Tactics Archives - Heavy Topspin

Tomas Machac’s Defiant Angles

*Tomas Machac at the 2023 US Open. Credit: Hameltion*

2024 is quickly turning into the year of Tomas Machac. The 23-year-old Czech reached his first grand slam third round in Australia, straight-setting Frances Tiafoe for a first top-20 win. A quarter-final showing in Marseille and a defeat of Stan Wawrinka at Indian Wells earned him a place in the top 60.

Now, in Miami, he has dispatched top-tenner Andrey Rublev and outlasted Andy Murray for a place in the fourth round. The live rankings place him precariously in the top 50; tomorrow’s match against fellow second-week surprise Matteo Arnaldi give him a chance to make it official. While Jiri Lehecka, a year younger and considerably higher in the rankings, is the poster boy for the resurgence of Czech men’s tennis, Machac is right behind him.

The key to the Machac game is a compact, versatile backhand that seems capable of anything. Inside-out backhands are usually little more than a curiosity, a miracle of timing that many players don’t even bother to try. The Czech hits one in ten of his backhands that way. Against Rublev, he cracked five: one for a winner and two more that forced errors. He won all five.

The tactics that surround Machac’s backhand are a joy to watch. Since he doesn’t serve big, every point threatens to become a rally. But the Czech angles for court position like a much bigger hitter. He approached the net 35 times in yesterday’s Murray match alone. Counting the times he was forced to come forward as well, he played 48 points in the forecourt, winning 38 of them. Combined with a court-widening slice serve, the net play makes Machac just as much of a threat on the doubles court. With Zhang Zhizhen, he reached the semi-finals in Australia and won the title in Marseille. He and girlfriend Katerina Siniakova would make a dangerous mixed duo at the Paris Olympics.

The unknowns that could limit Machac’s ceiling are, well, everything else. His forehand is a bit hitchy and it is nowhere near as effective as his backhand. By my Forehand Potency metric (FHP), he earns barely any points off that wing, ranking among the likes of Adrian Mannarino and Mikael Ymer.

And then there’s the serve. While he is capable of firing bullets–one of his serves in Australia registered at 128 mph (208 kph)–he rarely goes that route. His first serves in Miami have hovered around 110 mph, so he sets up points with slices wide, especially in the deuce court. He manages a respectable ace total thanks to a well-disguised delivery and the surprise that comes from his occasional bombs down the T.

The Machac serve is not a liability, exactly, but it is not the standard first-strike weapon for a prospect in today’s men’s game. Let’s take a closer look.

Lean right

Aside from keeping an eye on the radar gun while watching Machac’s progress in Miami, I don’t have a lot of data to put his serve speed in context. The only available point-by-point serve speed data these days comes from Wimbledon and the US Open, where the Czech has played just two career main-draw matches.

At Wimbledon last year, Machac’s first serves clocked an average of 115 mph (184 kph), faster than about one-third of the field. The Wimbledon gun might have been a little hot, as most players scored better there than in New York, and by a wider margin than you’d expect from more serve-centered tactics. When the Czech played a match at the US Open in 2022, his average first serve speed was 107 mph (171 kph). Four-fifths of the field hit harder; most of the names in his part of the list are clay-courters. Presumably he has gotten stronger since then, so while 115 mph may be an overestimate, 107 mph is probably low.

These numbers confirm that the serve won’t hold him back too much. Some other men in the same neighborhood are Casper Ruud, Tommy Paul, and David Goffin. Neither Carlos Alcaraz nor Novak Djokovic averaged much faster than Machac on the Wimbledon gun last year, and they did just fine. The Czech has only a bit of ground to make up with the rest of his game, and Ruud offers one example that it can be done.

What makes Machac’s serve look so pedestrian is the frequency with which he spins wide serves in the deuce court. Against Murray yesterday, he hit 54% of his deuce-court firsts to the wide corner. Fewer than 40% went down the T, and most of the remainder were also to the forehand side. He was even more extreme in the ad court, spinning 61% of those first serves down the T to the opponent’s forehand.

60/40 sounds rather undramatic, like most tennis stats. But few men favor one direction so strongly, at least until they reach critical situations like break point, when they lean more heavily on their favorite angle. Machac tries to balance it out by aiming for the backhand with his second serves, though by a slightly narrower margin. That does the job: The gap between his first- and second-serve results is about the same as tour average.

In the deuce court, at least, the tactic is working. Against Murray yesterday, Machac won 18 of 22 (82%) when his first serve went wide, though he was nearly as successful down the T. Against Rublev, he won 13 of his 14 wide deuce-court first serves. Understandably, he didn’t hit many deuce-court serves anywhere else. When Murray broke back yesterday to keep the third set alive, it wasn’t the serve itself that let Machac down. Twice at deuce, the Czech missed first serves when he tried to go down the T. His wide second serves drew weak replies on both occasions, but he lost both points with unforced errors.

The dis-ad-vantage

Wide serves in the deuce court are a gamble. You let your opponent take a swing at a forehand–probably his preferred wing–but you pull him out of position. Clearly it can work. Few men rely more heavily on their forehand than Rublev does, yet Machac attacked that side at every opportunity.

Murray was cannier and kept things much closer than Rublev did. But even he was fighting a losing battle. Machac won 80% of total first-serve points in the deuce court yesterday, compared to 69% in the ad court. So far, the Czech’s opponents have been more like Murray than Rublev, but still, the serve-to-the-forehand gamble pays off.

While he likes to aim for the same wing in the ad court as well, Machac doesn’t get the same court-position advantage. Across ten matches logged so far by the Match Charting Project, he has won 78% first-serve points in the deuce court against 71% in the ad court.

