Alex de Minaur at the 2024 Australian Open. (Getty Images: Julian Finney)
Last week, Tennis Insights posted a graphic showing the average first serve speed and accuracy–distance from the nearest line–for the ATP top 20. There’s a ton of fascinating data packed into one image.
Hubert Hurkacz is fast and accurate, Novak Djokovic is nearly as precise, and Adrian Mannarino defies logic as always. The most noteworthy outlier here, especially just after his run to the Rotterdam final, was Alex de Minaur. The Australian gets plenty of pop on his first serve, hitting them faster than tour average, if slower than most of the other men in the top 20. This comes at a cost, though. As one of the shortest guys among the elite, he doesn’t hit the lines. He’s by far the least accurate server in this group:
Precision is great: It’s certainly working for Hurkacz and Djokovic. But everything is a tradeoff. Any pro player could hit more lines if there was no reason to serve hard. Or vice versa: If the goal was simply to light up the radar gun, these guys could add miles per hour by aiming at the middle of the box. Standing a modest six feet tall, De Minaur is even more constrained than his typical peer. No technical tweak is likely to move him into Hurkacz territory. He might make small improvements or swap some speed for more accuracy.
Small gains would be enough, too. De Minaur wins fewer first-serve points than the average top-50 player, but in the last 52 weeks, he has outpaced Carlos Alcaraz, Holger Rune, and Casper Ruud. He trails Alexander Zverev by about one percentage point. This isn’t Sebastian Baez (or even Mannarino) we’re talking about. Whatever the cost of de Minaur’s inaccuracy, he’s able to overcome it. It’s just a matter of what gains he could reap by making returners work a bit harder.
Here’s the question, then: How much does accuracy matter?
Speed first
For this group of players over the last 52 weeks, speed is by far the most important factor in first-serve success. Speed alone–ignoring accuracy or anything else–explains 72% of the variation in first-serve points won. Accuracy alone accounts for 43%. (The players who are good at one thing are often good at others, so most of those 72% and 43% overlap.) 43% might sound like a lot, but isn’t that far ahead of something as fundamental as height, which explains 33% of the variation.
Surprisingly, precision is even less critical when it comes to unreturnable first serves. Using unreturned serve counts from Match Charting Project data, accuracy explains just 30% of the variation in point-ending first serves, less than we could predict from height alone. (Speed alone explains 60% of the variation in unreturned serves.) I would have expected that accuracy would play a big part in aces and other unreturned serves, since a ball close to the line is that much harder to get a racket on. But while precision may increase the odds of any individual serve going untouched, average precision isn’t associated with untouchable serving.
The story is the same for any metric associated with first-serve success. Speed matters most. There’s immense overlap between the factors I’ve discussed: Taller players find it easier to hit the corners, and all else equal, they take less of a risk by hitting bigger. There is probably some value of height that isn’t captured by speed or accuracy, such as the ability to put more spin on the ball, but the main benefit shows up on the radar gun.
To tease out the impact of each variable, I ran a regression that predicts first-serve points won based on speed, accuracy, and height. The results should be taken with an enormous grain of salt, since we’re looking at just 20 players, some of them the game’s most outrageous outliers. Still, the findings are plausible:
Speed: Each additional mile per hour translates to an improvement of 0.43 percentage points in first-serve points won. (1 kph: +0.27 first-serve points won)
Accuracy: Decreasing distance from the line by 1 cm results in an improvement of 0.2 percentage points in first-serve points won.
Height: At least for these twenty players, the value of height is entirely captured by speed and accuracy. The margin of error for the height coefficient spans both positive and negative values. It is unlikely that height is a negative, though I suppose it’s possible, if speed and accuracy capture the height advantage on the serve itself, and height is a handicap on points that develop into rallies. Either way, the impact is minor, if it exists at all.
Approximately, then, one additional mile per hour is worth the same as two centimeters of accuracy. The height of the graph–110 to 130 mph–represents a variation of nearly 9 percentage points of first-serve points won. The width–70 to 52cm–represents a range of 3.6 percentage points. Broadly speaking, speed remains more important than accuracy, though a particular player might find it easier to improve precision than power.
Just one example of what the numbers are telling us: De Minaur has won 72.8% of his first-serve points over the last year, compared to the top-ten average of 75.3%. If this model were to hold true–a big if, as we’ll discuss shortly–that’s a gap he could close by improving precision by about 12 cm, to a tick better than tour average.
Drowning in caveats
For every question we answer, we’re rewarded with ten more questions.
I’m most interested in the choices that individual players could conceivably make, and the analysis so far offers only hints to that end. For this group of servers, we can say that a player who serves faster will win more points than his slower-serving peers. But we don’t know whether a specific player, if he was able to juice his serve by a mile or two per hour, would enjoy the same benefits. Hitting harder, or placing the ball more accuracy, is better, but by how much?
(I dug into the speed question way back in 2011 and found that one additional mile per hour–for the same player–was worth 0.2 percentage points. More recently, I found that for Serena Williams, an additional mile per hour was worth 0.5 percentage points. One of these days I’ll revisit the initial study with the benefit of many more years of data and perhaps a bit more wisdom.)
De Minaur was unusually precise in Rotterdam. Another Tennis Insights graphic indicates that his accuracy improved to about 55 cm for the week, an enormous gain of 15 cm from his usual rate, even more remarkable because his average speed was a bit quicker as well. (Playing indoors probably helped.) The model suggests that 15 cm is worth three percentage points. His boost of two miles per hour should have been worth nearly one more percentage point itself. Yet he won “only” 73.9% of his first-serve points–about one percentage point better than his non-Rotterdam average.
It’s just one week, so it isn’t worth fretting too much over the discrepancy. Still, it illustrates the value of the data we don’t have. (By “we,” I mean outsiders relying on public information. The data exists.) If we knew de Minaur’s accuracy and speed for every match, we could figure out their value to him specifically. Perhaps an uptick of one mile per hour is worth 0.43 percentage points only if you start serving like the players who serve faster–guys who are generally taller and can put more slice or kick on the ball. Those weapons aren’t available to the Aussie, so a marginal mile per hour may be less valuable. For him, accuracy might have a bigger payoff–relative to speed–than it does for other players. We just don’t know.
Sill, we’ve extracted a bit of understanding from the data. We’ve seen that accuracy translates into more first-serve points won, and we have a general idea of how many. De Minaur showed himself capable of hitting the lines as precisely as Andrey Rublev or Grigor Dimitrov, at least under a roof for one week. Just half that improvement, if he could sustain it–even if he didn’t get the full gains predicted by the model–would shore up a mediocre part of his game and lay the groundwork for a longer stay in the top ten.
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Let’s start off with a couple of puzzles. I realize they aren’t the sort of things that keep most of you up at night, but they were odd enough to drive me to a flurry of coding, data analysis, and now blog writing.
On Wednesday, Ugo Humbert lost his first-round match in Rotterdam to Emil Ruusuvuori. It marked an unceremonious end to a hot streak for Humbert: He not only won the title in Marseille last week–launching himself into the Elo top ten–but he strung together 31 consecutive holds. 1,000 kilometers north, on a different indoor hard court, he got broken twice by a man ranked outside the top 50.
That’s the first puzzle: Why did the Frenchman lose? Again, it’s not that odd, as my Elo ratings gave Ruusuvuori a one-in-three shot to pull the upset. But it’s a match that Humbert should have won.
Head-scratcher number two: Why does Humbert always lose to Ruusuvuori? Wednesday’s decision marked their fifth meeting, and the Finn is undefeated. While the outcome is always close–Rotterdam was their fourth deciding set, and the other match went to two tiebreaks–the results are starting to get boring. Ruusuvuori is a solid player, and he is consistently able to blunt the Frenchman’s serve. But five in a row?
The answer to both mysteries is the same, and it’s more satisfying than I expected. Rotterdam is unusually slow for a hard court, especially indoors. Like most (or perhaps all) of the previous Humbert-Ruusuvuori venues, it plays slower than tour average. Just as important, Humbert’s game is unusually sensitive to surface speed. While that isn’t always true of big servers, he stands out as a fast-court specialist. We couldn’t have confidently predicted a Finnish upset, but we could have guessed that the Marseille champion would find this week’s tournament tougher going.
Rotterdam, it’s slow
The last time I published surface speed numbers, in late 2019, Rotterdam rated as the slowest indoor hard court on tour. Adjusting for the mix of players at the event, there were 10% fewer aces at the tournament than expected. It was a sharp decline from 2017 and 2018, when the venue sported more typically speedy indoor conditions.
Since then, the results have remained similar. Last year, the rate was 5% lower than expected, roughly tied with Stockholm as the slowest indoor surface on tour. Marseille, by contrast, gave players 12% more aces than usual.
There are limitations to using aces as a proxy for surface speed; I use aces because it’s the most relevant data that is widely available. Still, while you can quibble about the methodology or about a specific tournament’s place on the list, the overall rank order seems about right. Aces–adjusted for each event’s field–tell you much of the story.
With a growing mass of Match Charting Project data, we can do a little better. We have shot-by-shot logs for over one thousand matches since 2021. To compare conditions, I used my Serve Impact metric, which estimates how many points a player wins, directly or indirectly, because of his serve. It counts aces, other unreturned serves, and a fraction of the service points that take longer to decide. Depending on your motivation in measuring court speed, this isn’t perfect either: It doesn’t directly tell you anything about bounce height, for instance. But if you want to know what sort of players a tournament favors, Serve Impact gets you close.
By this more sophisticated metric, Rotterdam is… still slow. The venue takes away 4% of the points a player typically earns from his serve. Marseille and Montpellier each swing 7% in the other direction, Stockholm and Vienna provide a modest 3% boost, and Basel adds 8% to the server’s punch. With the exception of the short-lived tour stop in Gijon, Rotterdam has been the slowest indoor hard court of the 2020s. Even the clay in Lyon plays faster.
Here are the Serve Impact adjustments for the tournaments best represented in the dataset. Higher numbers mean faster conditions with more points decided based on the serve:
Tournament ServeImpact
Stuttgart 1.29
NextGen Finals 1.20
Tour Finals 1.16
Wimbledon 1.11
Shanghai Masters 1.11
Halle 1.10
Queen's Club 1.08
Basel 1.08
Washington 1.08
Dubai 1.07
Tournament ServeImpact
Antwerp 1.05
Gstaad 1.05
Australian Open 1.04
Davis Cup Finals 1.04
Cincinnati Masters 1.04
Paris Masters 1.03
Vienna 1.03
Miami Masters 1.02
Madrid Masters 1.01
US Open 1.01
Tournament ServeImpact
Canada Masters 1.00
Rotterdam 0.96
Indian Wells Masters 0.95
Rome Masters 0.92
Acapulco 0.87
Barcelona 0.87
Roland Garros 0.83
Monte Carlo Masters 0.83
Average Serve Impact is around 34%, so the 4% hit in Rotterdam knocks that down to about 32.6%. Humbert has an above-average serve, so the slow-court penalty is greater still. He isn’t going to win any awards for rallying prowess, especially against someone as sturdy as Ruusuvuori, so the points that he doesn’t secure with his serve will disproportionately go against him.
The first three meetings in the Humbert-Ruusuvuori head-to-head were on clay, at Roland Garros, Madrid, and Rome. The fourth came on grass, at ‘s-Hertogenbosch. It rates a bit faster from 2021-23 than Halle or Queen’s Club by the Serve Impact metric, though it rated as the slowest grass court on tour last year by my older ace-rate algorithm. Maybe it was less server-friendly in 2023, just in time for Humbert to be flummoxed once again.
Surface sensitivity
We tend to take for granted that players are suited to conditions in predictable ways. Big servers like fast surfaces, right? Broadly speaking, yes, but it’s not a hard-and-fast rule. Bounce height makes a difference, footwork matters, and some players are just more comfortable on some surfaces than others.
Armed with surface speed ratings, this is something we can test. If a player is particularly sensitive to conditions, each tournament’s Serve Impact rating should have a predictable influence on his match outcomes. I tried that for all tour regulars, controlling for player strength by using overall Elo ratings at the time of each match.
The resulting numbers are an abstraction on top of an abstraction, so they’re a bit difficult to get your head around. I’ve tried to simplify matters by rendering them in terms of Elo points. A player who is very sensitive to surface and does better on hard courts is, effectively, a better player in faster conditions. The ‘Sensitivity’ numbers given here are the benefit–denominated in Elo points–of each single percentage point that a surface is faster than average. For players who like it slow, negative numbers express the same idea, the Elo-point advantage of a one-percentage-point slowdown.
