Trivia Notebook #3: Indian Wells Upset Edition

Belinda Bencic in 2023. Credit: LHC88

Previous: Trivia Notebook #2

Thanks to all who have suggested trivia topics — you’ve sent me some good ones. Keep them coming. Today I’ve got tidbits on three winners from Indian Wells: Belinda Bencic, Tallon Griekspoor, and Camila Osorio.

Better Belinda Bencic

Great dig from Oleg:

Those numbers include Bencic’s upset of Coco Gauff, but not her loss yesterday to Madison Keys. So the current top-five tally is 19-16, still comfortably better than her record against the next five, or the next ten after that.

The top five typically does not allow things like this. Since 1984, when my week-by-week ranking data begins, the WTA top five has won 79% of matches. That’s a healthy margin ahead of 69% for players ranked 6-10 and 64% for 11-20.

So, is Bencic alone? We’re looking for players with plenty of meetings against each of the three groups. She has 35 or more against each; let’s set the bar lower, at 20. I found 151 such players. Of those, we want to find those who have a better winning percentage against the top five than against the next five, and a better winning percentage against 6-10 than versus 11-20.

No dice. Belinda is the only one. 18 women managed a better record against the top five than the next five:

Player                    W% v1-5  W% v6-10  
Serena Williams             76.5%     62.7%  
Belinda Bencic              54.5%     48.6%  
Karolina Pliskova           46.0%     39.5%  
Jelena Ostapenko            44.8%     37.0%  
Maria Sakkari               41.2%     39.4%  
Kristina Mladenovic         40.9%     33.3%  
Daria Kasatkina             40.5%     24.2%  
Donna Vekic                 37.5%     20.0%  
Flavia Pennetta             37.2%     28.6%  
Marion Bartoli              30.2%     29.7%  
Samantha Stosur             29.0%     26.4%  
Elise Mertens               25.0%     19.0%  
Iva Majoli                  23.9%     22.6%  
Katarina Srebotnik          23.8%     20.0%  
Barbora Strycova            17.9%      9.7%  
Marianne Werdel Witmeyer    17.4%     13.0%  
Karina Habsudova            17.2%     11.1%  
Raffaella Reggi Concato     17.2%      5.9%

(All of these numbers, including Bencic’s, exclude Indian Wells.)

Comparing records against “next five” and “ten after that” is a bit odd in isolation, so instead, let’s compare top-ten and next-ten records. That’s an even more limited group:

Player               W% v1-10  W% v11-21  
Belinda Bencic          51.4%      35.0%  
Kiki Bertens            47.9%      38.2%  
Anett Kontaveit         40.4%      40.0%  
Kristina Mladenovic     37.0%      34.0%  
Donna Vekic             27.8%      26.8%  
Tsvetana Pironkova      25.0%      17.2%  
Katarina Srebotnik      21.7%      20.8%

Lots of these margins are close; Belinda’s is not. Maybe this explains the recent downward ranking moves of Elena Rybakina and Jasmine Paolini. They fear their colleague from Switzerland, so they’ve fled the top five so as to give her less motivation.

Tallon Griekspoor is no Bencic

Heading to the desert, Tallon Griekspoor held a 0-18 career record against the top five:

Some good fights in there, but a zero is a zero. That changed last Friday, when the Dutchman outlasted Alexander Zverev in a third-set tiebreak. Zverev has given several men a top-five victory in the last few weeks, but it still counts.

We have a few questions, then:

  1. Is Griekspoor’s top-five losing streak the longest ever to start a career?
  2. Is it the longest to be broken?
  3. How does it compare to top-five losing streaks, including those that don’t start a career?

Losing your first 18 matches against top-fivers gets you into the conversation, but Griekspoor stopped five defeats short of the record. These numbers all go back to 1982, the first year for which I have week-by-week ATP rankings. Here’s the all-time list:

Player             Losses  Broken?  
Fabio Fognini          23      Yes  
Jeff Tarango           23       No  
Jarkko Nieminen        23      Yes  
Simone Bolelli         22      Yes  
Diego Schwartzman      22      Yes  
Francisco Clavet       21      Yes  
Potito Starace         20       No  
Tomas Carbonell        20      Yes  
Victor Hanescu         19       No  
Tallon Griekspoor      18      Yes  
Leonardo Mayer         18       No  
Ryan Harrison          18       No  
Alex De Minaur         18      Yes

It’s easy to dunk on Fabio Fognini, but in fairness, he came up at a very difficult time to score a top-five win. Check out the list of opponents for those 23 losses:

And yes, after all that, Fognini ended the string by beating Nadal. On clay. Twice.

I also need to mention Tomas Carbonell. He ended his 20-match losing streak with an upset of 5th-ranked Jonas Bjorkman … and that was it! He finished his career on at least one winning streak.

What about top-five losing streaks, not limited to those at the beginning of a career? Here are the longest runs of top-five futility, again going back to 1982:

Player                 Streak     
Andreas Seppi              32     
Viktor Troicki             28     
Philipp Kohlschreiber      27     
Jeff Tarango               23  *  
Fabio Fognini              23  *  
Jarkko Nieminen            23  *  
Jimmy Connors              23     
Eliot Teltscher            22     
Simone Bolelli             22  *  
Diego Schwartzman          22  *  
Andres Gomez               22     
Marin Cilic                22     
Gilles Muller              22     
Francisco Clavet           21  *

(Starred players are those from the previous list.)

Before we get to Seppi, Teltscher deserves an honorable mention here. His 22-loss streak started in early 1982, right after he upset John McEnroe at the season-ending Masters event. Had he lost that match, the string would have extended to 34, since the McEnroe upset broke a separate 11-loss streak.

Seppi’s long run of frustration would have been hard to predict: He had beaten Lleyton Hewitt and Nadal before he broke into the top 40 himself. But the 2008 victory over Rafa would be his last top-five win for nearly seven years:

As with Fognini, not an easy time to knock out anybody in the top five.

Finally, did you notice Jimmy Connors on the list? He is by far the greatest player to suffer such a long losing streak, and it was all the more notable because it began when he was a top-two player himself. He was responsible for 15 of Teltscher’s losses, but by 1985, things turned south for Jimbo:

Connors was 32 years old when the streak began, so it didn’t entirely come out of the blue. Still, that’s a tough run for a top-ten player.

Defeats of former number ones

Camila Osorio opened her Indian Wells campaign with a straight-set win over Naomi Osaka. It wasn’t exactly a shock, as Osorio is ranked slightly above Osaka. But here’s a different spin on it:

Is this something we’re doing now? I mean, great for Camila and Colombia–I’m always happy to see a tennis non-powerhouse getting attention. But “former number one” spans a fair few players, some of whom have stuck around long after they fell from the top of the list. Victoria Azarenka alone has lost over 100 matches since she first dropped out of the top ten in 2014.

Still, what the hell, let’s play.

Going back to 1984, there have been 27 WTA number ones. I’m going to count wins against the current number one as well–presumably those are at least as noteworthy as beating a former top player. Since the beginning of my week-by-week ranking data, current or former number ones have lost 2,587 matches.

Here are the stars who have handed out the largest number of noteworthy(?) victories. Unlike some loss leaderboards, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Azarenka is a good example: Inclusion here says more about longevity than anything else. So, losses after first reaching the number one ranking:

Player                   Losses  
Venus Williams              219  
Jelena Jankovic             205  
Caroline Wozniacki          192  
Arantxa Sanchez Vicario     168  
Ana Ivanovic                162  
Victoria Azarenka           142  
Karolina Pliskova           131  
Maria Sharapova             130  
Serena Williams             116  
Angelique Kerber            114

Osorio represented Osaka’s 49th such loss. Venus Williams has allowed 108 different women to put “beat a former number one” on their CV, and Osaka is already up to 33.