The difference lies largely in what Machac can do with his plus-one shot. In the deuce court, he wins about half of first-serve points with his serve or plus-one. In the ad court, that number falls below 40%. 50% is excellent: Djokovic hardly does better than that, and even an imposing server like Ugo Humbert does worse. But 40% is dire. Only clay-courters win so few short first-serve points overall. There’s less room to put away the second shot when you’ve left the returner standing in the middle of the court.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with a split between deuce-court and ad-court results. If asked, most players would probably prefer to win more points in the ad court, since most break points start in that direction. But the effect of winning more break points is mostly cancelled out by earning fewer break chances in the first place. Anyway, Machac doesn’t have any particular problem saving break points. He survived 13 of 15 against Murray. At tour level since this time last year, he has saved 64.5% of break points faced while winning 65.5% of serve points overall. That’s a closer margin that most players can boast.

The deeper we dig, the more we find weaknesses and unusual preferences in Machac’s game. Paired with each one, it seems, is a way in which it could work to his advantage. So far, he has succeeded despite the oddities. His results against Rublev and Tiafoe suggest that stronger competition might not break the spell, though the demands of yesterday’s gutbuster with Murray makes me wonder if brainier competition will raise the bar.

As the men’s game gets ever more powerful, there is less room at the top for playing styles that break the mold. Machac has already hinted that he can counterbalance brute force with the right set of angles, especially if they create opportunities for him to deploy his top-tier backhand. Countryman Radek Stepanek cracked the top ten with his own brand of unorthodox unpredictability. Machac has a different set of quirks, but based on his rapid progress this year, he may be able to do the same.

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More About Drop Shots: Alexander Bublik Edition

*Alexander Bublik in 2022. Credit: Getty*

If Carlos Alcaraz is the prince of the drop shot, Alexander Bublik is the court jester. We learned this week that Bublik hits droppers more than any other tour regular, about once every 14 points. That’s three times as often as tour average. No one else goes to the well more than once per 19 points.

Persistence aside, Sasha’s results are mixed: He wins about 45% of those points. That’s unimpressive compared to the ATP norm of 54%, and it’s particularly weak next to Alcaraz’s mark of 62%. Assuming that drop shots are, on average, hit from a neutral rally position, one in which each player has a 50% chance of winning the point, Bublik costs himself 3.3 points per thousand with his drop shot. In the last decade, only Benoit Paire has been worse.

On the other hand, the number rests on a big assumption. Alcaraz excels from the baseline; Bublik relies more on his serve. For any given situation–say, 5th stroke of a second-serve point, ball coming to the backhand side–Carlitos probably has a better chance of winning it, drop shot or not. Indeed, based on Match Charting Project data, Alcaraz wins 52% of points from that position. Bublik manages only 46%.

That’s typical. Here are the six situations in which Bublik hits the most drop shots, broken down by whether he is the server or returner, whether it’s a first- or second-serve point, the stage of the rally, and whether he’s faced with a forehand- or backhand-side shot. The table shows the probability that he wins the point if he doesn’t hit a drop shot:

Sv/Ret  Serve  Shot  Side  Exp W%  
Sv      1st    3rd   FH     57.4%  
Ret     2nd    4th   BH     42.8%  
Sv      2nd    3rd   FH     48.2%  
Sv      1st    3rd   BH     51.6%  
Ret     2nd    4th   FH     42.5%  
Sv      2nd    3rd   BH     46.1%  
Ret     1st    6th+  FH     42.2%

Only two of these scenarios favor Sasha: Plus-one forehands and plus-one backhands behind a first serve. Just about anything else and he’s the underdog.

Here are the same six situations, with expected point winning percentages for Alcaraz:

Sv/Ret  Serve  Shot  Side  Exp W%  
Sv      1st    3rd   FH     60.7%  
Ret     2nd    4th   BH     51.5%  
Sv      2nd    3rd   FH     57.3%  
Sv      1st    3rd   BH     54.1%  
Ret     2nd    4th   FH     53.6%  
Sv      2nd    3rd   BH     50.7%  
Ret     1st    6th+  FH     55.1%

When Carlitos opts for a drop shot, he’s trading in what’s already a positive expectation for one that he hopes is even rosier.

Repeat this exercise for every situation in which Bublik has hit a drop shot, take a weighted average, and we find that had he not hit drop shots, he would have won 46.5% of those points. With that in mind, his 45.4% drop-shot winning percentage doesn’t look so bad.

The recalculation doesn’t tell us that Bublik’s drop shot is good, but it does make the tactic look more viable. We’re assuming that in the aggregate, all shot opportunities with the same profile (i.e. second-serve point, ball to the backhand for the fifth shot of the rally) are about the same. That’s just an approximation, so a gap of one percentage point could occur because Sasha chooses lower-percentage moments to hit the drop. There’s even a sliver of evidence that he does so: Eight of his charted drop shots are backhands on the seventh shot of the rally or later of his own first-serve points. Those sound like desperate efforts to finish a point he’s given up on, and sure enough, he lost all eight. Take those out of the equation, and his win percentage on drop shots is exactly the same as when he hits something else.

Drops in expectation

Go through the same exercise for every player, and the drop-shot leaderboard takes on a different look.

Some players, like Kei Nishikori and Nicolas Jarry, win a very high percentage of drop shot points and exceed expectations by a wide margin. Others, like Alcaraz, see less of a benefit from their drop shot, in part because their other options are so good. Still others, like Daniil Medvedev, win more than half of drop-shot points, but because of the rest of their game and the moments they choose to deploy the drop, they may be sacrificing some points when they do so.

Call the new stat Drop Shot Wins Over Expectation, or DSWOE: the ratio of drop-shot success rate to non-drop-shot winning percentage, taking into account the situations in which the player chooses the drop.