Here is the list of all players with at least 100 tour-level matches since 2021, plus Rafael Nadal:
Player Sensitivity
Tallon Griekspoor 11.1
Ugo Humbert 9.5
Richard Gasquet 9.1
Novak Djokovic 8.7
Adrian Mannarino 7.9
Sebastian Korda 4.9
Jordan Thompson 4.3
Matteo Berrettini 4.0
Aslan Karatsev 3.6
Tommy Paul 3.4
Marcos Giron 2.9
Marton Fucsovics 2.9
Marin Cilic 2.6
Felix Auger-Aliassime 2.1
Hubert Hurkacz 1.7
Player Sensitivity
Frances Tiafoe 1.6
Carlos Alcaraz 1.4
Emil Ruusuvuori 1.3
Brandon Nakashima 1.3
Cristian Garin 0.6
Alexander Zverev 0.5
Alexander Bublik 0.5
Ilya Ivashka 0.0
Arthur Rinderknech -0.1
Taylor Fritz -0.3
Jan Lennard Struff -0.3
Lorenzo Sonego -0.4
Mackenzie Mcdonald -0.5
Andy Murray -0.9
Grigor Dimitrov -1.1
Player Sensitivity
Roberto Bautista Agut -1.2
Alex de Minaur -1.2
Karen Khachanov -1.4
Jannik Sinner -1.4
Yoshihito Nishioka -1.5
Miomir Kecmanovic -1.9
Andrey Rublev -2.2
Daniel Evans -2.2
Cameron Norrie -2.5
Holger Rune -2.9
Roberto Carballes Baena -3.0
Botic van de Zandschulp -3.1
Daniil Medvedev -3.4
Denis Shapovalov -3.5
Sebastian Baez -3.7
Player Sensitivity
Laslo Djere -4.1
Dusan Lajovic -4.1
Pablo Carreno Busta -4.4
Jaume Munar -4.6
Fabio Fognini -4.8
Nikoloz Basilashvili -4.9
Casper Ruud -5.0
Diego Schwartzman -5.4
Francisco Cerundolo -5.9
Alexei Popyrin -6.4
Albert Ramos -6.8
Rafael Nadal -9.9
Alejandro Davidovich Fokina -10.1
Stefanos Tsitsipas -10.2
Lorenzo Musetti -11.2
There’s Ugo! He’s not quite as surface sensitive as Tallon Griekspoor, but a couple of points is within the margin of error. A sensitivity rating of 9.5 means that Humbert is about 100 Elo points worse in Rotterdam than he is Marseille, as long as I’ve accurately estimated the server-friendliness of the respective playing conditions. Ruusuvuori may also like it faster, but only marginally so; he’s effectively neutral.
Keen-eyed readers may have noted that I earlier referred to “overall” Elo. I’m not using surface-specific Elo ratings here, because I don’t want to adjust for surface twice. Surface-specific ratings already capture some of this: Humbert’s hElo (for hard courts) is 120 points higher than his cElo (for clay courts), which tallies reasonably well with these more fine-grained distinctions. What hElo and cElo can’t tell us, though, is how much his (or anyone else’s) performance will vary on the same surface, depending on the conditions at each specific venue.
It’s easy to get lost in the weeds of Elo-based forecasting calculations, but it’s important to remember they are just tools to help measure a real-world phenomenon. Not every big server is equally at sea on clay; some dirtballers are less dependent on slow conditions than others. Small differences in surface speed are, for most matchups, a minor consideration. But for some players, conditions matter a lot. Ugo Humbert likes his surfaces fast, as much as almost anyone else on tour. In Rotterdam, the conditions did not cooperate.
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Italian tennis hardly needs any more prospects, but Luciano Darderi has announced himself as yet another young player to watch. The Argentinian-born right-hander turns 22 today, three days after securing his debut ATP title. He came through qualifying in Cordoba, and in just his third appearance in a tour-level main draw, knocked out the 2nd, 4th, and 7th seeds en route to the championship.
Darderi is a supercharged clay courter, comfortable on dirt yet possessing a serve and forehand that will play on faster surfaces. He cracked 25 aces in the Cordoba main draw, plus another 11 in qualifying. On Sunday, fellow qualifier Facundo Bagnis got barely half of Darderi’s first serves back in play. Against Sebastian Baez in the semi-finals, the Italian ended 22 points with a forehand winner or forced error and, as we will see, held his own from the baseline against one of the game’s most stubborn defenders.
Though the magnitude of Darderi’s breakthrough came out of nowhere, he has been inching toward a double-digit ranking for some time. He reached 13 Challenger quarter-finals last year, advancing to three finals and collecting a pair of titles. He finished the year ranked 128th and gained 60 places with the victory in Cordoba, ensuring he’ll have plenty more chances to prove his mettle on tour.
He hasn’t hesitated to take advantage, dropping just three games in beating Mariano Navone in Buenos Aires yesterday. The victory extended the Italian’s winning streak to eight and shows just how fast he is developing, having lost to Navone in a bruising Challenger final just a few months ago.
It won’t always be so smooth for Darderi: The hard-court skew of the top level of the circuit may not prove hospitable to a youngster who has played 84% of his career matches on clay. Even with the right weapons in hand, it will take some time to become more than just a dark horse on the Golden Swing. But that’s all in the future: Darderi’s 22nd birthday is an ideal opportunity to dig into the upsets that lifted him from Challenger warrior to the top 100.
Bullying the little guy
The defining win of the Italian’s week in Cordoba was the semi-final. Baez struggled at the end of 2023, but he is always a tough out on clay, especially coming off a third-set-tiebreak victory in Davis Cup. At just five-feet, seven-inches tall, the Argentinian relies on speed and defense, neutralizing the weapons of larger men. It doesn’t always work–his serve puts him at an immediate disadvantage, and he can become overly aggressive and error-prone to compensate–but he doesn’t give much away.
Despite his size, Baez doesn’t mind going toe-to-toe with an opponent’s best shot. In 19 clay-court matches tracked by the Match Charting Project since the beginning of 2022, Baez’s opponents have hit forehands–excluding service returns–as 61% of their baseline shots, compared to a tour-wide clay-court average of 55%. Thomaz Bellucci found the forehand 72% of the time against the Argentinian; Tallon Griekspoor clocked in at 71%.
Both lost. No matter what the shot, if you find yourself in a rally with Baez, your odds aren’t good. When you hit a forehand after the service return, your chances of winning the point are 45%; with a backhand, your chances are 44%. (Tour averages on clay are 53% and 47%, respectively.) Some individual cases are downright comical. In the 2022 Bastad quarter-finals, Dominic Thiem won just 27% of points when he hit a forehand. When the two men met again in the Kitzbuhel final last year, Thiem relied a bit more on his backhand. Alas, he won only 14% of points when he hit one of those.
Darderi ran around a few backhands to find his bigger weapon, but he generally refused to take the bait. He waited for his spots to attack one of the toughest men on tour to be patient against. This table details the results he got from his forehands and backhands in the semi-final:
FH/GS FH W% FH Wnr% FH UFE%
Darderi vs Baez 55.4% 50.6% 12.2% 8.5%
Average vs Baez 60.6% 45.2% 10.4% 12.0%
BH/GS BH W% BH Wnr% BH UFE%
Darderi vs Baez 44.6% 48.5% 6.1% 6.8%
Average vs Baez 39.4% 43.8% 6.3% 10.3%
The Italian hit fewer forehands than the usual Baez opponent, and it won him more points, in part thanks to hitting winners at a higher rate and coughing up fewer unforced errors. His backhand numbers were favorable as well, perhaps in part because he set up for backhands in places where other opponents would go for an inside-out forehand. He was particularly stingy with free points on that wing.
Despite possessing the bigger gun, Darderi let his opponent make the mistakes. Baez obliged, piling up 32 unforced errors, including an uncharacteristic 11% of his backhands. Winning percentages of 50.6% and 48.5% hardly make for good headlines, but coupled with a big serve, they are enough to beat Baez. Few players on tour have been able to manage the same.
Tailored attack
The classic clay-court baseline weapon is the inside-out forehand, a salvo that might not end the point, but will pull the opponent out of position and leave the court open for a finishing blow. Darderi can win matches with that shot, as he did in the final against Bagnis. His left-handed opponent kept sending balls to his backhand corner, and the Italian ran around a lot of them. More than half of Darderi’s forehands in the final were inside-out, and he won the point 78% of the time he hit one. The match wasn’t close.
As we’ve seen, though, manufacturing forehands against Baez is a trap. The Argentinian can blunt the angle and absorb the pace, and meanwhile, his opponent is out of position. When Thiem had his terrible day in Bastad, he hit 62 inside-out forehands, only 16 of them in points that he won. (He typically wins more than half, as does the tour as a whole.) Whether by preparation or intuition, Darderi took those chances much less often, and far less frequently than he would against Bagnis. Just one in six of his forehands were of the inside-out variety, and he won just shy of half those points.
Instead, with Baez accustomed to playing defense on the backhand side, Darderi attacked to the forehand. While he didn’t go crosscourt particularly often, he hit hard when he did. 22% of his crosscourt forehands ended the point in his favor with a winner or forced error. That shot can be a slightly favorable play against Baez–opponents win 47% of those points, compared to 45% for forehands overall–but only Nicolas Jarry has cleaned up against Baez in this category the way that Darderi did. It’s way too early to draw any conclusions about how the Italian’s game will fare on tour, but when you share the top of a forehand leaderboard with Jarry, you’re doing something right.
A big serve and a forehand isn’t enough: Nearly everybody has those, even if Darderi’s forehand has a bit of extra mojo. Upsetting the forehand-neutralizing Baez, especially in between victories against less complicated opponents, is a sign that the Italian has resources between his ears as well. Every week, it seems, Italian tennis looks a little bit better.
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Also today: Ugo Humbert in the (Elo) top ten; South American Davis Cup hard courts
Elena Rybakina at the 2023 US Open. Credit: Hameltion
Never underestimate average. Establishing oneself on the top level of the pro tennis circuit is extraordinarily difficult; proving that any particular skill is average among one’s tour-level peers is even harder. Most players are better than the norm in some categories, worse in others. Anyone who can beat the middle of the pack in every department is virtually guaranteed to be a superstar.
Average is Elena Rybakina’s secret weapon. You probably didn’t know she needed one, because she has a very effective, very evident non-secret weapon: an unreadable bullet of a first serve. In the last year, over 43% of her first serves have gone unreturned. No one else on tour comes within three percentage points of that, and only five other women top 35%. On a good day, the serve can put a match out of reach nearly on its own. When she faced Aryna Sabalenka in Beijing last fall, 65% of her first serves didn’t come back. Most women barely manage to win that many first serve points, let alone decide them with one stroke.
I’ll come back to the serve in a moment, because it is so remarkable, and it would be strange to talk about Rybakina without discussing it. But what makes her a contender every week–not to mention a champion in Abu Dhabi yesterday–is the way that the rest of her game doesn’t hold her back. Among the other women who end points with more than 35% of their first serves, you’ll find a long list of weaknesses. Qinwen Zheng doesn’t put nearly enough of them in the box. Donna Vekic and Caroline Garcia struggle to break serve. Liudmila Samsonova doesn’t break much, either, and her mistakes come in excruciating, match-endangering bunches.
Lopsided player profiles make sense. Only a few people have the combination of natural gifts and discipline to develop a dominant serve. Tennis skills are correlated, but not perfectly so. Someone who serves like Vekic can often learn good-enough groundstrokes and secondary shots. But players with one standout skill are unlikely to be solid across the board. Just because someone is top ten in the world in one category, why would we expect them to rank in the top 100 by a different measure?
Rybakina has reached the top–or close, anyway–by coupling a world-class serve with a set of skills that lacks defects. (You can nitpick her footwork or technique, but none of that holds her back when it comes to winning enough points.) After we review the devastation wrought by her serve, we’ll see just how average she otherwise is, and why that wins her so many matches.
First serves first
I’ve already given you the headline number: Since this time last year, 43.4% of Rybakina’s first serves haven’t come back. That’s one percentage point better than Serena Williams’s career rate. Serena’s numbers are based on matches logged by the Match Charting Project, a non-random sample skewed toward high-profile contests against strong opponents, so I’m not ready to say outright that Rybakina is serving better than Serena. But I’m not not saying that–we’re within the margin of error.
Some back-of-the-envelope math shows what kind of gains a player can reap from the best first serve in the game. Rybakina makes about 60% of her first serves–lower than average, but probably worth the trade-off. (And improving–we’ll talk about that in a bit.) When the serve does come back, she wins about half of points, roughly typical for tour players. All told, 43% of her serve points are first-serve points won. Tack on about half of her second serve points–she wins 48% of those, better than average but not by a wide margin–and we end up with her win rate of 62.5% of serve points–fourth-best on tour.