All told, 369 women have now beaten a current or former number one in the last four decades. They represent 52 different countries, now including Colombia.

It really isn’t that elite of a group. Osorio has better achievements to brag about, including–to bring us full circle–a top-five win, one that took her far fewer than 18 tries to accomplish.

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The Inscrutable Magic of Jessica Pegula

Jessica Pegula playing defense at the 2022 US Open

Alright, alright, alright.

When I started writing these player-themed pieces more than a year ago, Jessica Pegula was at the top of my list. One of my goals is to demystify the factors that cause each player’s success, or lack thereof. Pegula has had plenty of success, but compared to her peers at the top of the game, it is difficult to say exactly why.

There’s no obvious calling card that intimidates opponents. Pegula doesn’t serve very hard, ranking in the middle of the pack at least year’s US Open with an average serve speed around 92mph and first serves at 99mph. She doesn’t hit many aces. She ranks just outside the top ten in hold percentage, largely because she cleans up on second serves. That’s her one standout, top-line stat: In the 52 weeks leading up to Indian Wells, she won 51% of second-serve points. Only four women have topped 50%, and only Iga Swiatek wins more.

Pegula’s return numbers are even more anonymous. She ranks 20th among the WTA top 50 in break percentage. Top 20 on both sides of the ball is outstanding and unusual, but again, hardly intimidating. Whether serving or returning, she isn’t particularly effective on break points. Not that she’s bad in that department, but clutch play doesn’t help us understand all the match wins.

But win matches she certainly does. The American has held a place in the top ten since June 2022, much of that time in the top five. She has won seven tour-level titles and reached finals at both the US Open and the year-end championships. Off a title in Austin, she’s on a seven-match winning streak going into today’s match against Elina Svitolina. Elo isn’t quite as excited about her performance, but even that metric places her seventh, only 16 points behind fifth-place Qinwen Zheng.

What, then, is Pegula doing so right? When a player gets better results than her tools seem to suggest, I tend to fall back on difficult-to-quantify assets like movement, anticipation, and the blackest box of all, tennis IQ. Pegula excels in all those categories. But can we do better?

Second thoughts

Let’s start with the second serves. Here’s a generic theory for you: second-serve win percentages are related to success rates on return. Few women have dominant second serves–remember that Pegula is one of only a handful who win more than half of those points–so especially if the returner puts the ball in play, the server is already on defense.

Indeed, there’s something of a relationship, though not a statistically strong one. This plot shows the WTA top 50 in both categories:

jpeg.jpg

Here’s a sentence I didn’t expect to write: Pegula and Sabalenka are almost identical in this pair of metrics. To go a step further, the cluster of players extending from Alexandrova in the lower left, to Sabalenka, then to Swiatek in the upper right, is disproportionately made up of big hitters. (The finesse players, along with the always unpredictable Jelena Ostapenko, are in the lower right.)

Yet by the standards of women’s tennis in the 2020s, Pegula is not a big hitter. It’s natural enough that she would equal Sabalenka’s return results, even if they get there in different ways. But second serves, too?

After watching Pegula’s quick dismissal of Xinyu Wang on Sunday, I thought I had the answer. While her second serves aren’t fast (79mph on average at last year’s US Open), they are precise. She doesn’t tee them up down the middle, and she manages to hit targets close to the service line. Location can be as valuable as raw speed, so that might explain how she gets the results of a bigger server.

Except… I can’t prove that she does any of that on a consistent basis. US Open scorers classify serve depth as “close to the line” or “not close to the line. Pegula merited a “close to the line” designation on 15% of her second serves, compared to a tournament average of 18%. She was slightly below average on first serves, too.

As for serve direction, it’s the same story. The Match Charting Project classifies each serve as one of three directions: wide, body, or down-the-tee. The average server hits one of the corners (wide or tee) with about 80% of their second serves. Pegula’s number is 74%. That’s not in itself bad–Venus Williams sports the same number–but it certainly doesn’t support my theory.

If there’s a quantifiable reason why Pegula wins all those second-serve points, it doesn’t look like we’ll find it in the second serve itself.

The match and the territory

Another eye-test hypothesis about Pegula: She doesn’t wait for the game to come to her. She stands as close to the baseline as she can get away with, both returning serve and in rallies. She doesn’t back up when faced with a deep drive or a high bounce. Depending on the shot, she’ll pick it up on a short hop or reach above her shoulder.

Not everyone is able to do this. For those who can, the advantages are clear. The earlier you hit the ball, the faster it gets back in your opponent’s court–and the less time they have to react. It’s power tennis for women without overwhelming power.

This style of play is particularly effective against opponents who aren’t particularly aggressive. Pegula’s losses this year have come against Madison Keys, Olga Danilovic, Ekaterina Alexandrova, and Linda Noskova: a quartet of heavy hitters who end points fast. Pegula lost just two matches on North American hard courts last summer, both to Aryna Sabalenka.

Against less free-swinging foes, the American takes away chances. Pegula doesn’t hit an overwhelming number of winners: 6% of her groundstrokes go untouched, in line with tour average. But her opponents do worse. In the Austin final, McCartney Kessler scored winners on just 2% of her shots from the baseline, half her usual rate. Pegula applied the same pressure to Xinyu Wang Sunday, slashing the Chinese player’s groundstroke-winner rate to 4% from a career average of 7%.

Again, these are stats that invoke parallels with a different style of player. The best way to prevent winners is to hit winners of your own, or at least end the point trying. That’s the Keys/Alexandrova/Ostapenko/etc playbook. Yet by Aggression Score, a metric that puts those ball-bashers on top, Pegula is below average, keeping company with the likes of Emma Navarro and Mirra Andreeva.

Deep research

Maybe you’re convinced that this explains a lot of Pegula’s success. She hugs the baseline, cuts off angles, and takes away opportunities for all but the most aggressive players to find openings of their own.

Still, I’d like more support from the numbers. Positioning is tricky to quantify, so I want to focus on one specific situation. What happens when the American is faced with a very deep service return?

Deep returns essentially erase the server’s advantage, neutralizing the point with one swing. The server usually needs to take a step or two back, and unless it’s a perpetual gambler like Ostapenko, she won’t try anything flashy for at least one more shot. Pegula doesn’t aim to end the point, either, but she’s less likely to concede territory. While that doesn’t allow her to seize the advantage, she’s careful not to hand too much of an edge to the returner.

Yet… nope. The next table shows how the ten players with the most hard-court data since 2022 handle deep second-serve returns: How often they get the next ball back in play (“3rd-inPlay”), how often those balls in play result in points won (“inPlay W%”), and how often they win points against deep returns, even considering the ones they didn’t get back (“vsDeep W%”).

Player            3rd-inPlay  inPlay W%  vsDeep W%  
Iga Swiatek            84.2%      59.8%      50.4%  
Aryna Sabalenka        77.5%      63.5%      49.2%  
Karolina Muchova       84.2%      56.3%      47.4%  
Paula Badosa           84.2%      54.6%      45.9%  
Elena Rybakina         79.5%      57.5%      45.7%  
Daria Kasatkina        85.5%      52.2%      44.6%  
Coco Gauff             83.6%      53.2%      44.5%  
Jasmine Paolini        82.7%      53.7%      44.4%  
Jessica Pegula         81.9%      53.2%      43.6%  
AVERAGE                81.8%      53.0%      43.4%  
Qinwen Zheng           76.5%      52.6%      40.2%

Pegula is almost exactly average, which makes her less effective against deep second-serve returns than most other top players. (The average considers all players, not just those listed, which is why it’s so close to the bottom.) Sticking to the baseline might still be the best solution for her, but it doesn’t win her an unusually high number of points.