Among the 60 players with the most charted points since 2015, here’s the top of the list–the men who gain the most per drop shot–along with a few notable names in Bublik’s section of the list, plus the most extreme laggards:

Player                       Drop W%  Exp W%  DSWOE  
Nicolas Jarry                  65.3%   50.4%   1.30  
Lucas Pouille                  60.3%   48.1%   1.25  
Kei Nishikori                  68.1%   54.5%   1.25  
Sebastian Baez                 63.2%   50.9%   1.24  
Richard Gasquet                60.7%   50.0%   1.22  
Kevin Anderson                 53.8%   44.6%   1.21  
Reilly Opelka                  52.1%   43.5%   1.20  
Marton Fucsovics               58.2%   49.5%   1.18  
Alejandro Davidovich Fokina    59.3%   50.7%   1.17  
Roger Federer                  59.5%   51.4%   1.16  
Robin Haase                    54.7%   47.8%   1.14  
Frances Tiafoe                 54.6%   48.0%   1.14  
Pablo Carreno Busta            58.9%   52.2%   1.13  
Dominic Thiem                  57.1%   50.7%   1.13  
Carlos Alcaraz                 62.1%   55.7%   1.12  
Rafael Nadal                   61.5%   55.4%   1.11  
Andy Murray                    55.7%   50.5%   1.10  
…                                                    
Holger Rune                    51.4%   51.3%   1.00  
Grigor Dimitrov                47.7%   47.9%   0.99  
Alexander Bublik               45.4%   46.5%   0.98  
Daniil Medvedev                53.0%   54.8%   0.97  
Novak Djokovic                 50.8%   52.9%   0.96  
…                                                    
Stan Wawrinka                  45.3%   48.9%   0.93  
Milos Raonic                   38.0%   41.3%   0.92  
Benoit Paire                   42.9%   46.8%   0.92  
Tommy Paul                     47.0%   51.5%   0.91  
Aslan Karatsev                 39.0%   49.9%   0.70

Surrounded by names like Rune and Djokovic, Bublik doesn’t seem so bad. Alcaraz, on the other hand, doesn’t stand out as much. He and list-neighbor Rafael Nadal are outrageously good in rallies whether they hit a drop shot or not. Even a world-class drop shot is only so much better than a standard Rafa or Alcaraz topspin groundstroke.

Tour average is around 1.05, meaning that the typical player does a bit better when they hit a drop shot than they would have had they chosen a different shot in the same situation. That tells us something that we probably suspected: Players are generally good at choosing the right moment to unleash the drop.

With this more fine-grained notion of expectations, we can re-calculate the number of points per thousand that each player gains or loses from drop shots. It is a function of both success rate (relative to expectations) and frequency. Nishikori and Jarry get great results from the drop but employ it rarely; men like Alcaraz and Sebastian Baez gain more points overall because they hit droppers so much more often.

Here are the players who gain the most points, along with the five tour regulars at the bottom of the list:

Player                       Freq%  W% - Exp%  DPOE/1000  
Sebastian Baez                3.9%      12.3%        4.8  
Alejandro Davidovich Fokina   5.2%       8.5%        4.5  
Lucas Pouille                 2.9%      12.2%        3.5  
Carlos Alcaraz                5.4%       6.4%        3.4  
Richard Gasquet               2.8%      10.8%        3.0  
Robin Haase                   3.9%       6.9%        2.7  
Kei Nishikori                 2.0%      13.6%        2.7  
Frances Tiafoe                3.2%       6.6%        2.1  
Pablo Carreno Busta           2.8%       6.7%        1.9  
Nicolas Jarry                 1.2%      14.9%        1.8  
Fabio Fognini                 3.7%       4.7%        1.8  
Andy Murray                   3.3%       5.2%        1.7  
Dominic Thiem                 2.6%       6.4%        1.7  
Marton Fucsovics              1.9%       8.7%        1.7  
Roger Federer                 2.0%       8.1%        1.6  
…                                                         
Novak Djokovic                3.3%      -2.1%       -0.7  
Alexander Bublik              7.2%      -1.0%       -0.8  
Lorenzo Musetti               5.1%      -2.3%       -1.2  
Aslan Karatsev                1.2%     -10.9%       -1.3  
Benoit Paire                  5.4%      -3.9%       -2.1

Five (or 4.8) points per thousand might not sound like a lot, but it represents the difference between Baez having a place in the top 20 and residing well outside of it. Alcaraz still grades well here, if not as much as he did before making all of the adjustments. Bublik scores closer to neutral too. His drop shot is probably more useful for earning him highlight-reel screentime than it is for winning points, but it isn’t hurting him that much.

Side matters

Armed with these adjustments, we can compare each player’s forehand and backhand drop shots, as well. Bublik has a fairly wide split. He wins just over 50% of points when he hits a forehand drop shot, next to only 39% behind a backhand drop shot. His expectations when faced with a backhand are worse in general, but not that much worse. His forehand drop shot success rate is two percentage points better than if he went with a standard groundstroke, while his backhand drop shot is five points worse.

So Sasha, if you’re reading this: We all love your drop shots. But maybe take it easy with the backhands.

The best forehand drop shots, compared to how the player would have fared with a different shot, belong(ed) to Kevin Anderson, Sebastian Baez, Lucas Pouille, Marton Fucsovics, and Nishikori, with Roger Federer not far behind. The most effective backhand droppers are those of Jarry, Reilly Opelka, Pouille, John Isner, and Richard Gasquet. “Expectations” is the key word for Opelka and Isner: They didn’t win a lot of points once a rally was underway, so a moderately good drop scores very well by comparison.

