Podcast Episode 93: ESPN’s Bill Connelly on What Novak Djokovic Does Better

Episode 93 of the Tennis Abstract Podcast welcomes Bill Connelly, who wrote about Novak Djokovic this week at ESPN. You might know Bill from his coverage of soccer and college football, including his two books, Study Hall and The 50 Best* College Football Teams of All Time.

Bill, who dug into Match Charting Project data for his piece, explains how Djokovic tactically differs from the competition, how his game has changed over the years, and whether the nature of his game makes it tough to fully appreciate. I also encourage him to speculate about whether Novak will reach 20 slams, and if that would make him the greatest of all time.

Also on the agenda: whether tour-wide parity is better than dominance, how ESPN (and tennis media in general) could cover the sport differently, and why there are so few people who love both tennis and college football.

Thanks for listening!

(Note: this week’s episode is about 48 minutes long; in some browsers the audio player may display a different length. Sorry about that!

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Podcast housekeeping:

  • In case you haven’t heard, I’m now doing a short (~4 minutes) daily podcast called Expected Points. Here’s today’s episode.
  • The TAP book club will reconvene in a few weeks with our next selection, John Updike’s 1968 novel, Couples. Read along with us, share your thoughts, and suggest topics/questions/comments for our discussion in a future episode.
  • Fans of the TA podcast will also want to check out Dangerous Exponents, Carl’s and my Covid-19 podcast. This week, we talked about the Russian, Chinese, and Indian vaccines.

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