This is a lot of negative results for one post. Pegula is close to the best in the business at turning her second serve into points won. But it’s not because she hits her seconds deep, or because she keeps the ball away the returner, or because she handles deep returns unusually well.

So we’re more or less back where we started. The American does a lot of things well, or at least well enough that they are not liabilities. Among top 50 players, she is average or better in nearly every category, close to the top ten in a few. By my groundstroke potency metrics, FHP and BHP, she does even better: She ranks among the top 20 in both, one of the few players to do so.

That, apparently, is good enough for a place in the top five. With better, finer-grained stats, we might be able to isolate how Pegula turns court position into victory. For now, we can appreciate how she holds her own against opponents with more fearsome weapons. Her personal brand of flexible shotmaking is certainly working, whether we understand it or not.

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Was Fred Stolle Snubbed at the 1966 US Championships?

Fred Stolle (right) with friend and frequent foe Roy Emerson

Fred Stolle died this week, at the age of 86. He made his first appearance at the Australian Championships in 1958 (losing to Rod Laver, no less!), and he was part of the game for six decades after that, as a player, coach, and commentator. He won two major singles titles and ten major doubles titles.

For a more traditional obituary, click for the tributes from Richard Evans or Joel Drucker.

Stolle spent most of his playing days as a runner-up. In five majors between the 1964 and 1965 Australian, he reached four finals and lost the lot to Roy Emerson. My records (which may not be complete) show that Stolle faced Emmo 46 times. He won 14 of them, including just two on his first 16 tries.

Still, in the 1950s and 1960s, the second-best Australian–whoever it was that year–was a very good player. Frank Deford spoke for the entire frustrated American tennis establishment in 1966: “Lock up enough monkeys with typewriters and one of them will write Hamlet: Unleash enough Australians with racquets at Forest Hills and one will win the tournament.”

So it was just a matter of time. Stolle’s breakthrough came at the 1965 French Championships, where he beat John Newcombe, Cliff Drysdale, and Tony Roche to bag his first major title. He was a reliable contributor to the Aussie Davis Cup squad, too, winning a crucial rubber in the 1964 Challenge Round against Dennis Ralston.

Still, it seemed that Fiery Fred Stolle never quite got his due. Part of the problem was Harry Hopman, Australia’s martinet of a Davis Cup captain. Hopman liked hard workers, and Stolle preferred to save his energy for competition. Loaded with talent, Hopman could afford to bench his second-best man. Given the prominence of Davis Cup in the amateur era, Stolle’s second-tier status on the Australian squad led the rest of the world to doubt him, as well.

The 1966 US Championships

Key to the legend is that Stolle was snubbed at Forest Hills in 1966, a tournament he won as an unseeded player.

Back then, only eight players were seeded. Without an official ranking system, the selection was made by the tournament committee. For a long time, favorites had been divided into “home” and “foreign” seeds, and while the US Championships made a single list in 1966, there was probably something of a bias to protect the best American players in the draw.

With his title at Roland Garros the previous year, Stolle was the consensus year-end #3, behind Manolo Santana and Emerson. In 1966, he was seeded 3rd in Australia, 1st at the French, and 3rd at Wimbledon. When the list was released for Forest Hills, he did not like what he saw:

  1. Santana (ESP)
  2. Emerson (AUS)
  3. Ralston (USA)
  4. Roche (AUS)
  5. Arthur Ashe (USA)
  6. Drysdale (RSA)
  7. Clark Graebner (USA)
  8. Cliff Richey (USA)

It turned out to be a blessing in disguise. Spurred by the extra motivation, Stolle played the tournament of his life, knocking out Ralston in the 4th round and Graebner in the quarters, both in straight sets. The Graebner defeat was a message direct to the committee, “a hopelessly uneven match that was viewed in almost oppressive silence,” according to the New York Times.

Stolle then dismantled Emerson in the semis, losing just six games. His opponent in the final was another unseeded Australian, John Newcombe. Stolle came out on top in a serving duel. By Deford’s count, “service was held for 30 straight games and for 30 of 31 points.” In the pre-tiebreak era, that meant a final score of 4-6, 12-10, 6-3, 6-4.

Despite the “Fiery” tag and the occasional swipe at Hopman, Stolle was gracious in victory. Trophy in hand, he allowed himself just one dig at the men who left him out of the top eight. “When I missed out on a seeding,” he said, “I reckoned they must have just considered me a bloody old hacker. Well, it seems the old hacker can still play a bit.”

Was he snubbed?

As part of my Tennis 128 project, I generated Elo ratings for the amateur era. Pundits of the day rated majors (especially Wimbledon) and Davis Cup even more than they do today, so there is often a wide gap between contemporary rankings and my Elo numbers.

Remember that Stolle was the consensus #3 at the end of 1965. Here’s Elo’s opinion:

Rank  Player               Elo  
*     Rod Laver           2190  
1     Roy Emerson         2121  
2     Manuel Santana      2112  
3     Dennis Ralston      2108  
4     Arthur Ashe         2054  
*     Andres Gimeno       2048  
*     Ken Rosewall        2018  
5     Cliff Drysdale      2017  
6     John Newcombe       2003  
7     Chuck McKinley      1999  
8     Fred Stolle         1988  
9     Marty Riessen       1965  
10    Nicola Pietrangeli  1963

The asterisked players were in the pros. Rosewall and Gimeno (and Laver, really) were probably better than their ratings indicate–it is tough to rank two separate groups when the populations virtually never mixed.

More to the point, Stolle is quite a ways down the list. He won only one title that year after Roland Garros, and he finished his Australian campaign in December with a loss to Ray Ruffels. Despite his impressive string of major finals, he lost in the second round of Forest Hills to Charlie Pasarell.

1966 was more of the same. He didn’t win a title until August, when he bagged the German Championships against a second-tier field. Yes, he was seeded among the top three at each of the first three majors, but he earned out the seed just once, with a semi-final showing in Australia. As the defending champ in Paris, he lost to Drysdale in the quarters, and he crashed out of Wimbledon in the second round.

Here’s the Elo list going into Forest Hills that year:

Rank  Player           Elo  Seed  
1     Roy Emerson     2122     2  
2     Dennis Ralston  2100     3  
3     Manuel Santana  2095     1  
4     Tony Roche      2059     4  
5     Arthur Ashe     2001     5  
6     Clark Graebner  1999     7  
7     Fred Stolle     1980        
8     Cliff Richey    1979     8  
9     Cliff Drysdale  1973     6  
10    John Newcombe   1964

Given what the committee knew at the time, they did a pretty good job! The algorithm would’ve given Stolle a spot among the seeds, but the Elo gap between him, Richey, and Drysdale is tiny.

The tournament could have given Stolle and Newk a boost because of their grass-court prowess, but not over Drysdale, who had reached the final the year before. Richey, who was dominant at clay events in the United States, probably benefited from a bit of favoritism, but even he had reached a final on Australian grass that year, knocking out Newcombe in the process. He ended up letting his advocates down, falling in the second round to Owen Davidson–yet another man from Down Under.