Here is the field of 60 regulars from the last decade. As usual, top right is good, bottom left is… yikes, Aslan Karatsev.

There are innumerable way to divide these numbers even further, and I know you’re tempted. But with drop shots, there is only so much data. Some of the outliers here, like Jarry and Anderson, are probably a bit aided by luck. Men who don’t hit many drop shots might only have a few dozen attempts on their weaker side. The standouts probably are better than average, but limits of our data lead us to overstate their advantage.

At least with the forehand/backhand division, adjusted for how players would have fared with something other than a drop shot, we can get some hints as to how our faves can improve their games. Taylor Fritz has a strong backhand, and I doubt the points he’s losing with his backhand drop shot are making it any more effective. Alexander Zverev isn’t doing himself any favors with his occasional forehand droppers. Karatsev, well… not everyone can excel at everything.

Bublik, despite his negative numbers in the aggregate, has an effective forehand drop shot. With the power of his serve and forehand, he’ll continue to earn plenty of opportunities to use it. If he resists the urge to showboat on his backhand side, the court jester of the drop shot could continue to show off his touch and still earn a more coveted position in the tactic’s royal house.

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Effects and After-Effects of the Carlos Alcaraz Drop Shot

Also today: Wild cards and doping bans; Miami preview podcast

*Carlos Alcaraz in the 2022 US Open final*

It is not easy to analyze the drop shot. Players don’t hit it very often, they sometimes hit it from very favorable or very unfavorable circumstances, and the goal of the shot sometimes extends beyond winning the point at hand. We can point to someone who hits droppers well and seems to win a lot of points doing so, but how much is the skill really worth?

Carlos Alcaraz is the poster boy for the modern drop shot. He loves to hit it–possibly too much–and when he executes, it’s one of the most stunning shots in tennis. At the business end of his Indian Wells campaign last week, he went to the well seven times against Alexander Zverev, ten times against Jannik Sinner, and three more in the final against Daniil Medvedev. He won 11 of those 20 points. That doesn’t sound so impressive, but Alcaraz could hardly complain about the end result.

To get a grip on drop shot numbers, we have a lot of work to do. What is a good winning percentage? Do any players suffer because they hit the drop shot too much? Is there a lingering effect from disrupting your opponent’s balance? Finally, once we have a better idea of all that, how does Alcaraz stack up?

Drop shot basics

To keep the data as clean as possible, let’s be specific about which strokes we’re looking at. While one can hit a drop shot in response to another drop shot (a “re-drop”), and it’s possible to hit a drop shot from the net in reply to a short volley or half-volley, those aren’t typically what we’re referring to. There are probably players (starting with Alcaraz!) who are better at that sort of thing than their peers, but those low-percentage recoveries aren’t today’s focus.

In this post, when I say “drop shot,” I mean a drop shot from the baseline, excluding all shots from the net, including responses to earlier drops.

The Match Charting Project gives us over 4,600 men’s matches to work with since 2015. Those 750,000 points include almost 35,000 drop shots. That works out to a drop shot in about 4.6% of points. Or from the perspective of a single player, it’s 2.3%, 1 out of every 44 points. The player who hits the drop shot ends the point immediately (via winner or forced error) about one-third of the time, and 19% of the droppers miss for unforced errors. Overall, the player who hits the drop shot wins the point 53.8% of the time.

From the 60 players with the most charted points to analyze, here are the 15 who win the highest percentage of points behind their drop shots:

Player                       Drop Point W%  
Kei Nishikori                        69.6%  
Richard Gasquet                      66.2%  
Nicolas Jarry                        65.3%  
Sebastian Baez                       63.2%  
Carlos Alcaraz                       62.1%  
Rafael Nadal                         61.3%  
Lucas Pouille                        60.3%  
Roger Federer                        59.7%  
Alejandro Davidovich Fokina          59.3%  
Roberto Bautista Agut                58.9%  
Marton Fucsovics                     58.2%  
Pablo Carreno Busta                  58.1%  
Jannik Sinner                        57.7%  
Dominic Thiem                        57.5%  
Andy Murray                          56.7%

Alcaraz does well here! Despite the presence of Kei Nishikori at the top, the list is heavily skewed toward clay-courters. Drop shots are a more central tactic on clay than on other surfaces, which works in both directions: Clay-courters are more likely to develop good drop shots, and players who have dangerous droppers are more likely to succeed on dirt.

Another skill that contributes to a spot on the list is good judgment. Nicolas Jarry doesn’t hit many drop shots, so he is probably picking the ripest opportunities when he does. There’s almost zero correlation between frequency of drop shots and drop shot success rate. Call it the Bublik Rule. From the same group of 60 tour regulars, here are the top 15 ranked by frequency:

Player                       Drop/Pt  Drop Point W%  
Alexander Bublik                7.2%          45.4%  
Benoit Paire                    5.4%          41.7%  
Carlos Alcaraz                  5.4%          62.1%  
Alejandro Davidovich Fokina     5.2%          59.3%  
Lorenzo Musetti                 5.1%          50.7%  
Holger Rune                     4.8%          50.9%  
Sebastian Baez                  3.9%          63.2%  
Robin Haase                     3.9%          55.1%  
Fabio Fognini                   3.7%          54.7%  
Matteo Berrettini               3.5%          52.0%  
Nick Kyrgios                    3.3%          54.9%  
Andy Murray                     3.3%          56.7%  
Novak Djokovic                  3.3%          50.4%  
Botic van de Zandschulp         3.2%          51.4%  
Frances Tiafoe                  3.2%          54.1%

Bublik may be turning things around: In the Montpellier final last month, he attempted 18 droppers and won the point 14 times. For a consistent high-frequency, high-success combination, though, we’re back to Alcaraz. Only Carlos, Alejandro Davidovich Fokina, Sebastian Baez, and Andy Murray (barely) appear on both lists.

