Expected Points, my new short, daily podcast, highlights three numbers to illustrate stats, trends, and interesting trivia around the sport.
Up today: Ruud narrowly upsets Stefanos Tsitsipas, Aryna Sabalenka posts a series of eye-popping winner totals, and Nuno Borges is back down to ITF 15Ks.
Scroll down for a transcript.
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Music: Love is the Chase by Admiral Bob (c) copyright 2021. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. Ft: Apoxode
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Rough transcript of today’s episode:
The first number is 81%, the fraction of first serve points won in yesterday’s match between Casper Ruud and Stefanos Tsitsipas in Madrid. Tsitsipas, coming off a Monte Carlo title and a final in Barcelona, was favored against the unseeded Norwegian, but Casper executed a narrow upset. Both players were clinical behind their first serve, controlling play despite hitting relatively few aces. The 7-6, 6-4 decision featured a single break point, which Ruud converted. Beyond that crucial yet sparsely populated category, there was little to tell apart the 22-year-olds: both won roughly three in four serve points, and they evenly split the 130 points of the match. It’s a big win for Casper, who is in his 4th straight clay-court quarter-final. It’s an even bigger opportunity to go further, with a match tomorrow against another unseeded opponent, Alexander Bublik, and no Masters finalists left in the bottom half of the draw. With big-hitting potential opponents like Bublik, Matteo Berrettini, and Cristian Garin, Ruud can look forward to more textbook serve-plus-ones on the clay.
Our second number is 142, Aryna Sabalenka’s winner total through five matches in Madrid. The raw count is even more impressive in context: Her victories have been quick, so the winners account for 30% of all the points she’s played, and 48% of the points she’s won. The Belarussian’s aggression—and the rate at which her powerful groundstrokes are hitting targets—has been a big part of her easy passage to the final. It’s even clearer on a per-shot basis: 7% of shots after the serve go for winners on the WTA tour. Sabalenka’s career rate is around 12%. In her first three matches this week, her rates of winners-per-shot were 22%, 21%, and 18%. It’s unsurprising, then, that Aryna’s rally aggression score—the rate at which she ends points, for good or ill—is the highest on tour, even surpassing Petra Kvitova, who dominated the category for years. Unfortunately for Sabalenka, it isn’t all up to her. Her opponent in Saturday’s final, Ashleigh Barty, has an effective serve, a low slice, and some aggression of her own, combining to neutralize her opponents. In Stuttgart, where the same two women met in the title match, the Belarussian hit only 9% of her shots for winners, not enough to topple the world number one.
Today’s third and final number is 24 kilometers, the distance between the Caja Magica in Madrid and suburban Majadahonda, Spain, which is hosting a men’s ITF $15K this week. Another measurement of the distance is approximately 3.2 million euros, the prize money gap between the ITF event and the men’s Madrid Masters taking place 15 miles away. Heading the field in Majadahonda is Nuno Borges, a former Mississippi State standout who advanced to the quarter-finals yesterday via retirement. The Portuguese 24-year-old must be experiencing a bit of whiplash as he bounces between levels of the tennis tour. He started the year at a series of 15Ks in Turkey, then played two Challengers in Portgual, a $25k in Spain, and qualified last week in Estoril, beating two top-100 players and pushing Marin Cilic to a third set. For that round-of-16 showing, Borges earned 9,000 euros; if he wins the title this week, he’ll gross less than a quarter of that. The real reason to play tourneys like Majadahonda is for the ranking points—Nuno has already climbed 100 places on the official list this year, and a good showing will give him a foothold in the top 300. At this time next year, maybe he’ll be back in Madrid—not marooned in the suburbs.