We now know that for the first two weeks of September 1966, Fred Stolle was the best tennis player in the amateur ranks. He cruised through the best American players on offer, he trounced Emerson, and in the final, he put on a serving display that might have even given Laver something to think about.

Stolle said later that he “went into the tournament with a point to prove.” From our vantage point six decades later, his case was hardly so clear-cut. But he rated himself highly, and he exceeded the most optimistic expectations–even his own.

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Is the Stefanos Tsitsipas Backhand Back?

One hand might be enough.

On Saturday in Dubai, Stefanos Tsitsipas won his first 500-level title. Just about everything about this was unexpected. He had lost his last eleven finals at ATP 500s. He had dropped four of six matches coming into the event, including three against opponents outside the top 70. He barely deserved to be in the final at all, coming through a quarter-final against Matteo Berrettini in which he won a mere 47% of total points.

Most of all, the Greek shocked fans with the way he won. For the first time in years, his backhand was a weapon. He took big swings, especially on return of serve. The one-hander was suddenly so fearsome that Felix Auger-Aliassime, his opponent in the final, stopped attacking it. According to my backhand potency (BHP) metric, Tsitsipas’s performance in the semi-final against Tallon Griekspoor was his best on a hard court in more than two years.

For me, this is exciting. How often does a player–in his mid-20s, no less–just, out of nowhere, fix their biggest weakness?

One immediate cause is clear: Tsitsipas swapped out his Wilson racket for a stiffer-framed Babolat Aero. I’ll leave it to the gear experts to dissect exactly how much of a difference that has made. But given the Greek’s tactical shift this week, I have to think that the new racket offered a small boost. More importantly, it provided an excuse for Stef to make some long-overdue changes.

Let’s take a closer look at the new-and-improved Tsitsipas game.

Back(hand) from the brink

I wrote about Tsitsipas a year ago, after he crashed out of Indian Wells to Jiri Lehecka. I focused on Stef’s utter helplessness against first serves to his backhand. No one expects ATPers to win a lot of points against the first serve, but this was dire.

The Greek won just 12% of first-serve return points when Lehecka aimed at his backhand. His ten-match rolling average had fallen as low as 16% in that category, compared to career rates around 23%. At the 2023 Tour Finals against Jannik Sinner, Tsitsipas went oh-for-21 when the Italian first-served to his weaker side.

Of course, this was no secret. Most players mix up their serve direction evenly, rarely hitting more than 60% in either direction. In Acapulco last spring, Alex de Minaur hit 90% of his first serves to the Tsitsipas backhand. Most opponents didn’t go that extreme, but it must have been nice to know that there was a weak point to poke under pressure.

Until about a week ago, nothing had changed. Last fall in Basel, the Greek won barely 10% of first-serve return points when Arthur Fils aimed at his backhand. In Doha just two weeks ago, he salvaged only 15% against Hamad Medjedovic. Griekspoor nearly ousted him in Rotterdam by hitting 71% of his first serves in that direction. So the new look is truly sudden:

Match             1st to BH  inPlay  Pts Won  
Prev 10               56.5%   57.7%    23.2%  
QF vs Berrettini      67.7%   57.1%    19.0%  
SF vs Griekspoor      66.0%   54.8%    29.0%  
FI vs FAA             64.7%   72.7%    31.8%

The “previous ten” matches are those indexed by the Match Charting Project, and they run between Tokyo last year through the Medjedovic match. That span looks a bit better than early in 2024, when Tsitsipas’s win rate on these points nearly fell below 20%, but some of that is because he faced weaker servers. Apart from Fils, the span includes two matches against Alex Michelsen and one against Mattia Bellucci.

The Berrettini result doesn’t look like much of an improvement (and again, he won only 47% of points in that match), but it is Matteo Berrettini we’re talking about. Against two more strong servers, Tsitsipas not only leapt beyond his own recent rates, he exceeded tour average. The typical player wins 28% of these first-serve return points. Stef did better.

The Auger-Aliassime result is particularly telling. While Stef has now won seven of ten meetings, Felix has piled up some impressive serve numbers over the years. In Marseille in 2022, the Greek won only 12% of first-serve return points on his backhand side. Back in 2019 when the pair met at Indian Wells, Auger-Aliassime sent 21 first serves in that direction, and Tsitsipas won the point only once.

Back(hand) up

The challenge for every returner is to find a balance between swinging big and playing it safe. Tsitsipas, with his fluctuating confidence in the topspin backhand, sometimes leans too hard on his slice. Slice returns aren’t themselves bad–a deep slice return can instantly snatch the advantage away from the server–but Tsitsipas is rarely the stronger baseliner on court. Settling in for a baseline rally is, for him, a losing proposition.

Surprisingly, Stef’s three matches in Dubai do not reflect a change in overall shot selection. From the time I wrote about his backhand struggles last year, he began hitting more and more topspin first-serve returns. Since the European indoor swing last fall, the rate has drifted back down again, though not as far as its low point, which was probably driven by injury.

This graph shows how often Tsitsipas chose to hit topspin backhand returns (as opposed to chips or slices) against first serves. It shows a ten-match rolling average on hard courts, across more than 130 charted matches since 2018:

The current rate is almost exactly at his career average of 56%. Perhaps that understates his current approach a bit–as noted, he faced some big servers in Dubai, and he’ll always end up hitting more slices to defend against players of their caliber.

This was the biggest surprise for me in the numbers. Tsitsipas looked like a completely different player last week. His backhand returns may well have been qualitatively different. But he didn’t try to attack more of them than usual. The same was true in rallies. His career backhand slice percentage (compared to all backhands) is about 20%, and he continued to land in that range for the final three rounds in Dubai.

Back(hand) in black

This is where I get to say that, yes, the margins in tennis are small. Stef’s one-hander racked up points against Griekspoor, rating 5.5 on my BHP scale. (His average over the last 52 weeks is negative, and no one consistently scores as high as Tsitsipas’s rating in that match.) But against Berrettini, his BHP was slightly negative, and against Auger-Aliassime, it was neutral.

The backhands generated by the Greek’s blacked-out racket made for glittering highlight reels. Yet they do not fully explain the title run. Tsitsipas survived the quarters by the slimmest of margins. He dropped 53% of points and probably would’ve lost the match had it not been for a miraculous half-volley winner at 4-all in the decider. The semis, yes, credit to the backhand in all its glory. The final: unusually steady backhand returns that led a flummoxed Auger-Aliassime to target the Tsitsipas forehand instead.

Assuming Stef adopts his new stick and continues to swing freely with it, the best-case scenario is probably a backhand that is … well, average. Average is not a bad thing! Tsitsipas is one of the elite servers on tour, peaking at an 89% hold rate in 2023. His forehand is a reliable weapon. A year ago, it looked like he was becoming a one-dimensional servebot. He may now be able to avoid that fate.

Where, then, is the equilibrium? Opponents have long feasted on the Tsitsipas backhand, and they won’t give up so easily. Expect servers to push him out wide, where he’ll be stuck continuing to slice. Baseliners will test him to see if they can break the shot down. After years of backhand struggles, both mental and physical, I don’t expect he’ll come through unscathed.

But he doesn’t need to transform into Novak Djokovic. The Greek’s backhand has long been among the bottom third on tour. A step up to average would be worth a point or two per match, something that, at the margin, is the difference between a berth at the Tour Finals and another year-end ranking outside the top ten. Tsitsipas has said he wanted to inspire more youngsters to hit one-handed backhands. Winning more matches would be an excellent way to do that.