Here are all 60 players in graph form. The top right corner shows players who hit a lot of drop shots and win most of those points. The closer to the bottom, the lower a player’s success rate; the closer to the left, the fewer droppers he attempts:

As a percentage of all points played, Bublik wins the most behind his drop shot. But it comes at a cost, since he hits so many of them, often sacrificing points because of it. If we assume that each drop shot is struck from a precisely neutral rally position, meaning that the would-be dropshotter has a 50% chance of winning the point, Bublik is losing points by going to the drop shot so often.

That’s a big assumption, and it probably isn’t exactly true for Bublik, or for anyone else. But if we stick with that for a moment, we can combine frequency and success rate into one number. Take the difference between success rate and 50% (that is, the gain or loss by opting for a drop shot), multiply that by frequency, and you get the percent of total points that the player wins by choosing the drop. The resulting numbers are small, so here’s the top ten (and bottom five) list showing points gained or lost per thousand:

Player                       Drop Pts/1000  
Carlos Alcaraz                         6.5  
Sebastian Baez                         5.2  
Alejandro Davidovich Fokina            4.9  
Richard Gasquet                        4.5  
Kei Nishikori                          3.8  
Lucas Pouille                          3.0  
Pablo Carreno Busta                    2.3  
Andy Murray                            2.2  
Roberto Bautista Agut                  2.2  
Rafael Nadal                           2.0  
…                                           
Jo Wilfried Tsonga                    -0.8  
Feliciano Lopez                       -1.3  
Aslan Karatsev                        -1.3  
Alexander Bublik                      -3.3  
Benoit Paire                          -4.5

Reduced to one number, Alcaraz is our dropshot champion. Six points per thousand doesn’t sound like a lot, but to invoke the familiar refrain, the margins in tennis are small. Beyond the top five or ten players in the world, one single point per thousand is worth one place on the official ranking list. Stars of Alcaraz’s caliber are separated by wider gaps, but it’s still a useful way to gain some intuition about the impact of these apparently miniscule differences.

The after-effect

In the hands of someone like Carlitos, the drop shot is a reliable way to win points. But the impact can go further than that. All sorts of tactics–drop shots, underarm serves, serve-and-volley–can theoretically be justified by some longer-term effect. If your opponent is camped out six feet behind the baseline and you want him somewhere else, a drop shot will surely give him something to think about.

This is hard to quantify, to put it mildly. How long does the effect of a drop shot last? Does it decay after each successive point? Does it disappear at the end of a game? On the next changeover? Ever? Jarry might need to hit the occasional drop shot to remind his opponent that he can do it, but Alcaraz doesn’t even need to do that. Everybody knows he’ll dropshot them, so he’s probably in his opponent’s head even before he hits the first drop shot of a match.

The evidence is unclear. About two-thirds of drop shots are hit by the server. I looked at the results of points immediately after a point with a drop shot, points two points later, and all the points that followed within the same game. When the server hits the drop shot, his win percentage on those subsequent points is worse than his win percentage on other points throughout the match–that is, non-dropshot points that didn’t follow so closely after he played a dropper:

Situation          Win%  
Next point        63.3%  
Two points later  62.6%  
Same game         62.5%  
All others        64.2%

I suspect that the dropshot effect (if there is one) is swamped by all the other influences at work here. Droppers typically occur in longer rallies, which might tire the server. The server might go for a drop shot when he runs out of ideas, another thing that might go through his mind as he prepares for the next point. This seems to work against Alcaraz more than other servers:

Situation          Win%  
Next point        62.0%  
Two points later  62.1%  
Same game         63.2%  
All others        65.0%

The same pro-returner bias appears when we look at the results when it is the returner who goes for the drop shot. After seeing the numbers above, it’s tough to say that hitting a drop shot causes the higher success rate on subsequent points, but it is nonetheless a striking effect, especially for Carlitos:

Situation      Alcaraz W%     Tour W%  
Next point          44.0%       38.3%  
Two points later    41.8%       37.6%  
Same game           41.5%       37.9%  
All others          40.1%       35.8%

Whatever the mechanism here, it goes beyond “drop shot good, opponent confused.” More research is needed, and camera-tracking data would help.

Regardless of the after-effects (or lack thereof), the stats support the common contention that Alcaraz possesses a world-class drop shot. He might use it too often in some matches, and certainly there are individual situations in which he should have done something else. In the aggregate, though, the tactic is working for him. It produces more value than any other player’s dropper has done in the last decade. Tennis analytics is hard, but goggling at the game of Carlos Alcaraz is easy.

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Wild cards and doping suspensions

Simona Halep returned to action this week, thanks to a Miami wild card granted immediately after her doping suspension was reduced. Halep is well-liked, and there were few objections to her appearance in the draw. But Caroline Wozniacki, while careful to say she wasn’t specifically targeting Halep, said that she was against dopers getting post-suspension wild cards.

We’ve done this before. In 2017, Maria Sharapova returned from 15-month ban and immediately got a wild card to enter Stuttgart. The tennis world spent a few weeks in a dither about whether she’d get one to the French Open, too. She didn’t.

I wrote about the Sharapova situation at the time. I argued that Sharapova ought to get those opportunities. The reason I gave at the time was that it was better for the sport: She was one of the best players in the game, and fields would be more competitive with her than without her. Another reason is that without wild cards, it’s a long road back. Unranked after more than a year on the sidelines, a player needs to enter qualifying at ITFs, wait two weeks for those points to go on the official rankings (assuming they win!), and then use those rankings to enter (slightly) stronger events, with entry deadlines several weeks in advance of the tournaments themselves.

