Expected Points, my new short, daily podcast, highlights three numbers to illustrate stats, trends, and interesting trivia around the sport.
On today’s episode: Benoit Paire gets back in the win column, Gauff wins her closest three-setter so far, and return king Lleyton Hewitt is headed to the Hall of Fame.
Scroll down for a transcript.
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Rough transcript of today’s episode:
The first number is 10, Benoit Paire’s number of losses out of his 12 matches played in the last year. He scored only his second win in 52 weeks last night in Cordoba against wild card Nicolas Jarry, who was himself riding a 12-match losing streak just before an 11-month drug suspension. Someone had to come out of this match with a much-needed W, and in straight sets it was the second-seeded Paire. The pandemic came at a particularly bad time for the Frenchman. He won a pair of clay court events in 2019, and reached two hard-court finals in August 2019 and January 2020, dragging his ranking back from a low of 69 in April 2019 up to 19, just short of his career high, last February. The pandemic-adjusted ranking system is letting Paire back down easy—his 1-9 record since the restart still leaves him in the top 30. If he’s going to stay there, he’ll need to rack up more wins in his typically busy schedule, which will see him remain among the relatively weak fields of South American clay events when most of the top players head to Rotterdam and Doha.
Our second number is 49.4%. 49.4 is the percentage of total points won by Cori Gauff in her Adelaide quarter-final match against Shelby Rogers. Gauff trailed 2-4 in each of the two final sets before coming back to win, 2-6 6-4 6-4, despite winning 79 points to Rogers’s 81. It’s not the first time the 16-year-old has pulled out a win in a lottery match: She beat Polona Hercog at Wimbledon in 2019 with 48.6% of points, and she upset Aryna Sabalenka last year in Lexington with 49.3%. Ironically, Sabalenka is the only player to have played the trick back on her, beating Gauff in Ostrava last fall when the American won 95 points to her opponent’s 93. Regardless of the point distribution, Gauff is continuing to prove herself in tight matches, with a 15-7 record in three-setters at tour-level and tour-level qualifying. She opened her career with 7 straight 3-set wins, and she has now won four deciding sets in Adelaide in four days.
Today’s third and final number is 187, the length of one of the most impressive streaks in men’s Open Era tennis. From January 2000 to April 2002, win or lose, Lleyton Hewitt broke the serve of every opponent he played for 187 consecutive matches. It was announced yesterday that Hewitt, twice a grand slam singles champion, will be inducted into the Tennis Hall of Fame in July. Over the course of his streak, the Australian Davis Cup stalwart went from a 25th-ranked teenager to number one in the world, a position he would hold for 80 weeks. The first man to prevent him from breaking was Roger Federer, who won the 2002 Miami final in straight sets. The result hinted at what was to come, but the Aussie held off the future number one for more than a year, as Hewitt beat Federer in their next three meetings, culminating in a memorable five-set comeback in the 2003 Davis Cup semifinals. Hewitt was one of the leading lights of the pre-Big Four era, and as the 187-match streak attests, the best returner of his generation.