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Monthly Roundup #2: February 2025

At the White House, May 10, 1922. Second from left is Molla Mallory; fourth is President Warren Harding; fifth is Marion Zinderstein Jessup.

Previous: January

February did not go as planned here at the blog — illness and the day job intervened. March should be better.

Anyway, here’s this month’s grab bag of links, historical tidbits, and trivia.

1. Newmark dug up the fantastic photo that makes this month’s header. A little research turns up that the picture dates from May 10, 1922, when President and Mrs. Harding invited several players for exhibition matches on the White House lawn. There had been a similar exhibition, including Bill Tilden, a year earlier.

Molla Mallory, then the six-time U.S. champion, was the headliner, but she lost a one-set contest with Marion Zinderstein Jessup. She then partnered Watson Washburn and dropped another set to Jessup and R. Norris Williams. The President stayed for about 90 minutes of tennis, including both of those sets.

2. Not explicitly tennis, but applicable to the sport: Speed thrills: why are so many sports getting faster?

Due to genetic constraints, athletes generally can’t improve their speed as easily as other physical attributes like endurance or strength. This means recruiters are likely to prioritise fast athletes in a spiralling pace race.

Tennis will never be entirely about speed, but speed and quickness make everything else (excepting the serve) easier and more efficient.

3. Last month we celebrated 15,000 matches in the Match Charting Project database. This month we crossed the threshold of nine million shots.

4. Denis Shapovalov beat Taylor Fritz in a deciding-set tiebreak in Dallas. It was his first deciding-set tiebreak win in thirteen tries:

Oddly enough, the 2019 win against Berrettini improved his record at the time to 7-1 at tour-level, 12-2 in all pro matches. It’s tempting (and possibly correct) to look at his recent losing streak and infer that something was going on, but on the other hand, in a decade of pro tennis, Shapo has ended up about even, as most players should be in deciding-set TBs.

5. Congratulations to Simona Halep on a wonderful career. As a long-time fan, I’m choosing to ignore the last couple of years. We’ll probably never know exactly what she took, what she knew, and so on. It would have been great to get another few healthy, uncomplicated seasons, but it was a good run. Simona ranked 93rd on my Tennis 128 list, and as a part of a longer essay, I wrote then:

She remains unclassifiable. Her serve has developed into a weapon as her baseline game has drifted back toward more cautious counterpunching. The New Yorker called her “no one’s idea of a grass court player,” and she hoisted a Wimbledon trophy. Known as something of a choker, she has ascended to the highest peaks of the sport.

6. Again non-tennis, again applicable: I love this visualization from Mike Beuoy:

This is a great way of showing both peak and longevity on the same plot. I’d love to find some ways to represent tennis careers along these lines.

7. Another glorious career comes to an end: Diego Schwartzman is hanging up his racket. He went out in front of the home crowd in Buenos Aires, even winning a match against Nicolas Jarry. There may be no greater outperformer-of-expectations in the history of the sport.

I wrote about Schwartzman for The Economist back in 2017:

Predictably, Mr Schwartzman is weakest on his serve. He hits the lowest share of aces (2.5%) and wins the lowest share of service games (63%) of any top-50 player. He compensates for this with deadly returning. In fact, so potent is El Peque in rallies that if tennis had evolved with an underhand serve—as is the case with badminton—he would probably have become a hallowed occupant of the Hall of Fame. In 2017, coming into the US Open, he had won 44% of his return points, better than anyone else on tour, and just ahead of Mr Nadal, Mr Murray, and Mr Djokovic. Against first serves, he is third best; facing second serves, he once again leads the pack.

The “deadly returning” link goes to a post I wrote the same year, in which I attempted to adjust return points won for the level of competition he faced. That metric made his already-sterling RPW% look even better.

I’m also reminded that, back in 2012, I had some very strong feelings about wild cards. I tried to illustrate how much they matter by comparing Jack Sock–recipient of several free passes as the then-golden boy of American tennis–to the unfavored Argentinian:

It’s an open question whether Sock or Schwartzman had the more impressive year.  Some might prefer the American’s challenger title and handful of top-100 scalps; others would prefer Schwartzman’s 30-match winning streak at the Futures level.

But here’s the kicker: While Sock made $137,000 and raised his ranking to #164, Schwartzman made $17,000 and is currently ranked #245.  By showing up at the Indian Wells Masters and losing in the first round, Sock made about as much money as Schwartzman did by winning six tournaments.

Schwartzman won in the end, and not just because he doesn’t play pickleball.

8. Mirra Andreeva’s Dubai title moved her up to 4th in the Elo ratings:

Adam pointed out a quirk of the top four: Sabalenka is three years older than Swiatek, who is three years older than Gauff, who is three years older than Mirra. And Madison Keys is three years older Sabalenka.

9. Speaking of Keys, here’s something I forgot to include last month. By saving match point against Swiatek in the Australian Open semis, she joined the short list of women who had come from the brink to win a major title. Only two players did so in the first three decades of the Open era, though it has become more common since.

My favorite entry on the list is Muriel Robb, who won the 1902 Wimbledon final in straight sets, yet saved a match point to do so:

1902: [WIMBLEDON] Muriel Robb d. Charlotte Sterry 7-5 6-1 in the Challenge Round. The previous day, the match had been interrupted at 4-6 13-11, after Robb saved mp when Sterry led 6-4 5-4 40-30. The match was replayed from the beginning.

10. The best match video I came across this month: Andy Murray and Arnaud Clement at the 2005 US Open:

11. How to quantify the gap between Jannik Sinner and… you?

This is fascinating. The Elo-rating gap that implies a 90% chance of winning is about 390 points. So Sinner has a 90% chance of beating #15 Gael Monfils, who has a 90% chance of beating #228 Coleman Wong, who has a 90% chance of beating #483 Leonardo Aboian. My Elo ratings only consider Challengers and Challenger qualifying, so I can’t go beyond that, and guys like Aboian may not be properly rated.

Still, that’s three levels between Sinner and a guy who has won some ITF titles. There’s at least one more level to the bottom of the pro ranks, maybe two.

After that, it gets tougher to measure. UTR could probably help us here. It also depends on how you define “weekend” tennis player. My gut reaction is that Agustin’s estimate of 12 levels is a bit too high, but 9 or 10 seems reasonable. I might just be thinking in terms of a stronger “weekend” player. Either way, the broader point holds, that the range between a recreational player and the world’s best tells us something about the sport–both its age and how compelling it is to play and watch.

12. Steve Tignor revisits Arthur Ashe’s 1975 Wimbledon victory:

To say that Jimmy Connors was the overwhelming favorite coming into Wimbledon in 1975 was an understatement. The 22-year-old was the defending champion and ranked No. 1, and he was playing with a viciousness unseen before in this previously polite sport. In 1974, he had gone 99-4, and there was talk, even among his rivals, of how he would “go on winning everything for years.”

A few years ago I wrote about the same match, evaluating Ashe’s post-match claim that Connors had choked. He probably didn’t, at least not the way Arthur thought he did.

13. From my email, Samuel writes:

Hitting a great “first serve” is like having a great fastball. If that is all you have and all you hit, you won’t last long. I’d be interested to see what would happen if someone truly approached serving like pitching and threw out the old way of thinking in terms of two speeds/serves.