Climbing back up the ladder can take months. Is that part of the penalty? Is a 15-month suspension supposed to be 15 months of no competition, followed by 3-6 months of artificially weak, poorly remunerated competition? In team sports, this isn’t an issue, because coaches can put returning players in the lineup as soon as they’re ready.

As usual, the problem is that tennis doesn’t have unified governance. None of the various bodies in charge have an applicable policy. Sharapova was fine, and Halep will be fine, because stars get wild cards (if not as many as they would like), while lower-ranked players are stuck heading to Antalya to rack up ITF points. The discrepancy is particularly glaring in a case like that of Tara Moore, who missed 19 months but has been fully exonerated.

The WTA is apparently considering granting special rankings to players who have been cleared of doping charges or had their bans reduced, essentially treating them as if they are returning from injury. That’s better than nothing, but it wouldn’t address the more common scenario illustrated by Sharapova’s return.

I would go further and grant special rankings to any player returning from suspension. The term of the suspension is the penalty, period. Even better, and fairer to the field as a whole: Grant those special rankings in combination with a policy that restricts wild cards. For instance, Halep could have eight or ten entries into tournaments on the basis of her pre-suspension ranking, but no wild cards for her first year back. That way, individual tournament directors don’t need to re-litigate each doping ban, players have a predictable path to follow post-suspension, and superstars aren’t given any special advantages.

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Miami preview podcast

I had a fun conversation yesterday with Alex Gruskin, talking about my recent Iga Swiatek piece and previewing the men’s and women’s draws in Miami. Click here to listen.

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Alex de Minaur’s Adequate Inaccuracy

*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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Welcome to the Show, Luciano Darderi

*Luciano Darderi in 2023. Credit: jmmuguerza*

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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Felix Auger-Aliassime’s Achilles Heel

Also today: February 8-10, 1974

*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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How Diana Shnaider Beat Zhu Lin in Hua Hin

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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The Manufactured Attack of Caroline Garcia

*Caroline Garcia in 2019. Credit: Peter Menzel*

Last night, Caroline Garcia scored what many fans saw as an upset, straight-setting two-time Australian Open champion Naomi Osaka. While Garcia was seeded 16th and Osaka is just beginning a comeback, no one ever knows quite what to expect when the Frenchwoman takes the court. The former champ, for her part, has always been at her best on big stages.

The result was almost pedestrian. Garcia turned in a performance that exemplified the tennis of her late 20s: Serving big, returning pugnaciously, taking risks, and–on the rare occasions that Osaka left her an opening–net rushing. Osaka served well, but the 16th seed out-aced her, 13 to 11. More than three-quarters of points were decided in three shots or less, and Garcia stole a few more of those from her opponent than Osaka did from her. In a contest defined by small margins–one break of serve and a tiebreak–that was all it took.

The strange thing is, Caro didn’t use to play like this. She plays shorter points than any other tour regular, an average of 2.9 shots per point in charted matches from the last 52 weeks. It isn’t just about her powerful first serve: Her return points end even sooner than her serve points do. Back in 2018, when she first reached her career-best ranking of 4th on the WTA computer, she was averaging over four shots per point, a rally length that would put her in the range of Jessica Pegula and Maria Sakkari: in other words, a very different sort of player.

Here is the evolution of Garcia’s rally length, shown as a rolling 10-match average, for the 84 matches in the charting dataset:

Last night’s rally length was a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it 2.5 shots, the second-lowest figure I have on record for Garcia. Only a match against Donna Vekic last year comes in slightly lower, though last week’s match in Adelaide against Jelena Ostapenko may have been even more extreme. Osaka’s big game helped keep the number down, but it takes two to so comprehensively avoid the long-rally tango.

Garcia’s first serve has always been a weapon. But her tactical approach behind it has fluctuated wildly. The career trend of her Aggression Score in rallies illustrates how she has careened from one extreme to another. Aggression Score is scaled so that the most passive players rate around -100 and the most aggressive around 100, though Ostapenko and others have pushed the maximum figures further into triple digits. Here is how Garcia’s score has changed over time, again as rolling ten-match averages:

I don’t think there any other player in tennis–man or woman, past or present–who has followed a path like this. As she established herself as an elite on tour, even as she rose into the top five, she became more and more conservative. For reference, players who posted scores around zero in 2023 were Sakkari and Martina Trevisan, hardly styles that will remind you of Garcia’s. Eventually she reversed course, not only regaining her former style but surpassing it, ranking among Liudmila Samsonova and Aryna Sabalenka as one of the most aggressive players on tour, a rung below the class-of-her-own Ostapenko.

Is it working?

The oddest thing about the multiple phases of Garcia’s career is that she has reached the No. 4 ranking with two different styles. In each of her first three charted matches after achieving the peak ranking in 2018, she posted negative rally aggression scores. In two matches against Sabalenka, she averaged 3.9 and 3.7 shots per point; against Karolina Pliskova in the Tianjin final, the typical point lasted 4.3 strokes. When she returned to the No. 4 ranking at the end of 2022, after years in the wilderness, she was frequently posting triple-digit aggression scores and average rally lengths below 3.

The main effect of Garcia’s current style is that it makes the most of her serve. From 2015 to 2017, she won just over 66% of her first-serve points, a mark that is good but sub-elite. She fell all the way to 62% in 2021 before the big shift; since then, she has won more than 70% of her first-serve points. She ranked fourth in that stat heading into the Australian Open, and she converted nearly 90% of her first serves against Osaka. Her success behind the second serve hasn’t shown the same improvement, but the overall picture is a good one: She won more total serve points in 2023 than ever before.