Put another way: We combine one world-class number (unreturned first serves) with a below-average figure (first serves in), one average number (success rate when the serve come back), and one more that was slightly better than average (second-serve points won). The result is an overall success rate that trails only those of Iga Swiatek, Sabalenka, and Garcia. That, in case you ever doubted the value of an untouchable first serve, is the impact of one very good number.
The key to Rybakina’s first serve–apart from blinding speed–is its unreadability. She must lead the tour in fewest returner steps per ace, a stat I dreamed up while watching the Abu Dhabi semi-final on Saturday. Samsonova seemed to stand bolted to the ground, watching one serve after another dart past her. After one business-as-usual ace out wide, Samsonova even offered a little racket-clap of appreciation, an unusual gesture for such a routine occurrence.
In addition to the deceptiveness of a nearly identical toss and service motion, Rybakina is effective in every direction. There’s no way for an opponent to cheat to one side, hoping to get an edge on a delivery in that corner of the box. Here are Elena’s rates of unreturned first serves and total points won in each corner of the two service boxes:
The average player ends points with their first serve between 20% and 25% of the time and wins 60% of their first serve points. Rybakina obliterates those numbers in every direction. If there’s a strategy to be exploited, it’s that returners ought to lean toward their forehand, because if the serve comes to their backhand, they don’t have a chance anyway.
The scariest thing for the rest of the tour is that the 24-year-old’s biggest weapon may be getting even bigger. Her 43.4% rate of unreturned first serves in the last 52 weeks compares favorably to a career clip of 38.2%. Against Samsonova on Saturday, over 41% of all serves didn’t come back, better than Rybakina managed in any of their four previous meetings.
She may be getting savvier, too. One of the dangers of a game built around a single weapon is that certain players might be able to neutralize it. Daria Kasatkina, Elena’s opponent in yesterday’s final, is just such an opponent, a resourceful defender and a first-class mover. When the two women played a three-and-a-half-hour epic in Montreal last summer, Kasatkina put three-quarters of first serves back in play, something that few women on tour could manage and one of the main reasons the match stretched so long. Rybakina survived, but she was broken ten times.
Yesterday, Kasatkina was as pesky as ever, getting almost as many balls back as she did in Montreal. But Rybakina took fewer chances with her first strike, perhaps as much to counter the wind as to adjust for her opponent. Whatever the reason, Elena made three-quarters of her first serves. She had never landed more than 61% against Kasatkina.
The Abu Dhabi final was an exaggerated example of a longer-term trend. Somehow, Rybakina is making way more first serves than ever before, sacrificing no aces and only a fraction of first-serve points won. The overall results speak for themselves:
It’s not a perfect comparison, because the entire 2024 season so far has been on hard courts. Her season stats will probably come down. But a ten-percentage-point increase in first serves in? Nobody does that. Kasatkina won just five games yesterday, and she won’t be the last opponent to discover that whatever edge she once had against Rybakina is gone.
Average ballast
As Ivo Karlovic can tell you, the best service in the world can take you only so far. Some first serves will go astray, some serves will come back, and then there’s the whole return game to contend with. Women’s tennis rarely features characters quite as one-sided as Ivo, but Vekic and Garcia illustrate the point, struggling to string together victories because their serves alone are not enough.
Here’s a quick overview of how the rest of Rybakina’s game stacks up against the average top-50 player over the last 52 weeks:
Stat Top-50 Elena
2nd W% 46.7% 48.4%
DF% 5.2% 3.9%
RPW 44.4% 44.2%
Break% 35.5% 36.9%
BPConv% 46.6% 43.5%
She’s somewhat better than average behind her second serve, as you’d expect from someone with such a dominant first serve. It’s aided by fewer double faults than the norm. On return, we have two separate stories. Taking all return points as a whole, Rybakina is almost exactly average, matching the likes of Barbora Krejcikova and Marta Kostyuk. The only category where she trails the majority of the pack is in break point conversions–and by extension, breaks of serve.
The discrepancy between Rybakina’s results on break points and on return points in general may just be a temporary blip. Most players win more break points than their typical return performance, because break points are more likely to arise against weaker servers. That hasn’t been the case for Elena in the last 52 weeks, and it wasn’t in 2022, either, when she won 41.9% of return points that year but converted only 40.5% of break opportunities.
Match Charting Project data indicates that she is slightly more effective returning in the deuce court than the ad court; since most break points are in the ad court, that could explain a bit of the gap. Charting data also suggests she is a bit more conservative on break point, scoring fewer winners and forced errors than her normal rate, though not fewer than the typical tour player. It may be that Rybakina will always modestly underperform on break opportunities, but it would be unusual for a player to sustain such a large gap.
In any case, she hasn’t struggled in that department in 2024. In 13 matches, she has won 46.9% of return points overall and 47.3% of break points. It’s dangerous to extrapolate too much from a small sample, especially on her preferred surface, but it may be that Rybakina’s single weak point is already back to the top-50 norm of her overall return performance.
The value of all this average is this: What Rybakina takes with her first serve, she doesn’t give back with the rest of her game. We’ve already seen how a standout rate of unreturned first serves–plus a bunch of average-level support from her second serve and ground game–translates into elite overall results on serve. A tour-average return game generates about four breaks per match. Elena has been closer to 3.5, but either way, that’s more than enough when coupled with such a steady performance on the other side of the ball.
I can’t help but think of Rybakina’s “other” skills as analogous to the supporting cast in team sports. Her first serve is an all-star quarterback or big-hitting shortstop; the rest of her game is equivalent to the roster around them. In baseball, a league-average player is worth eight figures a year. Though Elena’s return, for instance, doesn’t cash in to quite the same degree, it is critical in the same way. A superstar baseball player can easily end up on a losing team, just as Caroline Garcia can drop out of the top 50 despite her serve. Rybakina is at no risk of that.
A final striking attribute of Rybakina’s game is that her array of tour-average skills can neutralize such a range of opponents. Her weekend in Abu Dhabi was a perfect illustration, as she overcame Samsonova and Kasatkina, two very different opponents, each of whom has bedeviled her in the past. Elena is more aggressive than the average player, but she is considerably more careful than Samsonova; her Rally Aggression Score is equivalent to Swiatek’s. She was able to take advantage of the Russian’s rough patches without losing her own rhythm or coughing up too many errors of her own.
Against Kasatkina, she posted the most unexpected “average” stat of all. In a matchup of power against defense, defense should improve its odds as the rallies get longer. On Sunday, the two women played 15 points of ten strokes or more, and Rybakina won 8 of them. In her career, Elena has won 52% of those points–probably more by wearing down opponents with down-the-middle howitzers than any kind of clever point construction, but effective regardless of the means.
Rybakina won’t beat you at your own game. But she’ll play it pretty well. Combined with the best first serve in women’s tennis, drawing even on the rest is a near-guarantee of victory. Abu Dhabi marked her seventh tour-level title, and it will be far from her last.
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Ugo Humbert, Elo top-tenner
You probably don’t think of Ugo Humbert as a top-ten player, if you think of him at all. The 25-year-old left-hander cracked the ATP top 20 only a few months ago, and his title last week in Marseille gave him a modest boost to #18.
Elo is much more positive about the Frenchman. Today’s new Elo rankings place him 9th overall, just behind Hubert Hurkacz, the man he defeated to reach the Marseille final. Humbert has always been dangerous against the best, with a 22-25 career record facing the top 20, and a 10-12 mark against the top ten.
Humbert’s place in the Elo top ten might feel like a fluke; there’s a tightly-packed group between Hurkacz at #8 and Holger Rune at #13, and an early loss in Rotterdam could knock the Frenchman back out of the club. But historically, if a player reaches the Elo top ten, a spot in the official ATP top ten is likely in the offing.
I wrote about this relationship back in 2018, after Daniil Medvedev won in Tokyo. As his ATP ranking rose to #22, he leapt to #8 on the Elo list. In retrospect, it’s odd to think that “Daniil Medvedev will one day crack the top ten” was a big call, and it wasn’t that far-fetched: Plenty of people would’ve concurred with Elo on that one. He made it, of course, officially joining the elite the following July.
In that post, I called Elo a “leading indicator,” since most players reach the Elo top ten before the ATP computer renders the same judgment. This makes sense: Elo attempts to measure a player’s level right now, while the ATP formula generates an average of performances over the last 52 weeks. That’s a better estimate of how the player was doing six months ago. Indeed, for those players who cracked both top tens, Elo got there, on average, 32 weeks sooner. In Medvedev’s case, it was 40 weeks.
Most importantly for Humbert, Elo is almost always right. In October 2018, I identified just 19 players who had reached the Elo top ten but not the ATP top ten. Three of those–Medvedev, Stefanos Tsitsipas, and Roberto Bautista Agut–have since taken themselves off the list. One more has come along in the meantime: Sebastian Korda joined the Elo top ten in early 2023, but his ATP points total has yet to merit the same ranking.
Most of the Elo-but-not-ATP top-tenners had very brief stays among the Elo elite: Robby Ginepri qualified for just one week. The only exception is Nick Kyrgios, who spent more than a year in the Elo top ten, thanks to his handful of victories over the best players in the game. His upsets earned him plenty of notoriety, but his inability to consistently beat the rest of the field kept his points total deflated.
Humbert, in his much quieter way, fits the same profile. His serve means that he can keep things close against higher-ranked players, but he has struggled to string together enough routine wins to earn more of those chances. (Injuries haven’t helped.) Still, the odds are in his favor. In 32 weeks–give or take a lot of weeks–he could find himself in the ATP top ten.
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Surfaces in South American Davis Cup
It dawned on me about halfway through the deciding rubber of the Chile-Peru Davis Cup qualifying tie: They were playing on a hard court! In South America! Against another South American side!
It made sense for Chile, with big hitters Nicolas Jarry and Alejandro Tabilo leading the team, and they did indeed vanquish the Peruvian visitors. But South America is known as a land of clay courts, the home of the “Golden Swing.” It seemed weird that an all-South American tie would be played on anything else.
As it turns out, it isn’t that unusual. Since the late 1950s, I found 252 Davis Cup ties between South American sides. I don’t have surface for 37 of them, almost all from the 1970s. Presumably most of those were on clay, but since that’s the question I’m trying to answer, I’m not going to assume either way.
That leaves us with 215 known-surface ties, from 1961 to the Chile-Peru meeting last weekend. (I’m excluding the matchup between Argentina and Chile at the 2019 Davis Cup Finals, since neither side had any say in the surface.) To my surprise, 37 of those ties–about one in six–took place on something other than clay. That’s mostly hard courts, but five of them were played on indoor carpet as well.
The country most likely to bust the stereotype has been Venezuela, which preferred hard courts as early as the 1960s. Ecuador also opted to skip clay with some frequency; it accounted for the first appearance of carpet in an all-South American tie back in 1979.
Chile has generally stuck with clay, but not always. The last time they hosted a South American side on another surface was 2000, when they faced Argentina on an indoor hard court. The surface probably wouldn’t have mattered, as Marcelo Rios and Nicolas Massu were heavy favorites against a much weaker Argentinian side. Though they won, the home crowd was so disruptive that the visitors pulled out without playing the doubles. Chile was disqualified from the next round and barred from hosting again until 2002.
The crowd last weekend was typically rowdy, but Jarry and Tabilo advanced without controversy. For some South American sides, hosting on hard courts may finally become the rule, not the exception.
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Felix Auger-Aliassime in 2023. Credit: aarublevnews
There may not be a more beautiful serve in tennis. When Felix Auger-Aliassime is hitting his targets, returners don’t have a chance. Auger-Aliassime has been particularly deadly on indoor hard courts, winning four such championships in 2022, then defending his Basel title last October.
Before returning to the winner’s circle at the Swiss Indoors, the Canadian’s 2023 season was one to forget. He struggled with a knee injury that knocked him out of Lyon and most of the grass-court season, where he would otherwise have figured to thrive. Between Miami–where he last reached his career-best ATP ranking of 6th–and Tokyo, he won just two matches in a dozen starts. We can’t hold much of that against him; when it wasn’t the injury, it was the recovery or the rust.
But he hasn’t played like a top-tenner in 2024, either. He lost to Daniel Altmaier to open his campaign, got dragged into a five-hour slog by Dominic Thiem in Melbourne, and then fell yesterday in Marseille to Zhang Zhizhen. The Chinese man, who lost to 1,107th-ranked Sebastian Dominko in Davis Cup last weekend, isn’t the sort of player who should threaten the likes of Auger-Aliassime, especially on an indoor hard court. Marseille has a reputation as a relatively slow surface for an indoor event, but according to my numbers, it played almost exactly as fast as Basel did last year.