I am always here for tennis-baseball comparisons. I think there are various reasons why tennis serving is less about variety:

a. For kids and rec players, serving consistently is hard. That’s enough of a hurdle for most people.

b. Even for much better players, disguising intentions is a challenge. A pitcher can move a (concealed) finger or two, twist their wrist a bit differently, and throw a breaking pitch. For all but the best servers, mixing things up means tossing in a different place and/or using a different service motion–both things that are visible to an attentive returner.

c. There’s much less value in “offspeed” serving than in pitching. A baseball changeup functions broadly like a curveball: It upsets the batter’s expectations and he swings over it. That might be a swing-and-a-miss, or it might mean weak contact. But the analogy doesn’t hold in tennis, because rackets are so much more forgiving than baseball bats. Miss the sweet spot by a fraction of an inch, and you can still get the ball back in play. And then, if the offspeed serve isn’t well-disguised, it’s just mediocre. And we know what happens to mediocre serves in 2025.

That said, pros do think in terms of a range of serves, even if it doesn’t rival, say, the pitch arsenal of Yu Darvish. With a much wider target, placement trumps movement. The very best servers–think Federer or Barty–can overcome (b) and (c) and do pretty much whatever they want.

I suspect that the next big shift in serving strategy will be about a different sort of variety: risk levels. The math doesn’t recommend “two first serves,” but it does suggest that players should take more chances with second serves and accept more double faults. I’ll have more about that in an upcoming post.

14. In my notes, I have reminders to mention Jannik Sinner’s suspension, the the evisceration of US Open mixed doubles, and the potential switch of the Golden Swing to hard courts–or its eventual disappearance in favor of a Saudi Masters.

But… you probably know about these things. I can’t get myself too worked up about any of them. In a few months, Sinner will be back, he’ll win lots of matches, and we’ll all mostly forget this ever happened. The purist in me hates the new exhibition-style US Open mixed, but honestly, was I going to watch any of it either way? (Were you?) And as for the Golden Swing: It will continue to struggle, given its spot on the calendar and its geographical position in a Europe-dominated sport. The rise of Joao Fonseca will save it, for now.

15. RIP Gene Hackman. Hoosiers is the best sports movie ever made. How did Hackman end up in Young Frankenstein? Tennis, of course:

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Carlos Alcaraz and the Fruits of Shot Tolerance

Carlos Alcaraz making it look easy

Tennis people increasingly talk about “shot tolerance.” What does it mean?

There’s no standard definition. A Google summary settles on this: “a player’s ability to get to and return a given ball as desired.” Other definitions focus more on avoiding unforced errors: How long can a player stay in a rally without making a mistake?

I think of it like defense, in a very broad sense. Usually when we talk about defensive skills, it’s a lunging Andy Murray, recovering balls that nearly end the point, like big serves or would-be winners. In pro tennis, though, nearly every shot has an offensive component. That is to say, almost every shot tests the defensive skill–or resourcefulness, or shot tolerance–of the other player. A heavy Jannik Sinner forehand right at the feet, a Novak Djokovic backhand angled wide: Can you handle that and keep the point alive?

Another way to conceptualize shot tolerance is to imagine a win probability stat that updates with each shot. When Sinner hits that heavy forehand, his chances of winning the point against an average opponent increase to, say, 70%. A player with high shot tolerance will somehow save more than 30% of those points. A player with low shot tolerance will fail to get as many back (or hit weaker replies), and he’ll win fewer than 30% of those points.

We don’t have that all-knowing win probability stat, so we can’t measure shot tolerance so directly. Because the concept is fuzzy, I don’t imagine we’ll land on a fully satisfying way to quantify shot tolerance. But it’s worth the attempt, and it will help us explain how Rotterdam champ Carlos Alcaraz works his magic.

Long rallies

Start with the basics. Players with high shot tolerance should win more long rallies, right?

I drew the line at six shots, including rallies where the sixth stroke was an unforced error. I don’t want to muck things up by mixing surfaces, so we’re sticking with hard courts today. Based on Match Charting Project data, here are the men who have won the most of these “long” rallies on hard courts since the beginning of 2024:

Player            6+ W%  
Jannik Sinner     56.1%  
Carlos Alcaraz    55.6%  
Alex de Minaur    55.1%  
Grigor Dimitrov   55.1%  
Joao Fonseca      55.0%  
Learner Tien      54.5%  
Andrey Rublev     54.2%  
Novak Djokovic    53.7%  
Daniil Medvedev   53.7%  
Alejandro Tabilo  53.2%

The top of the list is as expected: Sinner and Alcaraz can outlast most opponents and have the ability to end the point. Fonseca and Tien probably won’t sustain these numbers, since they haven’t played the same level of competition as the others. Tabilo’s position is dicey, too, as we don’t have as many charted matches of his. Alexander Zverev is next on the list, if you’d like to promote him in Tabilo’s place.

Complicating matters is how these points end. The goal isn’t to sustain the longest rally possible. At some point shot tolerance gives way to power and calculated risk-taking. Some players are particularly strong on the pure shot-tolerance side of things, avoiding unforced errors in these long rallies:

Player            6+ Rally UFE%  
Casper Ruud               15.8%  
Bu Yunchaokete            17.9%  
Lorenzo Musetti           18.5%  
Daniil Medvedev           19.5%  
Alex Michelsen            19.5%  
Frances Tiafoe            20.0%  
Karen Khachanov           20.2%  
Alejandro Tabilo          20.4%  
Learner Tien              20.7%  
Novak Djokovic            21.0%

There’s some overlap between the two lists, but not much. Sinner’s error rate is better than average, at 22.3%, while Alcaraz’s is worse, at 24.1%. In the Rotterdam first round against Botic van de Zandschulp, Alcaraz committed unforced errors on 40% of points that reached the sixth shot. He still somehow won half of the long points.

There’s a relationship between win rate and error rate on long points–there pretty much has to be, since errors are points lost. But error rate explains less than 30% of the variation in long-rally winning percentage. Alcaraz, for one, breaks the mold by committing a lot of errors yet winning the majority of the points:

Alcaraz’s errors don’t usually expose a weakness of shot tolerance. They reflect a gamble. (Sinner is similar, though his groundstrokes are so imposing that he can do more damage with less risk.) We can’t just count errors and create a shot-tolerance metric, but we also don’t have the ability to ask players what they were thinking when they attacked every shot. Isolating shot tolerance requires a different approach.

Accepting errors

Let’s shift from points to shots. Again for hard-court matches since the start of last season, I tallied each player’s baseline strokes starting from the fourth shot of each rally. Shot tolerance is useful for serve returns and plus-ones, but those shots are so often out of a player’s control. And since most points are short, returns and plus-ones end up dominating the data. To get a sample of shots that reflect what we think of as “rallying,” we need to discard those.

(The word “baseline” is doing a ton of work here. Shot tolerance isn’t usually about making volleys or smashes, or about executing passing shots. So I’ve excluded every shot at the net, as well as every shot when the opponent is at or approaching the net.)

As with the long rallies, we can start by getting a sense of the shot-tolerant all-stars, the guys who are best at avoiding unforced errors:

Player                UFE/Shot %  
Learner Tien                7.4%  
Alexander Shevchenko        7.9%  
Lorenzo Musetti             8.2%  
Alejandro Tabilo            8.2%  
Tommy Paul                  8.7%  
Frances Tiafoe              8.9%  
Carlos Alcaraz              9.2%  
Jannik Sinner               9.2%  
Matteo Arnaldi              9.2%  
Casper Ruud                 9.7%

Musetti, Paul, and Ruud are names you’d probably expect to see here. Alcaraz and Sinner are more bracing. They don’t stand out as error-avoiders when we look at long rallies, but on a per-shot basis, they do.