The return game is a different story. This is where even a casual viewer can’t miss Caro’s new tactics: She’s not afraid to stand well inside the baseline to return serve, and yesterday she net-rushed one Osaka serve, SABR-style. Measured by court position, if not by winners and error stats, Garcia is even more aggressive than Ostapenko.

At her best, the Frenchwoman posted acceptable return numbers, if not great ones. Her best single-season mark, winning 42.7% of her return points in 2017, put her in the bottom third of top-50 players. As she has upped the intensity of her attack, this key number has headed south:

In the last 52 weeks, she has won just 38.3% of return points, worst among the top 50 by two full percentage points. Among the top 20, no one else is below 42%. She can get away with it because her own serve is so rarely broken, but such ineffectual return results will make it difficult to mount another assault on the top five. Breaking serve so rarely dooms her to a career of three-setters and narrow decisions. Those sorts of results can sometimes be encouraging–as in her pair of recent three-set losses to Iga Swiatek–but have a knack for halting winning streaks, too.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Players don’t sign contracts agreeing to deploy the same tactics on both sides of the ball. Garcia won return games far more often in her less aggressive days, breaking 33% of the time in 2017 compared to a dreadful 23% last year.

Some of Caro’s 2017 skills are still in evidence. She is solid enough in long rallies that she doesn’t need to so actively avoid them: In the last year, she has won a respectable 48% of points that lasted seven or more strokes, and if you remove the two Swiatek matches, she breaks even. While the Osaka match was primarily determined by short points, Garcia won 17 of 29 (59%) that went to a fourth shot.

Without any major changes, Garcia will remain the sort of player who aggravates fans and opponents alike, a dangerous lurker capable of delivering upsets, inexplicable marathons, and lame early exits in equal measure. Like any hyper-aggressive player, Caro’s results can be seemingly random, with all the frustration that entails. Unlike Ostapenko, Sabalenka, and the many ball-bashers on tour, though, Garcia has chosen to play this way, rebuilding her game into something that the 2018 version of herself would hardly recognize. If she can somehow join her late-career serve to her earlier return-game tactics, the randomness will disappear, and Caro may make yet another appearance in the top five.

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The Underhand Serve: When and Why?

An underhand serve functions in two ways–one short term, one long term. The short-term goal is to win a single point. Your opponent is standing way back, and the service equivalent of a drop shot could go for a 50 mile-per-hour ace. The long-term goal is to give your opponent something to worry about, perhaps distracting him or changing his return position for games, or sets to come. It’s not about winning a single point, but about slightly improving your odds in many future points.

In his second-round match yesterday against Ugo Humbert at the Australian Open, Nick Kyrgios opted for both. He unleashed the underhander twice, once at 40-love in his second service game, and again at 5-5, 40-30 in the fourth set.

The first dropper was on as meaningless a point as he could ask for. Kyrgios’s probability of winning a service game from 40-love is about 99.6% (really!), so the risk of losing the game after throwing away a point is essentially nil. He won the point with a backhand winner on his next shot, but the object of the exercise–assuming there was a tactical one, and I’ll give Nick the benefit of the doubt here–was more long-term oriented.

He delivered the second underarm serve on a much higher-pressure point. Kyrgios is still heavily favored to hold serve from 40-30, but he could be forgiven for feeling some nerves and wishing for a free point. This time he netted the underhand attempt and ended up winning the point after a (conventional) second serve.

A drop of data

When the underhand serve first started to go mainstream a couple of years ago, I updated the Match Charting Project spreadsheet to allow us to track these attempts. Counting the Kyrgios-Humbert match, we’ve now gathered the results of 35 drop-serve attempts across 20 different men’s matches. (We’ve recorded many women’s underhand serves as well, but most of those belong to Sara Errani, who has a different set of goals when she goes that route.)

35 points is awfully far from big data, but it is enough to get a taste of how a handful of players are deploying this unorthodox weapon.

The most common point score for an underarm serve is 40-love. Of the 35 attempts, 40-love accounts for 12 of them. Another 4 occured at 40-15, plus two more at 30-love, so roughly half of the recorded drop serves came with a service game more or less secured. A few of the remaining points were also relatively unimportant ones, like Daniil Medvedev’s underhander at love-40 toward the end of a 2019 US Open match against Hugo Dellien, and Alexander Bublik’s back-to-back tries at 0-5 and 1-5 in a tiebreak against John Isner.

Bublik is the major source of unimportant-point underarm serving. He’s responsible for 19 of the recorded points, 16 of which were at 40-love, 40-15, 30-love, or those two tiebreak points I just mentioned.

Inferring tactics

Since so many underarm serves are deployed at low-pressure moments, it’s tempting to conclude that players are thinking long term.

On the other hand, our handful of recorded underhand deliveries–even the ones on 40-love points–don’t skew toward the beginning of matches. We have two charted matches in which Robin Haase tried an underhander: a 2019 Budapest tilt against Borna Coric in which he made his first attempt in the third game, and a 2020 Davis Cup rubber when he waited until the 32nd game of the match.

Poster boy Bublik is inconsistent on this as well. Twice he has brought out the underhander in his second service game–once in the Newport match versus Isner, and another time the same summer in Washington against Bradley Klahn. Yet at the US Open against Thomas Fabbiano the same year, he didn’t unleash the secret weapon until 40-love in the 32nd game of the match.

I’ll admit, it might be foolish to try to detect the grand plan underlying the behavior of Alexander Bublik.

But it works!

Yeah, our 35 points make up tiny sample, but… the server won 27 of these 35 points! That’s 77%, and it includes underarm first-serve attempts that missed. When players had to hit a conventional second serve, they still won 7 of 10 points–a rate of second serve points won that any player would happily accept.

