Italian translation at settesei.it
At the 2019 Australian Open, tennis balls have more to fear than ever before. Serena Williams is back and appears to be in top form, Maria Sharapova is playing well enough to oust defending champion Caroline Wozniacki, and Petra Kvitova has followed up her Sydney title with a stress-free jaunt through the first three rounds.
And then there are the youngsters. Hyper-aggressive 20-year-old Aryna Sabalenka crashed out in the third round against an even younger threat, Amanda Anisimova. But still in the draw, facing Serena on Saturday, is the hardest hitter of all, 18-year-old Ukrainian Dayana Yastremska. Watch a couple of Sabalenka matches, and you might wonder if we’ve reached the apex of aggression on the tennis court. Nope: Yastremska turns it up to 11.
When Lowell first introduced his aggression score metric a few years ago, Kvitova was the clear leader of the pack, the player who ended points–for good or ill–most frequently with the ball on her racket. Madison Keys wasn’t far behind, with Serena coming in third among the small group of players for which we had sufficient data. Since then, two things have changed: The Match Charting Project now has a lot more data on many more players, and a new generation of ball-bashers has threatened to make the rest of the tour look like weaklings in comparison.
The aggression score metric packs a lot of explanatory power in a simple calculation: It’s the number of point-ending shots (winners, unforced errors, or shots that induce a forced error from the opponent) divided by the number of shot opportunities. The resulting statistic ranges from about 10% at the lower extreme–Sara Errani’s career average is 11.6%–to 30%* at the top end. Individual matches can be even higher or lower, but no player with at least five charted matches sits outside of that range.
* Readers with a keen memory or a penchant for following links will notice that in Lowell’s orignial post, Kvitova’s aggregate score was 33% and Keys was also a tick above 30%. I’m not sure whether those were flukes that have since come back down with larger samples, or whether I’m using a slightly different formula. Either way, the ordering of players has remained consistent, and that’s the important thing.
Here are the top ten most aggressive WTA tour regulars of the 2010s before Sabalenka and Yastremska came along:
Rank Player Agg 1 Petra Kvitova 27.1% 2 Julia Goerges 26.8% 3 Serena Williams 26.8% 4 Jelena Ostapenko 26.5% 5 Camila Giorgi 26.0% 6 Madison Keys 25.9% 7 Coco Vandeweghe 25.9% 8 Sabine Lisicki 25.6% 9 Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova 24.0% 10 Maria Sharapova 23.2%
All of these women rank among the top 15% of most aggressive players. They end points more frequently on their own racket than plenty of competitors we also consider aggressive, like Venus Williams (21.9%), Karolina Pliskova (21.6%), and Johanna Konta (22.3%). Ostapenko bridges the gap between the two generations; she wasn’t part of the discussion when aggression score was first introduced, though once she started winning matches, it was immediately clear that she’d challenge Kvitova at the top of this list.
Here’s the current top ten:
Rank Player Agg 1 Dayana Yastremska 28.6% 2 Aryna Sabalenka 27.6% 3 Petra Kvitova 27.1% 4 Julia Goerges 26.8% 5 Serena Williams 26.8% 6 Jelena Ostapenko 26.5% 7 Viktoria Kuzmova 26.0% 8 Camila Giorgi 26.0% 9 Madison Keys 25.9% 10 Coco Vandeweghe 25.9%
Yastremska, Sabalenka, and even Viktoria Kuzmova have elbowed their way into the top ten. Yastremska’s and Kuzmova’s places on this list might be a little premature, since their scores are based on only seven and nine matches, respectively. But Sabalenka’s pugnaciousness is well-documented: her Petra-topping score of 27.6% is an average across almost 30 matches.
Tennis tends to swing between extremes, with one generation developing skills to counteract the abilities of the previous one. It’s not yet clear whether the aggression of these young women will catapult them to the top–after all, Sabalenka won only five games today against Anisimova, whose aggression score is a more modestly high 23.0%. Perhaps as they gain experience, they’ll develop more well-rounded games and return Kvitova to her place at the top.
In the meantime, we have the privilege of watching some of the hardest hitters in WTA history battle it out. Tomorrow, Yastremska will contest her first third round at a major in a must-watch match against Serena. There will be fireworks, but it’s safe to say there won’t be much in the way of rallies.