With such a serve, the rest of Felix’s game should fall into place. But it hasn’t, and even the Canadian’s service games can get messy. Zhang broke him three times in ten tries yesterday, and he came close to a fourth. Last week in Montpellier, Auger-Aliassime saved just one of six break points before squeaking past Arthur Cazaux. Apart from an occasional glut of double faults, the serve itself rarely fails him. He reliably sends in aces on at least one of ten service points. Nearly one-third of his serves don’t come back. So what’s the problem?
The Canadian charge
There’s a certain style of play that has become recognizably Canadian, by some combination of the influence of Milos Raonic and the natural development of players who grow up practicing indoors. While Auger-Aliassime, Denis Shapovalov, and Leylah Fernandez–like Raonic before them–rarely serve-and-volley, they often venture far inside the baseline after serving. The move puts them in excellent position to swat away weak replies, at the cost of getting exposed by a deep return.
(The move also calls to mind Evonne Goolagong, perhaps the most casual serve-and-volleyer in the game’s history. Martina Navratilova said of her, “She didn’t serve-and-volley; she would sort of saunter-and-volley.”)
If Felix’s aggressive court position pays off, it should show up in his second shot stats. This may sound familiar, because I talked about the same thing in my piece about Sebastian Korda earlier this week. Though Korda’s serve isn’t quite the weapon that Auger-Aliassime’s is, the two men are similar in that their overall results don’t seem to reflect the strength of their opening deliveries. Korda, for all of his power, hits a second-shot (plus-one) winner or forced error 17% of the time that a return comes back, almost exactly in line with tour average.
Auger-Aliassime is similarly punchless. I ran the numbers again, this time back to 2019 instead of 2020, to capture most of the Canadian’s career. The plus-one winner rates are a bit different, but not enough to alter the story. I’ve also included more players for comparison:
Player Plus-one winner%
Milos Raonic 24.4%
Denis Shapovalov 21.5%
Matteo Berrettini 19.5%
Carlos Alcaraz 19.1%
Holger Rune 18.6%
Lorenzo Sonego 18.4%
Stefanos Tsitsipas 18.2%
Felix Auger-Aliassime 17.6%
Sebastian Korda 17.3%
-- Average -- 17.2%
Jannik Sinner 16.8%
Daniil Medvedev 16.3%
Given the potency of his serve and the positioning risks he takes, Auger-Aliassime finds himself in the wrong section of this list. He’s not as one-dimensional as Raonic, and he’s less explosive (and erratic) than Shapovalov, but couldn’t he play more like Berrettini? You might argue that Felix’s ground game is better than the Italian’s, and he can thrive without forcing the issue so quickly. That may be true–I believe the Canadian and his team think this way–but the numbers don’t bear it out.
Over their careers, Auger-Aliassime and Berrettini have hit unreturned serves at exactly the same rate. Yet the Italian wins two percentage points more often on his second shot. The overall picture is even more dramatic: Berrettini’s career tour-level rates of 69% serve points won and 88% service games held are each better than Felix has posted in any single season. Berrettini’s forehand is better, sure, but I can’t believe that accounts for the entire difference. The Canadian’s wait-and-see approach too often turns into a ten stroke rally that ends in favor of the other guy.
The Achilles heel
I promised you a weak spot of mythological proportions, and you’re going to get it.
The story of yesterday’s loss to Zhang was captured, oddly enough, in one of the service games that Felix won. At 1-3 in the second set, he raced to 30-love with two points straight from the textbook: big serve to the backhand, shallow reply, swat away a winner. He scored another classic plus-one at 30-15.
The two points he lost, though, show what happens when someone reads the serve, or when he misses the first serve and doesn’t do much with the second. At both 30-0 and 40-15, Zhang took advantage of a second serve to put the return at Felix’s feet. The first time, the Canadian could only keep the ball in play, and he lost a six-stroke rally. Two points later, Auger-Aliassime unforced-errored the backhand plus-one. He secured the hold with a better second serve at 40-30, but he isn’t always so lucky.
When returns land in the service box, Felix’s results are strong, even if he isn’t as aggressive as Berrettini or his fellow Canadians. Here are several stats profiling what happens to those weak replies: plus-one winner rates (P1 W%), plus-one error rates (P1 UFE%), and overall point winning percentage:
Player P1 W% P1 UFE% Pt W%
Milos Raonic 43% 12% 64%
Denis Shapovalov 36% 16% 60%
Matteo Berrettini 34% 14% 60%
Holger Rune 32% 13% 61%
Carlos Alcaraz 32% 12% 66%
Felix Auger-Aliassime 31% 13% 62%
Sebastian Korda 31% 14% 61%
Daniil Medvedev 30% 9% 63%
Stefanos Tsitsipas 29% 11% 62%
Lorenzo Sonego 29% 13% 57%
-- Average -- 28% 12% 60%
Jannik Sinner 28% 11% 63%
These numbers are from 2019 to present, so Raonic’s stats are probably a caricature of the tactics he used at his peak. Still, it seems like Auger-Aliassime ought to be ending a few more of these points immediately. Either way, there’s no reason to complain about his ultimate outcomes–he wins more of these points than Berrettini does, and almost as many as Daniil Medvedev or Jannik Sinner. (Side note: Holy Alcaraz!)
Here is the same set of stats for returns that are not so shallow, but are still closer to the service line than the baseline. (The Match Charting Project calls these “deep”–as opposed to “very deep” returns.)
Player P1 W% P1 UFE% Pt W%
Milos Raonic 31% 12% 56%
Denis Shapovalov 24% 16% 54%
Holger Rune 23% 13% 60%
Matteo Berrettini 20% 14% 54%
Lorenzo Sonego 20% 14% 54%
Stefanos Tsitsipas 20% 11% 58%
Carlos Alcaraz 18% 13% 57%
Sebastian Korda 17% 16% 55%
Felix Auger-Aliassime 17% 13% 53%
-- Average -- 16% 12% 55%
Daniil Medvedev 15% 9% 56%
Jannik Sinner 14% 10% 56%
Take away a couple of feet of court position, and Auger-Aliassime’s results look awfully pedestrian. He still hits more plus-one winners than average, but barely, and at the cost of more errors. He wins fewer of these points than average, and fewer than anyone in this selected group of players. If we make the reasonable assumption that the returns coming back from Felix’s serves are weaker than average–even if they land in the same sector of the court–those middle-of-the-pack numbers look even worse.
I hope you’ve stuck with me, because you’re about to find out how to beat Felix. It’s not easy, but it worked for Zhang. Here’s how players manage against very deep returns–the ones that land closer to the baseline than the service line:
Player P1 W% P1 UFE% Pt W%
Milos Raonic 15% 14% 47%
Denis Shapovalov 12% 14% 50%
Matteo Berrettini 12% 11% 52%
Stefanos Tsitsipas 11% 10% 52%
Holger Rune 11% 11% 51%
Sebastian Korda 10% 10% 50%
Lorenzo Sonego 9% 14% 53%
-- Average -- 8% 8% 51%
Carlos Alcaraz 8% 7% 54%
Felix Auger-Aliassime 7% 9% 47%
Daniil Medvedev 6% 6% 54%
Jannik Sinner 6% 7% 52%
Auger-Aliassime plays these points like he’s Medvedev, but his baseline game can’t support those tactics. He wins these points at the same rate as late-career, physically compromised Raonic.
This is, in large part, the cost of that aggressive court position. Some players, like Alcaraz, can get away with it. Raonic couldn’t, but he put away so many cheap points that he could live with the drawbacks. It’s exaggerating only a bit to say that Auger-Aliassime gets the worst of both worlds: He doesn’t pick up an unusually high number of freebies, but then he finds himself on the back foot whenever someone manages to land a deep return.
That was the story of Zhang’s upset win yesterday. When the Chinese player hit a shallow reply, Felix won 11 of 15. When the return landed behind the service line, the success rate fell to just 8 of 25. It isn’t always that bad, and even when it is, a uptick in unreturned serves (or a strong return performance) can salvage the day. But opponents will only get better at reading the Canadian’s serve, and perhaps they will recognize that they needn’t attempt any heroics as long as they place the return deep in the court.
Auger-Aliassime isn’t going to wake up one day able to play like Medvedev, however much he might like to. He can, however, choose to play more like Raonic or Berrettini. His current approach is probably good enough for a long stay in the top 20: Elo ranks him 17th, at least until it updates with yesterday’s loss. But if he hopes to crack the top five, he’ll need to do more with the profits from that gorgeous serve.
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February 8-10, 1974: Sideshows take center stage
For a week in February 1974, the women’s tennis circuit had to make do without Billie Jean King. Fortunately, George Liddy was ready to pick up the promotional slack, and then some.
The Slims tour headed to Fort Lauderdale for an event on Chris Evert’s home turf–or, more accurately, her home Har-Tru. Billie Jean didn’t like her odds on clay in enemy territory, so it was a good time for a week off. In her absence, Evert provided the drubbings, Rosie Casals delivered the controversy, and–fulfilling what one newspaperman called Liddy’s “kinky dreams”–none other than Bobby Riggs showed up to sell more tickets.
The biggest story of the week took place off the court. Liddy was promoting more than just the S&H Green Stamps Tennis Classic; he also organized a track exhibition for the Friday night of the tournament. The big attraction was Riggs, who came to town for a much-ballyhooed race against famous miler Jim Ryun. (Earning a living as a professional track star could be complicated: Ryun had taken part in a tennis exhibition the previous June.) Ryun was a world-record holder and Olympic silver medalist, so in true Riggs fashion, some handicapping was in order. The 55-year-old hustler would get a half-mile head start.
Bobby was old, but he wasn’t that old. On February 8th, after a track clinic, a marching band, a pole-vault exhibition, and a 100-meter dash featuring some football players, the real business of the evening got underway. Riggs emerged, accompanied by a phalanx of young women and sporting a portable microphone to spice up the eventual television broadcast. He made a side bet with Rosie Casals and jokingly pleaded with organizers for an even bigger head start.
Ryun ran a respectable 4:03, but he never caught up with America’s most famous male chauvinist. Riggs ran his 890 yards in 3:22 for an easy victory.
“I’d say he needed another 200 yards,” Ryun said.
As for Riggs, he hadn’t been working out much since the Battle of the Sexes the previous September. His assessment: “I don’t think I’ve ever been this tired.”
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Casals was tired, too. She had spent most of the week griping: The tour came back to Florida too often, she didn’t like to play on clay, it was cold and windy, and the crowd was partisan to the point of rudeness when she faced Jeanne Evert in the second round. Another of her complaints–about thoughtless scheduling–had merit. After a late-night doubles match on Thursday, she was first up on Friday’s order of play.
As if that weren’t enough, her routine defeat of Francoise Durr earned her a place in the semi-finals against Chrissie herself. “Nobody’s unbeatable,” Rosie said. But on Saturday, she salvaged just one game. Casals had to settle for a lesser prize–a local columnist declared her the champion of the press room.
The final had unexpected potential. Evert had been expected to run away with the title, and she hadn’t done anything to call that forecast into question. But second-seeded Kerry Melville looked like she might just make it close, allowing just two games to Nancy Gunter in her semi-final. Melville herself had said that the chance of anyone beating the home favorite in Fort Lauderdale were “very, very slim.” But after a near-flawless match, she felt differently: “If I play like I played today, I think I have a good chance of beating Chris.”
Alas, it wasn’t to be. At the hotel on Saturday night, Melville walked to the bathroom in the dark and fractured her toe. She withdrew, and the title went to Evert.
Liddy, though, had another ace up his sleeve. Riggs was already scheduled to play an exhibition match on finals day, against Miami Dolphins quarterback Bob Griese and wide receiver Ron Sellers. Bobby would play one-on-two, and the crowd would get the full raincoat-and-umbrella handicapping show. Everyone would go home with a smile on their face.
The biggest draw of the day, though, was Liddy’s last-minute replacement. Refunds were available, but only two ticketholders asked for their money back.
To play Evert, the promoter brought in none other than Althea Gibson, the two-time Wimbledon champion who had been the world’s best player in the late 1950s. Gibson had since earned her living as a golfer and made occasional attempts at a tennis comeback now that the sport had gone pro. At age 46, no one expected her to upset Chrissie, and she didn’t, winning just three games. But she impressed nonetheless.
“I don’t think there is anyone in women’s tennis today that serves it with that much pure power,” Evert said. “I was really surprised.” Althea wanted a rematch. After all, as one fan shouted during play, Gibson won more games off of Chris than Casals did.
Rosie, though, could take one consolation from the finals-day slate. The crowd immediately took to Althea, the obvious underdog and a legend to boot. Finally, a stadium full of Florida tennis fans was cheering against an Evert.
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It wasn’t long ago that Sebastian Korda was considered one of the best prospects in the men’s game. He won a tour level title before his 21st birthday, then fell one match short at the 2021 NextGen Finals. He reached two more finals in 2022, then began 2023 with a near-miss, a momentous three-hour clash with Novak Djokovic in Adelaide that ultimately went to the veteran.