In general, there’s a predictable trade-off. Players who hit more winners (and force more errors) commit more unforced errors. But the relationship between the two numbers is not the same for everyone. Here’s the same UFE-top-ten list, with winner rates added:

Player                UFE%  W+FE%  
Learner Tien          7.4%   7.3%  
Alexander Shevchenko  7.9%   9.1%  
Lorenzo Musetti       8.2%   9.1%  
Alejandro Tabilo      8.2%  10.6%  
Tommy Paul            8.7%  11.1%  
Frances Tiafoe        8.9%   8.0%  
Carlos Alcaraz        9.2%  10.1%  
Jannik Sinner         9.2%  14.1%  
Matteo Arnaldi        9.2%   8.3%  
Casper Ruud           9.7%  11.1%

Holy Sinner! The typical ATP regular hits slightly more winners than UFEs at these stages of the rally. Tien, Tiafoe, and Arnaldi are on the wrong side of the scale. Tabilo, again, is probably favored by a limited (and biased) sample. And Sinner … well, you need to go 15 more players down the list before you find anyone who cracks as many winners as he does, and Karen Khachanov coughs up a quarter more errors to accomplish the feat.

Here’s the full scatterplot:

This is a tighter relationship than the one pictured earlier. The player-to-player variation in winner rate explains half of the difference in error rate. Yet again, some players defy the usual tradeoff. The closer they are to the upper left corner of the graph, the more risk-free their aggression.

Controlled (for) aggression

It feels weird to quantify shot tolerance by considering winners, but that’s exactly what we’re going to do.

As a simplification, imagine that we put every shot into one of two categories: aggressive or defensive. Aggressive shots really aren’t about shot tolerance. Unless the aggression is just a last-ditch effort from a hopeless position, it’s a shot that the player more or less knows he can make. He hits hard, aims for the line, and it ends the point one way or the other.

Shot tolerance isn’t about the unforced errors that come from that kind of risk. We’re interested in how steady a player is on every other shot.

To get there, we’re going to string together some assumptions. You’ll probably disagree with some of them, and you’ll almost definitely disagree with some of the results. But bear with me for a minute anyway.

Say that the “cost” of winners (and forced errors) is half as many unforced errors. The usual ratio is closer to 1:1, but that doesn’t count forced errors, and it counts the kind of “bad” errors that come from low shot tolerance. So the 2:1 ratio means that if a player is going to hit two winners, the cost of doing business is one unforced error. For Alcaraz, his 10.1% winner rate implies that even if he’s playing flawlessly in non-aggressive situations, he’ll still have an error rate of about 5%.

From there, we come up with a “non-aggressive” error rate. Since Alcaraz’s total error rate is 9.2% and we’re writing off 5% as the cost of his aggression, that leaves us with 4.2%. We’ll divide that by the number of non-aggressive shots–that is, 100% of his shots, minus his winners, minus the 5% of aggressive errors. So: 4.2% divided by (100% – 10.1% – 5% =) 84.9%. Punch it into the calculator, and we get a non-aggressive error rate of 4.9%.

In more positive terms, that’s a “shot tolerance” of 95.1%. That is, when he has a reasonable chance of making a shot (meaning his opponent didn’t hit a winner or generate a forced error), and he doesn’t go big, he makes the shot 95.1% of the time. Average among tour regulars is 93.7%. Here are the top ten, excluding the names like Tien and Tabilo that I quibbled with above:

Player           ShotTol  
Jannik Sinner      97.3%  
Tommy Paul         96.2%  
Lorenzo Musetti    95.7%  
Andrey Rublev      95.4%  
Carlos Alcaraz     95.1%  
Grigor Dimitrov    95.0%  
Casper Ruud        95.0%  
Daniil Medvedev    94.9%  
Frances Tiafoe     94.5%  
Alex de Minaur     94.4%

So, do you agree that Alex de Minaur doesn’t have the shot tolerance of Rublev, Dimitrov, or Tiafoe? What about leaving Djokovic out of the top ten entirely? (His figure over the last 13 months is a below-average 93%.) Of course you don’t. That’s what I’m here for.

Djokovic is easy enough to explain. His last 13 months have been rocky. If we expand the time frame back to 2020, his number shoots up to 97.1%.

Dimitrov is higher than expected because of his reliance on the slice. Dan Evans did well by this metric, too. Slices are a good way to keep balls in play, even if they don’t generate a lot of offensive opportunities. I hesitate to exclude slices from the metric, but some kind of adjustment is probably in order.

De Minaur may expose another limit of this approach. One of the assumptions I strung together is that everyone’s winners come at the same cost. But the Aussie is relatively small: He can’t just wave a magic wand and generate winners like Sinner can. He needs to take more risks to end points. His winner/error ratio for this set of shots is 10.7% to 10.0%. My model assumes that a bit more than half of his errors are aggressive shots that missed the mark. But what if it’s more? In the bizarro world where players really did register their intention before every shot, we might find that many more of de Minaur’s errors fall in that category.

Or, maybe, he’s not quite as sturdy as we think he is. Either way, it’s something to watch next time you tune into a match of his.

Return to Alcaraz

Why, then, is Carlitos’s name in the headline? Sinner (or Tien, or Ruud) is better by most of these metrics.

What fascinates me about shot tolerance is what it doesn’t explain. If shot tolerance determines anything, it should tell us who’s going to win long rallies. And to some extent it does: Sinner tops the shot tolerance list, and he wins more long rallies than anybody else. (Though that doesn’t prove much: Sinner is better at just about everything, related or not.)

Yet Alcaraz isn’t far behind in long rallies. The Spaniard comes in second with room to spare. Tommy Paul does better on my shot tolerance metric, yet he wins only 51% of long rallies.

The X-factor, I think, is that shot tolerance is instrumental. You can win some points by out-shot-tolerancing your opponent, because yes, eventually they will miss. But nearly as often, you will keep the rally alive, even slightly in your favor, and they’ll take a risk that pays off. If that opponent is Sinner, that’s the most likely outcome. Just ask de Minaur, who has lost all ten of his career meetings with the Italian.

Alcaraz’s long-rally magic doesn’t fully show up in the shot tolerance metric because it isn’t confined to the baseline. The signature Carlitos point is a ten-stroke rally that he puts away at the net or polishes off with a drop shot. His baseline prowess isn’t quite a match for Sinner, and his net skills probably rank behind those of Federer or Nadal. But has there ever been a player who could go from gutbusting rally to all-court acrobatics with such success?

The Spaniard approaches the net half-again as often as Sinner does. He wins nearly three-quarters of points when he does so. In today’s game, a mid-rally net approach has to be earned, and many strong forecourt players don’t have the baseline skills to create those chances.

Shot tolerance, then, is necessary but not sufficient. (And that’s even ignoring short points. Impregnable rallying doesn’t count for much when the serve is unreturnable.) Sinner earns his point-ending chances with sturdy baseline work, then converts them from the same position. Alcaraz is nearly as good at keeping the point alive, and he has more options than anybody when it comes to finishing it.

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The Tennis 128* Welcomes Aryna Sabalenka and Jannik Sinner

She’s number one (hundred and seventeen)

A few young players are working their way up the ranks of the all-time greats.

In 2022, I published the Tennis 128, my ranking of the 128 best players of the previous 100 years. It was (accidentally!) well-timed, as there were only a few legends in mid-career at the time. That has changed. At the end of 2023, I ran the calculations again and found that Iga Swiatek had earned a place just outside the top 100.