These numbers–cautiously as we must treat them–suggest that the underarm serve trend has plenty of room to run. The rare players who dare to risk ridicule are still only using the drop serve less than twice per match, and of course the vast majority of men on tour are never hitting them at all. The more common the underhand delivery becomes, the less effective it will be, but there’s a lot of space between the current drop-serve win percentage of 77% and the typical player’s success rate on serve. Tour average is around 65%, and only the most dominant servers exceed 70%.

As Bublik and friends have discovered, there’s little risk in mixing things up. Strong servers like him and Kyrgios have plenty of low-leverage opportunities to remind their opponents that surprises could be in store later in the match, when the stakes are raised. Our very early indicators suggest that where Kyrgios has gone, the rest of the tour could profitably follow.

Everybody’s a Tricky Lefty

Tennis players like routine, so maybe that’s what makes left-handed opponents “tricky.” The phrase “tricky lefty” is so common as to be a cliché, leading me to ask on Twitter last night whether there’s such a thing as a lefty who aren’t described as tricky.

A few of you responded, suggesting names such as Petra Kvitova and Rafael Nadal. It’s true, great left-handed players win matches because they’re great, not because they’re unusual. Plenty of adjectives come to mind for Petra and Rafa before “tricky.” Tour coach Marc Lucero suggested a broader framework:

Left handed power players aren’t tricky. Kvitova, Nadal, Klahn, Verdasco, Lopez. Smaller or Spinny or counter puncher type players : always tricky
— marc lucero (@marclucero) February 5, 2021

I suspect Marc is right, and he would know better than I would. It doesn’t make sense that all lefties are tricky, even if players don’t face them very often.

Let’s be pedantic and go back to my original question, though: Are there any lefties who aren’t described as tricky? Mihaela Buzarnescu is certainly no Kvitova, but she is more aggressive than the average WTAer, at least according to Match Charting Project stats. To answer this question, I did some hardcore 21st-century research and googled it.

More specifically, I googled the following:

“tricky lefty” tennis

That’s not a perfect filter, because it excludes things like “tricky left-hander,” “a lefty whose tricky game…” and so on. But it gives us a good overview. Skipping over results with instructional content (“how to handle a tricky lefty serve!”) and pages discussing amateur players, here are the first 27 players Google told me are tricky lefties:

Cameron Norrie
Alex Bolt
Ugo Humbert (“more than a tricky lefty”)
Ekaterina Makarova
Martin Klizan
Gilles Muller (“tricky lefty serve”)
Feliciano Lopez (“tricky lefty serve”)
Norrie (again)
Angelique Kerber
Corentin Moutet
Taylor Townsend
Kristyna Pliskova
Buzarnescu
Varvara Lepchenko
Nadal
Jerome Golmard
Moutet (again)
Leylah Annie Fernandez
Arantxa Rus
Kvitova (“tricky lefty serve”)
Makarova (again)
Lucie Safarova (“tricky lefty serve”)
Thomaz Bellucci
Klizan (again)
Dominik Koepfer
Kvitova (again)
Nadal (again)

Alas, the world’s content writers do not hold to Lucero’s logically consistent definition. While some of the examples that Google gave me come from blogs, which we might not expect to maintain high editorial standards (pot, kettle, etc), one of the mentions of Nadal’s trickiness came from a very respectable publication, written by a pundit whose name you would know. Many of the other players were described as tricky on the tour websites, or in direct quotes from players. (Caroline Wozniacki used the t-word for Buzarnescu.)

Are lefties tricky?

As I said at the outset, tennis players like routine. Unless you’ve reached the finals at Roland Garros, facing a lefty is out of the ordinary. It’s the same type of unusual as drawing an opponent with a monster serve (Ivo Karlovic is incessantly deemed “tricky”) or a finely-honed backhand slice. There’s a whole range of tired tennis tropes for the underspinners–they “slice and dice” (really? they chop up the tennis balls into small cubes?), and their trickiness is rivaled only by how “crafty” they are.

We can’t quantify this unless we reframe the question. If lefties are tricky–or, let’s say, they have more capacity to be tricky than right-handers do–it’s roughly equivalent to saying that left-handers have an advantage. And if southpaws have an edge, we’d expect to see more of them in high-level tennis than in the population as a whole.

Is there a disproportionate number of lefties? This was one of the first tennis analytics questions I tried to answer, almost exactly a decade ago, and my conclusion then was: not really.

In February 2011, 12 of the top 100 players in the ATP rankings were left-handed. That includes Nadal, who complicates things a bit, as he’s a natural righty. 10% of the population is left-handed, so 11 natural-born lefties out of 100 players is awfully close to what we’d expect if there was no advantage.

Don’t read too much into this, but things have changed a bit! At the moment, 15 of the top 100 ATPers are left-handed. (Still including Rafa, of course.) There’s only about a 4% chance that there would be so many lefties purely due to chance, or 7% if you class Rafa with the natural-born righties. It’s hardly a statistical slam dunk, and the case gets weaker when we broaden our view. There are 12 lefties among the next hundred male players, and only 18 lefties–fewer than we’d expect from chance alone–in the WTA top 200.

Paradoxically, the more lefty regulars on tour, the less uncomfortable they are to face. Put another way, the trickier they are, the less tricky they are.

There may well be an advantage to left-handedness, and its inherent trickery, in the junior or amateur ranks. (There is certainly an advantage when facing me!) But the evidence is flimsy that it extends to the highest level of the game. The real trick would be convincing everyone to start using a different adjective or–gasp!–treating non-superstar lefties as individuals with games that aren’t interchangeable, even if they do all use the same dominant hand.