That result, plus a quarter-final run in Melbourne and another runner-up finish last October in Astana, nudged Korda up to a career-high ranking of 23. While he has since dropped the points from Down Under and fallen out of the top 30, my Elo ratings keep him in the top 25, just ahead of the man who defeated him in Kazakhstan, Adrian Mannarino.
This all represents a step forward for the American, especially since he struggled throughout last year with a wrist injury. Compared to expectations, though, it’s a bit underwhelming. Korda’s father, Petr, is a grand slam champion; Sebastian has said he’d like to surpass him and win two. At age 23, he has plenty of time to develop, but eight of the men ahead of him in the rankings–including three of the ATP’s top seven–are younger still. For all the veteran exploits we’ve seen in the last decade of the ATP tour, superstars tend to make themselves known at an early age.
Last night, Korda recorded his 100th tour-level victory, a milestone that reminds us how much he has accomplished in his budding career. The match itself, however, pointed at some of his limitations. The American edged out big-serving French qualifier Hugo Grenier in the Marseille first round, 6-3, 2-6, 7-6(3). The player Korda aims to be would have progressed with ease. As it happened, he won 89 points to his opponent’s 92, marred by an error-spattered string in which he lost seven straight games. Grenier played well, but he is ranked outside the top 150. Korda didn’t look much better.
What’s missing? The 23-year-old has all the tools to climb higher: a six-foot, five-inch frame; an overpowering serve including a hard slice delivery that looks as if it were inherited directly from his left-handed father; a flexible, assured backhand; and a willingness to step into the court to take control of points. To watch him play, there’s very little separating Korda from, say, Taylor Fritz, yet Fritz is a top-tenner. Is it just a matter of time until Korda closes the gap, or does his game need to change?
Progress report
Let’s start with the positive: Korda’s serve is getting the job done. Yesterday, more than one-third of his serves didn’t come back. That’s in line with the average of the several other charted matches from the last 52 weeks. Only a handful of men end the point so often with their first shot; Fritz and Ben Shelton top 30% but still trail Korda. In a losing effort against Hubert Hurkacz in Shanghai last fall, more than 45% of the American’s serves were unreturned.
Those numbers represent a major step forward. Facing Hurkacz at the Australian Open last year, fewer than one-quarter of his serves ended the point. Korda finished below the 25% mark in matches against Daniil Medvedev and Karen Khachanov at the same event, too. It’s ironic that he won that one against Hurkacz and lost in Shanghai, but there’s no counter-intuitive moral to glean: Unreturned serves are an incontrovertible good.
The 23-year-old’s results are less reliable when the ball comes back. Even when presented with an attackable return, Korda sometimes hesitates. In two matches against Hurkacz last fall, Korda didn’t hit a single plus-one winner or forced error behind the second serve. (The high rate of unreturned serves means that his best deliveries aren’t coming back as sitters, but that hardly means that the remaining returns are all so daunting.) Grenier put 21 second serves back in play yesterday, only one of which the American ended with his second shot. Despite the qualifier’s overt aggression–he occasionally swung wildly for winners against Korda’s seconds–the average point on Korda’s deal ran to 4.3 strokes, an unusually high figure for such a strong server.
Taking first and second serves together, how much does Korda sacrifice with his conservative-seeming mindset on plus-ones? I calculated the percent of 3rd shots (plus-ones) and 5th shots that went for winners or forced errors across all charted matches since 2020. Here are results for Sebi, plus those of a few comparable players and the tour average:
Player 3rd W% 5th W%
Hubert Hurkacz 19.0% 20.0%
Stefanos Tsitsipas 18.5% 20.1%
Taylor Fritz 18.2% 17.1%
Sebastian Korda 17.1% 16.9%
-- Average -- 17.1% 17.3%
Felix Auger-Aliassime 16.8% 17.1%
Korda is just not as aggressive as the more successful of his tall, big-serving peers. He out-winners Felix Auger-Aliassime, but I would argue (and will do so at length, one of these days) that the Canadian’s approach is holding him back, as well. It isn’t that Korda is entirely passive on the plus-one, but given the relatively weak return quality he faces, he should be putting away more than a tour-average rate of second shots.
There is, however, a reason for his unwillingness to swing bigger, and that’s where we’ll turn next.
Something wild
Here’s the same table with two more columns: one for each player’s unforced error rate on the 3rd shot of the point, and another for the unforced error rate on the 5th shot:
Player 3rd W% 3rd UFE% 5th W% 5th UFE%
Hubert Hurkacz 19.0% 12.8% 20.0% 11.8%
Stefanos Tsitsipas 18.5% 11.4% 20.1% 10.2%
Taylor Fritz 18.2% 11.1% 17.1% 8.8%
Sebastian Korda 17.1% 13.8% 16.9% 12.3%
-- Average -- 17.1% 10.8% 17.3% 10.4%
Felix Auger-Aliassime 16.8% 10.9% 17.1% 11.6%
Yikes! Korda is wilder on these shots than the other players, so much so that he ends more points with the plus-one shot than everyone on this list except for Hurkacz. Of players with some degree of tour-level success, only Marin Cilic misses more plus-ones. Denis Shapovalov and Alejandro Davidovich Fokina are roughly equivalent to Korda in this department.
We’ve taken a roundabout path to reach a more general fact about the American’s game: He misses a lot of shots. As a fraction of all groundstrokes, Korda ends points in his favor about 10% more often than the average ATPer. But he commits 20% more unforced errors. His plus-ones are of a piece with his entire ground game, even if they’re a bit wilder. Racking up so many unforced errors without a correspondingly large winner count means, by definition, that his baseline game is a liability. Only that big pile of unreturnable serves is keeping him above water.
Fortunately, Korda is still young, and his game is not set in stone. He missed 13% of his plus-ones yesterday, but that number is trending in the right direction. Here are his winner and unforced error rates on the third shot of the rally, as ten-match rolling averages going back to the 2021 NextGen Finals:
You don’t need a tour guide to spot the good news here. Korda’s plus-one error rate used to be outrageously high. It’s still higher than he like it to be, but it’s dramatically better, and getting it under control hasn’t cost him much on the other side of the ledger. As he puts the wrist injury fully behind him, there may be even more room for improvement.
The ceiling
I’ve focused on the serve–and Korda’s approach behind it–because that’s the side of his game that will determine how high he climbs. In his career at tour level, he has won 38% of return points, a figure that means he’ll break often enough to win matches when he serves well. Maintaining a 38% rate will get tougher as the quality of his opposition rises, but that may not be a problem: He has already excelled against top tier competition. As Alex Gruskin points out, he’s 18-21 against top-20 players, a record that indicates he’s already able to compete at that level, even if his results against the rest of the pack (and his health) aren’t consistent enough to support a corresponding ranking.
Korda may improve his return game, but if he is to crack the top ten and have a real shot at those two major titles, his serve will make the difference. In the last 52 weeks, he has won 66% of return points and held 83% of service games, numbers that place him among the top half of the top 50… but not much higher. The serve itself needs no improvement, as we’ve seen. The difference between Korda and someone like Fritz or Tsitsipas is what happens when the serve comes back. The 23-year-old is making progress, but he has more steps to take before he can reach the enormous potential that once seemed so assured.
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Talking Tennis interview
I recently spoke with John Silk of Talking Tennis, and in a one-hour interview ,we covered all things Tennis Abstract: how to get the most out of the site, Elo ratings, common beliefs about tennis stats, and the Tennis 128. Watch it here:
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Also today: Bublik’s quartet of comebacks; top seed upset trivia
Diana Shnaider at the 2023 US Open. Credit: Hameltion
Diana Shnaider lost her place in the WTA top 100 after her first-round exit at the Australian Open. But before we had time to reevaluate her place on the prospect list, she hurled her momentum back in the other direction, going through the top three seeds in Hua Hin, Thailand, to win her first career tour-level title. (More later on the trivia aspect.)
The Russian left-hander is only 19 years old, and her new ranking of #73 places her fourth among all women under 21. (She’s also up to 76th on the Elo list, ranked among the top 70 on hard courts.) The only younger players ahead of her are Coco Gauff, Linda Noskova, and Mirra Andreeva. Gauff is already a major winner, and Andreeva is three years younger, the impossibly young sensation of the moment. Noskova, though, is just seven months younger; coming off a quarter-final showing in Australia, she has already cracked the top 30. Shnaider trails the Czech by some distance on the points table, but she is every bit as promising of a prospect.
Zhu Lin, the Chinese veteran seeded third in Hua Hin, was no match for Shnaider yesterday. A second-set tactical shift–and a delayed response from the Russian–sent the match to a decider, but when Shnaider adjusted and Zhu failed to offer any new problems, it became a race to the finish. The 19-year-old completed her sixth top-50 victory, collecting the trophy by the score of 6-3, 2-6, 6-1.
Shnaider’s response to the final-round challenge was a fitting end to the week. Her three seeded victims–Zhu, Magda Linette, and Wang Xinyu–play different styles of tennis. Each one, at times, threatened to derail the Russian’s own game. She doesn’t yet have the weapons to impose herself on a top-tier opponent; her game may never be quite big enough for that. But her ability to handle the variety on offer in Hua Hin is an encouraging sign that she is maturing as a player. It could be a very long time before she gives up her place in the top 100.
Pushing around
The Russian has described herself an aggressive player. “I never wanted to be a pusher,” she told Christopher Clarey. “I was always like: ‘OK, here’s the shot. I’m killing it.'”
She isn’t a pusher, but by the standards of modern-day women’s tennis, she isn’t particularly aggressive, either. Her serve isn’t big enough to dictate play: 80% of them come back, setting her equal to Elina Svitolina or Emma Navarro. She uses her groundstrokes as weapons in every direction, but she plays within herself and leaves winners on the table. She ends points a bit more often than the typical WTAer from the baseline in exchange for a tour-average rate of unforced errors. Her Rally Aggression Score, across six charted matches from the last year, is +13, slightly above the norm and similar to that of Maria Sakkari.
It’s tempting to label her a counterpuncher, especially after watching a highlight reel or two. The broadcast commentator for her first-round victory over Linette was reduced to sputtering “No way!” after one unlikely recovery; my own reaction was less printable. She’s extremely fast, deceptively so. Woe betide the opponent who approaches the net. A singles court is 27 feet wide, and Shnaider needs only a few inches.
But “counterpuncher” isn’t right either. She’s not a pusher, she’s a pusher-around. Her relatively flat crosscourt groundstrokes off both wings are daunting, especially the left-handed forehand. The Russian rarely squanders an opportunity to do something with a groundstroke, whether that means widening the court or dislodging her opponent from the baseline. She doesn’t go for broke, but there’s not much passivity in her approach.
Shnaider’s brand of pushing-around works best against an opponent with an exploitable backhand. Linette’s backhand was too steady, which is what made the first rounder the Russian’s closest contest of the week. (Each woman won 75 of the first 150 points before the knot was finally untied.) Against Wang Xinyu and Zhu Lin, the crosscourt forehand consistently took control of points:
MATCH W/FE% PointsWon%
SF vs Wang 27% 76%
FI vs Zhu 30% 66%
-- DS Avg 20% 59%
-- Tour Avg 14% 53%
R1 vs Linette 22% 47%
These numbers are for crosscourt forehands only. When she hits them, Shnaider ends points in her favor one-fifth of the time, and she came close to one in three yesterday against Zhu. More commonly, the pressure created by that stroke–not the individual shot itself–is what wins the point. The average WTA player picks up barely half of points in which they hit a crosscourt forehand. It’s just not an overwhelmingly offensive shot. Iga Swiatek wins 60% of those points; Aryna Sabalenka wins 58%. Shnaider, like Iga, wins nearly 60% of them, claiming two of three against Zhu and more than three out of four against Wang.
She’s not killing the ball, not most of the time anyway. But it doesn’t matter. Her crosscourt forehand is the tennis equivalent of death by a thousand cuts.
Adjustment periods
Shnaider’s game is a work in progress, no criticism for a 19-year-old who balanced college tennis with the tour for half of last year. She will almost certainly develop more power, especially on the serve, where there is a wide gap between her biggest strikes and her more pedestrian offerings. She will probably also learn to take more chances from the baseline, an adjustment that would give her more control over her own fate.
On a smaller scale, each one of her three seeded opponents last week threatened to take control of their encounters; each time, the left-hander recovered in time to advance.
