Do Players Like Daniil Medvedev Eventually Start Winning on Clay?

Daniil Medvedev is within a whisker of the ATP number two ranking, and he has twice reached a grand slam final. He has a big serve, but he’s more than a serve-bot, and his resourceful, varied baseline game suggests he has the tools to excel on all surfaces.

Yet out of 28 career tour-level matches on clay, he’s won 10. Ten wins is an awfully meager haul for a 25-year-old with his sights set on the sport’s top honors.

I put together a list of about 140 ATP top-tenners–that’s basically all of them, with the exception of those whose careers were well underway at the start of the Open Era. For each one, I tallied up their clay court winning percentage in their first 28 matches (or 29 or 30, if the 28th came in the middle of an event), their hard-court results up to the same point in their career, and their eventual clay court results.

When Medvedev played his most recent match on dirt last September, it dropped his clay winning percentage to 35.7%, compared to a hard court record of 116-51, or 69.5%. Few top ATPers have begun their careers so ineffective on clay or so deadly on hard.

In fact, only 5 of the 140 players were worse in their first 28 clay matches. It’s a motley bunch, ranging from Joachim Johansson (who only played 17 matches on the surface in his career) to Kevin Curren (who only got there at age 34) to Diego Schwartzman, who is best on clay, but was overmatched early in his career. The guys tied with Medvedev are an equally mixed crowd, including those who preferred to skip the clay–Tim Henman, Paradorn Srichaphan–and those who took some time to get their footing at tour level, such as Nicolas Almagro and Robin Soderling.

Unlike Daniil Medvedev

This sampling of names suggests that the question I started with is difficult to define. On paper, Henman was “like” Medvedev. By the time he finished his 28th clay match, he had already played 152 times at tour level on hard courts, winning two thirds of them. But their playing styles are so different that the statistical similarities could be misleading.

Let’s narrow the list of comparable players to those who meet the following criteria:

  • lost more than half of their first 28 clay matches
  • had played at least 75 hard-court matches by the time they played their 28th on clay (in other words, they weren’t slow-starting dirtballers like Schwartzman or Almagro)
  • played at least 40 more clay-court matches in their careers (to exclude the blatant clay-avoiders like Curren and Srichaphan)

The following table shows the remaining 14 players, plus Medvedev. I’ve included the age when they played their 28th clay match, and their winning percentages on clay and hard up to that point. The final three columns show how things proceeded from there–after the tournament when they played they 28th clay match (“Future”), you can see how many clay matches they played, what percentage they won, and how many titles they took home:

Player        Age  Clay%  Hard%  Future: M   W%  Titles  
T Johansson  24.1    29%    56%         79  38%       0  
Soderling    21.7    34%    53%        109  70%       3  
Henman       24.7    34%    66%         90  59%       0  
Medvedev     24.6    36%    69%                          
Enqvist      22.1    39%    67%         93  51%       1  
Federer      19.8    41%    62%        266  80%      11  
Rafter       24.4    41%    60%         41  59%       0  
Cilic        20.5    43%    64%        174  65%       2  
Anderson     25.9    43%    60%         80  56%       0  
Isner        25.9    45%    60%        100  57%       1  
Kiefer       21.9    45%    62%         94  45%       0  
Blake        23.4    46%    56%         72  46%       0  
Murray       21.9    48%    76%        125  74%       3  
Bjorkman     25.1    48%    60%         71  31%       0  
Rusedski     24.0    48%    54%         50  30%       0

The results don’t exactly leave Rafael Nadal quaking in his Nikes. 8 of the 14 never won a clay title, and Isner’s 2013 win in Houston barely saves him from making it 9. The combined post-28th-match winning percentage of these guys is just shy of 60%, which isn’t bad, until you consider that without Roger Federer, the rate drops to 55%. The four players that offer some hope for Medvedev–Federer, Soderling, Andy Murray, and Marin Cilic–all played their 28th tour-level match on clay before their 22nd birthday, and even given their relative inexperience, all but Soderling did better in their first 28 than the Russian did.

When we take age into consideration, Henman looks like an even better comp, alongside characters like Pat Rafter and Greg Rusedski. They were more obviously one-dimensional than Medvedev is, but their early-career results offer decent parallels. Medvedev can only hope the similarities end there.

One thing I learned in putting together this list was probably already obvious to most of you–there aren’t a lot of players, now or in the past, who can easily be described as “like” Daniil Medvedev. That makes forecasting even trickier than usual. His height and recent serving prowess almost classes him with Isner and Kevin Anderson, while his game style puts him in a category with … Murray?

There’s another lesson in trying to locate parallels for Medvedev. He’d better hope that he continues to defy easy classification. It’s a bit late to become the next Federer, so if he’s going to become more an occasional threat on dirt, he’ll have a whole lot of historical precedent to overcome.

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