probably not conclude 2018 with such a extreme set of won-loss numbers. To do so, she’d probably need to win a major to replace her 2017 US Open points while losing early at most other events. Recovered from injury, Stephens may maintain her feast-or-famine ways to some degree, but it’s unlikely she’ll continue to display such extreme peaks and valleys.