Linette, as we’ve seen, had no problem with the barrage of crosscourt forehands. After Shnaider won the opening frame, the top seed roared back with a 6-1 second. From there, though, the Russian was a different player. She sent more first serves to the wide corners–reliable weapons for many a left-hander–which sealed the first game of the decider with the loss of just one point. She also moved away from the crosscourt forehand, letting Linette test her own backhand with crosscourt forehands of her own. At 30-40 in the Pole’s first service game of the decider, Linette hit her plus-one shot down the middle. Where Shnaider might prefer to attack crosscourt, she instead went inside-out, setting herself up for a backhand crosscourt winner on the following shot. Linette would break back in the following game, but her momentum was broken. Shnaider had opened up new tactical options and would take the third set, 6-1.
Wang’s threat was less serious, but it represents bigger dangers that the 19-year-old will face on tour. Shnaider won the first set easily, aided by Wang’s own mistakes. But the Chinese player brought her power under control at the beginning of the second, breaking for a 3-1 advantage. The fourth game demonstrated what a big hitter can do: Wang needed only five shots to reach 40-30. There wasn’t anything to push around.
While Wang wasn’t exactly dominant on serve, she was good enough. The only way to handle a (temporarily) unbreakable server is to take care of your own deal, and Shnaider did her best. She took more chances with first serves, seeing that number fall below 50%, compared to a usual rate above 60%. When she was able to extend rallies, she let Wang make mistakes. The second-set tiebreak ended with a combination of the two: At 4-5, Wang missed a swinging volley to end a 20-stroke rally. Two points later, Shnaider cracked a wide first serve that didn’t come back.
Zhu Lin proved to be the knottiest problem of the three top seeds, even if she didn’t play the best tennis. Though Zhu doesn’t have big weapons, she knows the dangers of passive tennis, especially against someone like Shnaider who will push her around. After the first set went to the Russian, 6-3, Zhu did everything she could to shorten points. For one set, it worked:
RALLY LEN Shots/Pt
Set 1 4.6
Set 2 3.7
Set 3 4.6
Zhu picked up the second set, 6-2, in large part because Shnaider reacted so badly to the shift. After balancing winners and unforced errors in the first set, the 19-year-old hit just two winners against ten errors–including six on the forehand–in the second.
When the deciding set began, it was as if both players realized that Zhu couldn’t keep playing with borrowed tactics. Shnaider continued to put service returns close to the baseline–her Return Depth Index was 2.83, by far the best of the charted matches in her career so far–making it more difficult for Zhu to attack. Her forehand recovered, ensuring that she would keep points alive. A better player, or one with more experience, might have reacted to Zhu’s shift more quickly, but it is to Shnaider’s credit that she did so, so comprehensively, well before the clock ran out. The Russian concluded her title run with a 6-1 final set.
If the course of this week’s triumph is any indication, Shnaider’s march to the top of the rankings will be a steady one. She has too much to figure out before she consistently beats the best, and that will take time. But her run of upsets in Hua Hin showed us that she is making progress, and that her in-match problem-solving skills far surpass those of the typical 19-year-old. As the problems get tougher, we’ll find out just how far she can go.
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Alexander Bublik’s four comebacks
Alexander Bublik won the Montpellier title the hard way, coming back from one-set deficits against all four of his opponents. It’s the first time anyone has ever won an ATP title despite losing the first set of each of his matches. It’s never happened on the Challenger tour, either.
However, the key word here is four. Bublik was the second seed in Montpellier, so he didn’t have to play a first-round match. No titlist has ever lost the first set in all of their matches, but many players have won a tournament despite losing four first sets.
I found 20 previous occasions when a player came back so often at the same event, en route to a title. (Presumably there are even more, if we look for finalists, quarter- and semi-finalists at majors, and so on.) Bublik was the first since 2009, when Radek Stepanek recorded back-to-back wins against Andy Roddick and Mardy Fish to claim the San Jose title. He recovered from a one-set deficit four times, straight-setting only Chris Guccione.
The feat was more common at the beginning of the century, occuring twice each in 2001 and 2002. Tommy Haas recorded four comebacks on the way to a title at the 2001 Stuttgart Masters, the single Masters-level title run on this list. His only straight-set victory was the best-of-five final against Max Mirnyi. Nicolas Escude won Rotterdam in 2002 against an all-star cast including Roger Federer, Juan Carlos Ferrero, Tim Henman, Sebastien Grosjean, and Tommy Robredo, losing the first set to all but Robredo. Don’t be too hard on Tommy, though: He took the first set from Paul-Henri Mathieu in Moscow the same year, where Mathieu dropped four first sets yet still took home the trophy.
Two major winners appear on this list: John McEnroe for his 1981 US Open run, and Andre Agassi for his 1992 championship at Wimbledon (where, in another coincidence, he beat McEnroe in the semis). Those feats aren’t really in the same category as Bublik’s, as they had seven chances to come back. On the other hand, McEnroe recovered from a one-set deficit against Bjorn Borg, so I’m not about to disqualify him from anything.
Finally, there’s one oddball occasion that–if you squint hard enough–really is a precedent for Montpellier last week. Emilio Sanchez led Spain to the 1992 World Team Cup title, beating Stefan Edberg, Guy Forget, and Jakob Hlasek in the round robin, then defeating Petr Korda in the final round. In each one, he came back after losing the first set. It’s not quite the same thing, but Sanchez went home a hero, and he came back in all four of his matches. Whether it qualifies or not, it was one hell of a week.
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Shnaider’s top-three upsets
As I mentioned at the top of today’s post, Diana Shnaider went through the first, second, and third three seeds in Hua Hin en route to the title. (Unlike Bublik, she won all five of her first sets, too.) She beat top seed Magda Linette in the first round, third-seeded Wang Xinyu in the semi-finals, and second seed Zhu Lin in the final.
Shnaider’s feat is not so rare as Bublik’s. Excluding year-end tour championships, where seeds clash in every match, Hua Hin is the sixth time in a decade that player has gone through the top three seeds to win the title. Remarkably, Barbora Krejcikova has done it twice in two years, beating Anett Kontaveit, Belinda Bencic, and Beatriz Haddad Maia to win Tallinn in 2022, then upsetting Aryna Sabalenka, Jessica Pegula, and Iga Swiatek (not to mention seventh-seed Daria Kasatkina and twelvth-seed Petra Kvitova) to win Dubai last year.
The list of previous such winners is a glittering one, usually when a superstar returns from a prolonged absence. Serena Williams beat Martina Hingis, Jennifer Capriati, and sister Venus to win Miami in 2002. Steffi Graf won the 1999 French Open by knocking out Lindsay Davenport, Monica Seles, and Hingis in succession.
Graf wasn’t the first player to win a major title in such a fashion: Virginia Wade picked up the first US Open, in 1968, by eliminating Judy Tegart, Ann Jones, and Billie Jean King.
Conchita Martinez is probably the best player who won a title this way when she was still on the rise: She upset Sabrina Goles, Katerina Maleeva, and Barbara Paulus to pick up the 1988 Sofia crown. Hana Mandlikova, like Krejcikova, did it twice: At the 1984 Oakland tourney, she beat Andrea Jaeger, Pam Shriver, and Martina Navratilova. She returned the next year and did it again, knocking out Wendy Turnbull, Helena Sukova, and Chris Evert.
Finally, a twist: Margaret Court also appears on the list twice. Shortly after returning from her first pregnancy, she won the 1972 Newport title–where she was seeded sixth–with victories over Rosie Casals, Evert, and King. The odder instance is her other appearance, for the Locust Valley (New York) event in 1969. Court plowed through top seeds Denise Carter, Patti Hogan, and Betty Ann Grubb, losing just 12 games in the process.
Margaret had already won two majors that year–so why wasn’t she the top seed? Traditionally, foreign players were placed on a separate seeding list. Carter, Hogan, and Grubb were the top three Americans at the rather weak event. Court was designated 1F–the top foreign seed, ahead of 2F Kerry Harris, with whom she won the doubles, too. Foreign seeds were placed in the draw so they would avoid local seeds (and each other) until later rounds. So this example doesn’t really count: By modern standards, Court was herself the top seed, and Harris probably outranked one or more of the Americans.
Even if we toss out Locust Valley, Shnaider finds herself in good company. She joins Wade, Court, Mandlikova, Martinez, Graf, Amelie Mauresmo, Serena, and–thanks to a sparkling week in Luxembourg in 2016–the great Monica Niculescu.
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Dayana Yastremska at the 2023 US Open. Credit: Hameltion
Power giveth, and power taketh away. Few women hit as hard as Dayana Yastremska does, and sometimes, when enough of her returns find the court, that translates into victory. She squeaked through Australian Open qualifying by winning three deciding sets against players outside the top 200, then demolished 7th seed Marketa Vondrousova and rode the resulting momentum all the way to the semi-finals.
Then, yesterday in Linz, she managed just two games against Donna Vekic. So it goes.
The Ukrainian is essentially Jelena Ostapenko lite, mixing a middling serve with monster groundstrokes and a do-or-die approach on return. I wrote a few weeks ago about how Ostapenko’s game style leaves her unusually susceptible to chance; that applies even more to her less accomplished colleague.
The good news for Yastremska is that momentum is temporary. She’ll have off days, like the 92-point flop against Vekic, and she’ll occasionally play a perfect hour, like the dismantling of Vondrousova. More often, though, she’ll pack it all into a single match. The 23-year-old’s stats from her third-round adventure in Melbourne against Emma Navarro make for a good illustration:
SPW% RPW% Winners UFE
Set 1 64% 54% 12 11
Set 2 50% 33% 6 15
Set 3 73% 56% 15 8
I’ll bet you can tell which sets she won. It was a lopsided match, just not always in favor of the same player.
Typically, the wildest fluctuation came in Yastremska’s return numbers. Her serve is a weak point–she holds less than 60% of service games, worse than all but one other top-50 player–and it is no picture of consistency, either. But her return is a shot she can ride to a major semi-final. In the first five matches of her Australian Open campaign, she won 48% of return points, including 21 of 38 break point chances. Against Victoria Azarenka in the fourth round, Yastremska landed only 60% of her returns, but when she put the serve back in play, she won nearly three-quarters of the time. Almost one in six Azarenka service points ended with a Yastremska return that Vika couldn’t handle.
A few days later against Qinwen Zheng, the same attack proved to be too risky. The Ukrainian put just half of Zheng’s serves back in play. More than 20% of those returns ended the point, but against all of the free points she gave away, it wasn’t enough. Unlike the scattershot second set of the Navarro match, there wasn’t enough time to find the range before the contest was over.
The streaky slugger
After Yastremska’s eight straight wins from qualifying to the Australian Open semi-final, it’s tempting to call her a streaky player. Combine the big-picture run with narrow-focus ups and downs like the three sets of the Navarro match, and she looks like a kite blown around by the winds of chance at both the macro and micro levels.
I normally dismiss claims that any player’s results are particularly momentum-driven: While athletes aren’t robots, study after study suggests that if momentum (or “clutch” or “streakiness”) is real, it’s a minor effect, far more minor than commentators or the casual fan seems to believe. But after watching the Ukrainian’s three sets against Navarro, I had to test it.
Here’s a more precise hypothesis: Yastremska is more likely to win a game when she has won the previous game, compared to when she has lost the previous game. That isn’t the whole story of in-match streakiness, but for a single number, I think it gets to the core of the issue.
Result? True!
Player Change after Gm-W
Alison Riske Amritraj +11.9%
Linda Fruhvirtova +9.7%
Lesia Tsurenko +8.9%
Irina Camelia Begu +8.7%
Ajla Tomljanovic +7.1%
Kaja Juvan +6.5%
Polona Hercog +6.0%
Yulia Putintseva +5.6%
Shuai Zhang +5.4%
Dayana Yastremska +5.3%
---
Jelena Ostapenko +3.2%
Iga Swiatek +1.6%
-- Average -- +1.0%
Aryna Sabalenka +0.3%
Elena Rybakina -0.8%
Coco Gauff -1.2%
Caroline Garcia -3.3%
Among the 102 women with at least 20 charted matches since 2017, Yastremska ranks in the top ten, winning games more than 5% more often than average when she has won the previous game. She out-momentums her fellow hyper-aggressor Ostapenko by a modest amount. Another slugger, Aryna Sabalenka, seems to be impervious to previous results, even more so than the slightly streaky average player.
(The exact metric compares games-that-follow-games-won to games-that-follow-games [that is, games that don’t begin a set] within the same match, and excludes tiebreaks. Winning a match 6-0 6-0 isn’t “streaky” by this measure, because it’s impossible to know whether the result is due to a lopsided matchup [or injury] or to momentum–the winner went 10 for 10 in games that followed games won, and 10 for 10 in games that followed any game. With this metric, a streaky player is one who wins 10 of 20 total games in a match including, say, 7 of 10 games that follow other games won.)
So Yastremska is a little tougher to beat when she’s on a roll. She’s really hard to derail if she has just won a game and you have the misfortune of serving. Here is the same metric, only limited to winning percentage in return games:
Player After Service Hold
Katerina Siniakova +13.4%
Dayana Yastremska +13.3%
Lauren Davis +13.0%
Linda Fruhvirtova +12.2%
Tatjana Maria +11.2%
Alison Riske Amritraj +10.8%
Marta Kostyuk +10.3%
Anhelina Kalinina +9.9%
Yulia Putintseva +9.6%
Qinwen Zheng +8.8%
---
Jelena Ostapenko +2.7%
Iga Swiatek +2.6%
Aryna Sabalenka +2.2%
-- Average -- +1.0%
Coco Gauff -1.3%
Caroline Garcia -4.9%
Yastremska’s success in return games skyrockets after she has held serve. Maybe she feels especially confident after getting through a service game; maybe a hold is a sign that her whole game is clicking. Whatever the reason, she rides this particular type of momentum as much as anyone, trailing Siniakova at the top of the list by a meaningless 0.031 percentage points.
You might suspect–or at least, I initially suspected–that streakiness is related to slugging. It’s easy enough to invent a story to link the two: Big hitting is risky; winners and errors come in batches. But no, there’s virtually no correlation, positive or negative, between these measures of streakiness and any of the metrics I use to quantify aggression. Grinders like Yulia Putintseva share the top of the list with Yastremska, while attackers like Caroline Garcia appear at the other extreme.
For the Ukrainian, it seems, the ups and downs are here to stay. Until she gets more out of her serve, she’ll continue to get dragged into three-set battles against opponents much further down the ranking list. As long as she doesn’t miss too many returns, she’ll keep herself in position to win. The losses will sometimes be ugly, but the victories–like the games that contribute to them–will compensate by coming in batches.
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February 2, 1974: Five-dollar words
My favorite moments in early-1970s tennis came when Billie Jean King got feisty. I don’t mean the take-this-fight-to-Congress, crusading Billie Jean, though there was plenty of that. On the rare occasions when an opponent pushed Madame Superstar to the brink, she could get downright nasty. Pity the poor linesmen.
Fifty years ago today, King faced longtime friend, doubles partner, and punching bag Rosie Casals in the semi-finals of the Virginia Slims of Washington. It was the marquee match of the week, with all of the tour’s other stars absent. Chris Evert and Nancy Richey were taking the week off, Evonne Goolagong was chasing appearance fees on the other side of the globe, and Margaret Court was pregnant. Billie Jean took it upon herself to keep the crowds happy: She went to three sets in the opening round against Kerry Harris, then delivered a 6-0, 6-1 masterclass to win her quarter-final against the 17-year-old Kathy Kuykendall.
Some fans griped about the ticket prices: five bucks for the King-Casals semi and six dollars for the evening session, which featured Australians Kerry Melville and Helen Gourlay in the other semi-final. The 2,800 locals who showed up for the afternoon match, at least, got their money’s worth.
Casals rounded into form just in time, having struggled a bit to recalibrate her game as the tour seesawed between indoor and outdoor events. Her athletic net game outpaced King’s own attack throughout the first set, leading Billie Jean to find a scapegoat among the officials. She berated the service line judge, even threatening to quit; Casals had to calm her down and convince her to stay. (Rosie quipped later that she deserved 60% of the prize money for keeping her pal on court.) After the Old Lady vented her wrath at the chair and two separate linesmen, she settled for moving the offending service line judge to the net cord.
“What this game needs are professional linesmen,” King said. “We’re years behind the times. There are too many questionable situations for a bunch of amateurs to try to master. I’ve suffered through 21 years of bad line calls, and I’m fed up.”
Tennis officiating was certainly a mixed bag. A few months earlier, at the men’s season-ending Masters event in Boston, a last-minute strike forced organizers to pluck fans from the crowd to call the lines.
But not everyone believed that Billie Jean’s reaction was warranted, or that it was triggered by what King called her own “low boiling point.” Melville and Gourlay played their match with the same crew and had no problems. “Most of this arguing with linesmen is done for tactical reasons,” Melville said. “It helps intimidate them. You can get away with it over here, but not in Australia.”
The offending service line judge, Stew Saphier, had a few words of his own. Nothing like this had ever happened to him before, and he wasn’t embarrassed by it. Why not? “Because I was correct in all my calls.”
Whatever the cause of King’s outburst, the day ended as it usually did. After dropping a 7-5 first set to Casals, she came back to win, 6-2, 6-0. The next day, she dispatched Melville 6-0, 6-2, completing the rare feat of a tournament victory that included a 6-0 set won in every match. She was now 14-1 on the young season, her only loss coming in the previous week’s final against Evert. Past her 30th birthday, more famous than ever, she still had plenty of battles ahead.
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Meanwhile, in Ohio…
The men competing at the 1974 Dayton Pro Tennis Classic didn’t draw much in the way of crowds, but tournament organizers slapped together a sure-fire attraction: an exhibition match between Bobby Riggs and Cincinnati Reds star Pete Rose. 4,000 fans turned out for the famous court hustler and baseball’s “Charlie Hustle.” It was clear what they came for: Half of them left before the next regulation match got started.
“This is a disgrace for tennis,” said Yugoslavian veteran Boro Jovanovic. “People don’t come out to see us all week, then they come out for something like this.”
Rose insisted that Riggs play him “straight,” but after three games of running the outfielder ragged with all the spin that a 55-year-old arm could muster, the clowning began. Riggs donned everything from baseball catcher’s gear to a dress, and he eventually set out beach chairs and carried a briefcase to further aid his opponent’s cause. Final score: five games to two, Riggs.
Bobby recognized that rematches with King and Court were off the table and that neither Evert nor Goolagong were likely to accept a challenge. “I’d like to play women from all the world,” he said, naming Casals as potential foe. In the meantime, he’d take on all comers. With his Battle-of-the-Sexes celebrity still going strong, he knew people would show up to watch.
Click here for other posts about the 1974 season. Or here for dispatches from 1924.
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Novak Djokovic practicing at the 2023 US Open. Credit: Amaury Laporte
Fifteen break points. A week has passed, a new champion has been crowned, and I still can’t stop thinking about it. In the first two sets of his Australian Open quarter-final match against Taylor Fritz, Novak Djokovic failed to convert fifteen straight break points.
It’s so far out of character as to defy belief. Djokovic has converted more than 40% of his break chances in the past year, even counting the 4-for-21 showing in the entire Fritz match. The American, one of the better servers on tour, typically saves only two-thirds of the break points he faces. The chances that Novak would come up short 15 times in a row are about one in seven million.
Even stranger, it wasn’t because Fritz served so well. He missed his first serve on 7 of the 15 break points. He hit two aces and another four didn’t come back, but that leaves nine rallies when–under pressure, in Australia–Taylor Fritz beat Novak Djokovic. Five of those lasted at least seven strokes, including a 25-shot gutbuster at 4-3 in the second set that was followed, two points later, by yet another Fritz winner on the 17th shot. All credit to the American, who walked a tightrope of down-the-line backhands and refused to give in to an opponent who, even in the first two sets, was outplaying him. But clearly this wasn’t a matter of Fritz intimidating or otherwise imposing himself on Novak.
There’s no shortage of explanations. Djokovic is recovering from a wrist injury that hampered him in his United Cup loss to Alex de Minaur. He apparently had the flu going into the Melbourne semi against Jannik Sinner. The whole Australian adventure might be nothing more than a health-marred aberration; in this interpretation, none of Jiri Lehecka, Dino Prizmic, Alexei Popyrin, or even Fritz would otherwise have taken a set from the all-time great.
But… the man is 36 years old. If other tennis players his age are any guide, he may never be fully healthy again. He will continue to get slower, if only marginally so. He personally raised the physical demands of the sport, and finally, a younger generation has accepted the challenge. Djokovic has defied the odds to stay on top for as long as he has, but eventually he will fade, even if that means only a gentle tumble out of the top three. After a month like this, we have to ask, is it the beginning of the end?
Rally intolerance
The two marathon break points that Fritz saved were not exceptions. 64 of the 269 points in the quarter-final reached a seventh shot, and the American won more than half of them. Even among double-digit rallies, the results were roughly even.
Here’s another data point: Djokovic fought out 53 points in his first-rounder against Prizmic that reached ten shots or more. The 18-year-old Croatian won 30 of them. Yeah, Prizmic is a rising star with mountains of potential, but he’s also ranked 169th in the world. This is not the Novak we’ve learned to expect: Even after retooling his game around a bigger serve and shorter points, he remained unshakeable from the baseline, his famous flexibility keeping him in position to put one more ball back in play.
Down Under, though, those skills went missing. Based on 278 charted matches since the start of 2015, the following table shows the percentage of points each year that he takes to seven shots or more, and his success rate in those rallies:
By the standards of tennis’s small margins, that’s what it looks like to fall off a cliff. The situation probably isn’t quite so bad: The sample from 2024 is limited to only the matches against Lehecka, de Minaur, Prizmic, Fritz, and Sinner. On the other hand, matches charted in previous years also skew in favor of novelty, so upsets, close matches, and elite opponents are overrepresented there too.
It is especially unusual for Djokovic to see such a decline on hard courts. Over the last decade, he has gone through spells when he loses more long rallies than he wins. But they typically come on clay. Carlos Alcaraz shut him down in last year’s Wimbledon final as well, winning 57% of points that reached the seventh shot and 63% of those with ten or more strokes. The only period when hard-court Novak consistently failed to win this category was late 2021, when Medvedev beat him for the US Open title (and then outscored him in long rallies in Paris), and Alexander Zverev won 62% of the seven-plusses (and 70% of ten-plusses!) to knock him out of the Tour Finals.
Protracted rallies are a young man’s game, and Djokovic’s results are starting to show it. Before dissecting Alcaraz in Turin last November, Novak had never won more than half of seven-plusses against Carlitos. He has barely held on against Sinner, winning 43% of those points in their Tour Finals round-robin match and 51% at the Davis Cup Finals. In 13 meetings since 2019, Medvedev has won more of these long rallies than Djokovic has. Zverev, too, has edged him out in this category since the end of 2018.
Against the rest of the pack, Djokovic manages just fine. He dominates seven-plusses against Casper Ruud and Stefanos Tsitsipas, for instance. But it’s one of the few chinks in his armor against the best, and if January represents anything more than the temporary struggles of an ailing star, more players are figuring out how to take advantage.
Avoiding danger
For players who lose a disproportionate number of long points, the best solution is to shorten them. Djokovic may never have thought in exactly those terms, but perhaps with an eye toward energy conservation, he has done exactly that.
Especially from 2017 to 2022, Novak drastically reduced the number of points that reached the seven-shot threshold:
In 2017, 29% of his points went that long; in 2022 and 2023, barely 23% did. It remains to be seen whether January 2024 is more than a blip. In his up-and-down month, Novak remained able to control his service points, but he was less successful avoiding the grind on return. As we’ve seen, that’s dangerous territory: Djokovic won a healthy majority of the short points against Fritz but was less successful in the long ones, especially following the American’s own serve.
Much rests on the direction of these trends. If the players Djokovic has faced so far this year can prevent him from finishing points early, how will he handle Medvedev or Zverev?. If Novak can’t reliably outlast the likes of Fritz and Prizmic, what are his chances against Alcaraz?
Djokovic is well-positioned to hold on to his number one ranking until the French Open, when he’ll be 37 years old. By then, presumably, he’ll be clear of the ailments that held him back in Australia. Still, holding off the combination of Sinner, Alcaraz, Medvedev, Zverev, and Father Time will be increasingly difficult. The 24-time major champion will need to redouble the tactical effort to keep points short and somehow recover the magic that once made him so implacable in the longest rallies. Age is just a number, but few metrics are so ruthless in determining an athlete’s fate.
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Arina Rodionova on the cusp of the top 100
In December, Australian veteran Arina Rodionova celebrated her 34th birthday. Now she’s competing at the tour-level event in Hua Hin this week, sporting a new career-best ranking of 101. With a first-round upset win over sixth-seed Yue Yuan, she’s up to 99th in the live rankings. Her exact position next Monday is still to be determined–a few other women could spoil the party with deep runs, or she could climb higher with more victories of her own–but a top-100 debut is likely.
Rodionova, assuming she makes it, will be the oldest woman ever* to crack the top 100 for the first time. The record is held by Tzipi Oblizer, who was two months short of her own 34th birthday when she reached the ranking milestone in 2007. Rodionova will be just the fifth player to join the top-100 club after turning 30.
* I say “ever” with some caution: I don’t have weekly rankings before the mid-80s, so I checked back to 1987. Before then, the tour skewed even younger, so I doubt there were 30-somethings breaking into the top 100. But it’s possible.
Here is the list of oldest top-100 debuts since 1987:
Player Milestone Age at debut
Arina Rodionova* 2024-02-05 34.1
Tzipi Obziler 2007-02-19 33.8
Adriana Villagran Reami 1988-08-01 32.0
Emina Bektas 2023-11-06 30.6
Nuria Parrizas Diaz 2021-08-16 30.1
Mihaela Buzarnescu 2017-10-16 29.5
Julie Ditty 2007-11-05 28.8
Eva Bes Ostariz 2001-07-16 28.5
Maryna Zanevska 2021-11-01 28.2
Ysaline Bonaventure 2022-10-31 28.2
Mashona Washington 2004-07-19 28.1
Laura Pigossi 2022-08-29 28.1
Maureen Drake 1999-02-01 27.9
Hana Sromova 2005-11-07 27.6
Laura Siegemund 2015-09-14 27.5
* pending!
I extended the list to 16 places in order to include Laura Siegemund. She and Buzarnescu are the only two women to crack the top 100 after their 27th birthdays yet still ascend to the top 30. The odds are against Rodionova doing the same–the average peak of the players on the list is 67, and the majority of them achieved the milestone a half-decade earlier–but you never know.
A triumph of scheduling
Rodionova has truly sweated her way to the top. She played 105 matches last year, winning 78 of them, assembling a haul of seven titles and another three finals. When I highlighted the exploits of Emma Navarro a couple of weeks ago, I couldn’t help but draw attention to the Australian, who is one of only two women to win more matches than Navarro since the beginning of last year. Iga Swiatek is the other.
Most of the veteran’s recent triumphs–44 match wins and five of her seven 2023 titles–have come at the ITF W25 level. She didn’t beat a single top-200 player in those events, and she faced only five of them. In her long slog through the tennis world last year, Rodionova played just one match against a top-100 opponent, and that was a loss to 91st-ranked Dalma Galfi.
The point is, the Aussie earned her ranking with quantity, not quality. No shame in that: The WTA made the rules, and the Australian not only chose a schedule to maximize her chances of climbing the ranking table, she executed. Kudos to her.
What her ranking does not mean, however, is that she is one of the 100 best players in the world. Elo is a more reliable judge of that, and going into this week, the algorithm ranks her 207th. (She peaked in the 140s, back in 2017.) You can hack the WTA rankings with a punishing slate of ITFs, but it’s much harder to cheat Elo.
Here are the players in the official top 150 who Elo considers to be most overrated:
Player Elo Rank WTA Rank Ratio
Caroline Dolehide 124 41 3.0
Peyton Stearns 145 54 2.7
Arantxa Rus 103 43 2.4
Tatjana Maria 94 44 2.1
Arina Rodionova 207 101 2.0
Laura Pigossi 221 114 1.9
Elina Avanesyan 120 62 1.9
Varvara Gracheva 89 46 1.9
Nadia Podoroska 127 67 1.9
Lucia Bronzetti 109 58 1.9
Dayana Yastremska 54 29 1.9
Once you climb into the top 100, savvy scheduling is increasingly impractical. Instead, this kind of gap comes from a deep run or two combined with many other unimpressive losses. Caroline Dolehide reached the final in Guadalajara followed by a quarter-final exit at a WTA 125, then lost three of five matches in Australia. Arantxa Rus won the title in Hamburg and reached a W100 semi-final, then lost five of six. The WTA formula lets you keep all the points from a big win for 52 weeks; Elo takes them away if you don’t keep demonstrating that you belong at the new level.
The sub-200 Elo rank suggests that Rodionova will have a hard time sustaining her place on the WTA list once the ranking points from her W25 titles start to come off the board. Until then, she can continue to pad her total and–fingers crossed–enjoy the hard-earned reward of a double-digit ranking.
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Don’t let Daniil Medvedev’s near-miss in the Australian Open final fool you: Jannik Sinner is the best player in the world right now. Like Sunday’s championship match, it’s close–but it might not be close for long.
I wrote in December about what I called the “most exclusive clubs” in tennis. Since 1991, when the ATP began keeping these stats, Andre Agassi and Novak Djokovic have been the only two players to finish a season in the top three of both hold percentage and break percentage. (Agassi did it twice.) Well, in the last 52 weeks, Sinner ranks second in hold percentage behind Hubert Hurkacz, and he stands third in break percentage, trailing only Medvedev and Carlos Alcaraz. It’s not a calendar year so we can’t officially add him to the list, but he’s playing as well on both sides of the ball as anyone ever has, apart from two all-time greats.
Oh, and on hard courts, Sinner out-holds even Hurkacz. He gets broken less than anyone in the game, securing his serve 89.9% of the time.
But wait–it’s even better than that. Alex Gruskin pointed out that since Wimbledon, Sinner’s hold percentage is 91.1%, within shouting distance of John Isner’s career mark of 91.8%. Isner cracked the top ten by combining that monster serve with a return that only a mother could love. Sinner, on the other hand, pairs absolutely dominant serving with one of the best returns in the game. Ever wonder what would happen if Big John had an elite return? Now you know.
Starting the clock at Wimbledon might raise an eyebrow–is that just the line that spits out the most impressive number?–but it’s a sensible way to divide the data. In June, not long before the Championships, Sinner rolled out a new, simplified service motion. While the measurements of the new delivery are not overwhelming–one more mile per hour, four centimeters closer to the line, a 0.7 percentage-point increase in first serves in–the results have been devastating. His serve has always been good; perhaps a few minor tweaks were all it took to make it great.
Winning how?
First, a bit of a puzzle. In the last 52 weeks, Sinner ranks fifth on tour in serve points won, with 68.3%. (Why not first or second, in line with his hold percentage? We’ll come back to that.) Yet despite the Isner comparisons, he doesn’t get it done the easy way. He hits aces just 8.4% of the time. That’s equal to the average of the ATP top 50, and it’s fewer than Djokovic.
The answer doesn’t lie in unreturned serves, either. Some players do get more free points than their ace counts imply. Stefanos Tsitsipas, for instance, ranks well down the ace list, finishing just 9% of his serve points that way. But he looks much more elite when we measure how many don’t come back–almost one-third, in his case. Sinner’s 29.6% rate of unreturned serves is above average, but it’s hardly the stuff that record-breaking hold numbers are made of. The next man on the list, for comparison’s sake, is Frances Tiafoe.
What about plus-ones? Sinner serves big, but relatively speaking, his groundstrokes are even bigger. Can we explain his serve-game success by the rate at which he ends points with his second shot?
Still no! He wins 40% of his serve points by the third shot of the rally. Again, that’s a solid mark: Djokovic and Alcaraz are about the same. On the other hand, so is Jiri Lehecka, and Tiafoe is even better.
Once a point reaches the fourth or fifth shot–especially if it began with a second serve–winning it is more about contesting a rally than converting any lingering advantage of the serve. If the returner puts the fourth stroke of the point in play, he has a 52% chance of winning it. Big servers still get some easy putaways, but opportunities disappear as the rally develops. When that happens, winning service points relies on a different set of skills–assets that Sinner, unlike many a big server, amply possesses.
Sinner, then, has the whole package, even if no single one of his weapons stands out like the Isner serve. He serves big enough to clean up 40% of points with his first or second shot. It the point lasts longer, he has probably hung on to more of an advantage than most players do: His heavy, deep groundstrokes see to that. In a really long rally, okay, maybe the edge goes to Medvedev or Alcaraz, but who else is going to outlast the Italian?
Most players excel at some stage of service points, but not all. The following graph illustrates how service points typically develop, by showing the server’s chance of winning the point when each successive shot is put in play. Based on charted men’s matches since 2021, servers win 64.2% of points. That goes up to 66.5% if they land a serve; it goes down to 52.5% if the return comes back. Several strokes later the server’s advantage is mostly gone: If he puts the 7th shot of the point in play, his chances of winning are 57.4%; if the returner comes back with an 8th shot, the server’s odds are down to 45%.
I’ve shown that progression along with specific numbers for Hurkacz, in order to demonstrate how these things go with our usual image of a big server:
While the differences between Hurkacz and tour average are modest, you get the idea. Early in the point, a big server cleans up; the longer the rally goes, the further his results fall below the line.
Now, the same graph with Sinner’s results from 2021 to the present:
He doesn’t start as high as Hurkacz, but he does do a little better than average. Crucially, he never falls below the average line, and the longer the point extends, the more he surpasses it.
I hope you’ve stuck with me this far, because the payoff is worth it. Same graph, only instead of Sinner’s three-plus-year average, we have his numbers since the beginning of 2023:
At the beginning of the point, Sinner is almost equal to Hurkacz. From then on, he takes over. A surprising gap comes early, at the two-plus rally mark, indicating that he doesn’t make many mistakes with his plus-one shot, even if he doesn’t put away an overwhelming number of them. No matter how long the point continues, the Italian outperforms tour average for that particular situation.
In tennis, it’s almost impossible to be good at everything. You can put together a nice, quite lucrative career by merely getting close to average in most categories and having one or two standout weapons. Sinner, we’re beginning to see, is not just good at everything, he is verging on great.
Break points
We now know why Sinner is winning so many serve points. But I mentioned another mystery we have yet to resolve. The Italian ranks fifth in the last 52 weeks in serve points won, the middle of a tightly-packed trio with Nicolas Jarry and Taylor Fritz, about one percentage point behind Hurkacz, Tsitsipas, and Djokovic. Yet he challenges Hurkacz for the top spot in the closely related, more consequential category of hold percentage:
Player Hld% Rk Hld% SPW Rk SPW%
Hubert Hurkacz 1 89.1% 1 69.6%
Jannik Sinner 2 88.8% 5 68.3%
Stefanos Tsitsipas 3 88.4% 2 69.5%
Novak Djokovic 4 87.6% 3 69.4%
Nicolas Jarry 5 87.1% 4 68.4%
Alexander Zverev 6 86.1% 7 67.4%
Taylor Fritz 7 86.0% 6 68.2%
Christopher Eubanks 8 85.8% 8 67.1%
Carlos Alcaraz 9 85.7% 10 67.0%
Tallon Griekspoor 10 85.1% 12 66.7%
The lists are almost identical, except for Sinner’s placement. He wins points at almost the same rate as Jarry and Fritz, yet he holds serve more often than either one.
As mysteries go, this isn’t a tough one. Not all points are created equal; if you win more of the important ones, you’ll outperform the players who don’t. Nobody knows that better than Sinner, who upset Djokovic in Turin despite winning exactly the same number of points, then beat him again at the Davis Cup with just 89 points to Novak’s 93. He out-pointed Medvedev yesterday 142 to 141.
Sinner wins these matches by saving break points at a remarkable clip. While winning 68.3% of serve points overall, he has held off 71.7% of break chances, including 36 of 40 in Melbourne. No one else on tour tops 69%, and Hurkacz comes in at 65%. On average, top-50 men save break points two percentage points less than they win typical serve points (63.5% to 65.5%), mostly because stronger returners generate more break points.
The question, then, is whether this is sustainable. ATP numbers indicate that Sinner goes bigger on break points, averaging 125 mile-per-hour first serves in those situations rather than his usual 122s. It seems to be working, but it can’t be that straightforward. Surely he isn’t the first player to arrive at the strategy of simply hitting harder, and besides, that usually comes at a cost. Will he continue to land enough of those bigger first serves to justify the payoff?
I can’t answer that question, but I can tell you what usually happens after a season of break-point overperformance: It doesn’t last. Taking over 2,600 player-seasons since 1991, 582 (21.7%) of players saved more break points than they won serve points overall. 183 (6.8%) matched Sinner’s mark of saving at least two percentage points more than their serve-points-won rate.
Of those 183, just eleven repeated the feat the following year. None of them were big servers, and nobody managed it three years in a row. The average following-year performance of the 183 men was 1.5 percentage points fewer break points saved than their rate of serve points won–just a tick better than tour average.
Unless Sinner has developed a new secret sauce–to be clear, with Darren Cahill in his corner, I’m not ruling it out!–that’s probably the fate that awaits him. In more than three decades, only 23 men have saved at least 71.7% of the break points they faced for a full season. The Italian probably won’t keep that up, and his out-of-this-world hold percentage will fall to something more plausible, in the 86-87% range.
Fortunately, that’s still exceptionally good. The 22-year-old serves like Jarry or Fritz while racking up as many return points as Djokovic. Take away the break point magic and you still have a contender for every slam. Sinner continues to lurk in fourth place in the official ATP rankings, but as of today, he is number one on the Elo list. Before long, those positions will converge, and it won’t be because his Elo rating goes back down.
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AO recap
I hope you’ve enjoyed my coverage throughout the Australian Open. I’ll continue to write this sort of thing throughout the year, though not always every weekday!
In case you missed it, here are the ten other articles posted since the action in Melbourne began:
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