Now it’s the turn of Aryna Sabalenka and Jannik Sinner. Both number ones posted outstanding campaigns in 2024, enough to move them into my top “128.” (It’s now 131, since I’m not going to give anybody the boot.) Several other players improved their cases, though not enough for inclusion. We’ll probably have at least one new addition a year from now, as well.

74a. Jannik Sinner

Sinner posted a season for the ages, losing just three matches on hard courts and picking up two majors. He’s still at it, adding the 2025 Australian Open and reaching a new peak Elo rating, placing him among the top ten of the Open era.

My plan was to update the ranking at a logical time, like the “offseason” in December. Had I done that, Sinner would have landed in the mid-80s. I can’t yet do much with his 2025 Australian Open title, but I can use his ever-higher peak Elo rating. That’s the difference between a mid-80s ranking and his new position of 74th.

The Tennis 128 algorithm is based on three components: peak Elo, year-end Elo rating in the player’s best five seasons, and year-end Elo rating for the player’s entire career. The latter two factors make it difficult for a 23-year-old to achieve a high ranking–and understandably so, as it takes time to build an all-time-great résumé. But peak is different. Only a couple dozen men have ever played as well as Sinner is playing right now.

Appropriately, he slides into the list just ahead of Lew Hoad, another man who reached stratospheric peaks. Rod Laver was one of many who long considered Hoad the best ever. Now, to the extent fans still think of him, the assessment is more that on his best day, Hoad could outplay anybody. I’m not sure if Sinner makes quite the same impression, but he’s getting there.

93a. Iga Swiatek

Swiatek lost her place at the top of the WTA rankings, but she added a major in 2024 and posted another solid season. That was enough to move her inside the top 100, to a new position just ahead of Simona Halep.

117a. Aryna Sabalenka

I wrote last year that Sabalenka needed a “particularly dominant season” to crack the list, and she delivered. Two majors, two more notable titles, and a new peak Elo rating to kick off 2025.

One might argue that Swiatek, Sabalenka, or both, should rank even higher. Iga has five majors and Sabalenka has three. There are a lot of names ahead of them on the list with fewer. Part of the issue is that they are young: If they keep playing at the same level for another half-decade or more, they’ll move up quite a bit. I designed the Tennis 128 to assess careers, not careers-in-progress, so it’s a bit awkward to apply the same algorithm to players in their mid-20s or younger.

The other factor is that Elo doesn’t hold the current era of women’s tennis in particularly high regard. Swiatek reached a peak rating of 2,287, good for a place in the top 30 all-time. But Sabalenka has yet to crack 2,200, and Iga has dropped back to 2,154. The Tennis 128 algorithm has a mild era adjustment, because I don’t entirely trust Elo to compare eras. But the adjustment depends on several years of data, so it won’t fully affect 2023 or 2024 for some time.

There’s a reasonable case that I’m underrating the current era. Top players lose early more than the greats of the past, and that is, at least in part, due to an ever-stronger field. Accordingly, we don’t get a lot of head-to-heads among the handful of top women, and that makes it harder to assess just how good they are. I’m keeping an open mind about this, but that won’t affect the rankings for some time: We simply can’t judge the early 2020s from the vantage point of 2025.

On deck

Carlos Alcaraz and Alexander Zverev both rank around 140. Another 2024-like season from Alcaraz will be enough for him. Zverev will need a step forward, as his peak Elo is holding him back.

Daniil Medvedev is still around 150. The way things are looking at the moment, that’s where he’ll remain.

The next active player on the list is Naomi Osaka, around 180th. She’ll need to return to top-ten form to climb the list, and she’ll need more than that to break into the top 128.

After that comes Coco Gauff, the woman most likely to join the Tennis 128 a year from now. She sits around 200th, about where Sabalenka was a year ago. If she can turn in a season like Aryna’s 2024, increasing her peak Elo rating in the process, she’ll probably make the cut. If not, it would take (at least) one more year.

No one else is really on the horizon. Elena Rybakina ranks around 250th. Madison Keys is also in the top 300. As Sinner has shown, a monster season with a historically great peak suffices to rocket up the list. So it’s always possible that someone like Rybakina or Qinwen Zheng will come out of nowhere, even if their timetables are likely more conservative.

Check back in December for 2025’s tweaks to the list–I might even do the next update on schedule!

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The Second-Serve Woes of Arthur Fils

The outcome of this point depends a great deal on whether Arthur Fils is about to hit a first or second serve.

Arthur Fils is a bit of a forgotten prospect. A year younger than Carlos Alcaraz and two years older than Joao Fonseca, he isn’t considered to have the awe-inspiring talent of either. Then again, who does? By any other standard, the 20-year-old Frenchman has made tremendous progress. Standing at #19 on the ATP computer, he’s the top-ranked player under 21, and he’s even within the top five of under-23s.

There’s no secret to the Fils game. He hits hard, smacking serves over 130 miles per hour and occasionally connecting with a forehand that might even cause Fonseca’s eyebrow to twitch. In Saturday’s Davis Cup match against Thiago Seyboth Wild, he scored 11 aces in only 54 service points. He won 29 of 32 points when he landed his first serve.

The Frenchman has plenty more to his game, as well. He is sturdy off both wings, unafraid to battle from the baseline. He rates +5 in Forehand Potency, hardly a tour-leading number, but better than the likes of Daniil Medvedev and Holger Rune. By the same metric, his backhand is neutral. That’s another number that looks better in context: He won’t win any awards, but the shot isn’t holding him back.

At first glance, then, his biggest challenge is making inroads on return. He has won 36.2% of return points over the last 52 weeks, a number just below the usual minimum for an elite player. It ranks him above Rune, Hubert Hurkacz, and Taylor Fritz, but behind most of his fellow top-20 players. It isn’t an obstacle to cracking the top ten, though, as Hurkacz and Fritz have shown.

Fils’s problem now is what happens when he misses that big first serve. Among the ATP top 50, he ranks 16th in first-serve points won, just ahead of Karen Khachanov. By second-serve points won, he ranks a dire 43rd, several places down the list from Sebastian Baez. Even in Saturday’s Davis Cup rout, the Frenchman failed to win half of his second-serve points.

What’s going wrong? Is it something that young players tend to improve? What does a second-serve weak point say about a prospect’s future trajectory?

Second to many

Let’s get a sense of the typical relationship between first- and second-serve win rates. This scatterplot shows the ATP top 50 over the last 52 weeks:

Players who are successful behind one serve are generally successful behind both, with Jannik Sinner leading the way in the upper-right corner. Carlos Alcaraz and Novak Djokovic rank among the second-serve win rate leaders, though their first-serve results aren’t as strong. Grigor Dimitrov and Giovanni Mpetshi Perricard pop out as men with effective first serves who don’t do as much behind the second.

Fils hardly sticks out as a disaster, especially with Alexander Bublik there to distract us. Still, for a man who can win more than three-quarters of his first-serve points, he sits in the wrong part of this grid. There’s virtually no difference between his and Ben Shelton’s first-serve results, yet the American wins five percentage points more often with his second serves. Shelton is top-five in hold percentage, while Fils languishes outside the top 30, despite a near-identical first-serve success rate.

The diagnosis

It’s one thing to say that a player doesn’t win enough points behind his second serve. Can we figure out why?

Start with two things it’s not. Fils commits more double faults than average: 4.1% of serve points versus the typical top-50 rate of 3.4%. But even when he lands his second serve, the results are disappointing. Instead of 43rd among the top 50, he’s 37th. Fewer doubles might be nice, but they would barely move the needle.

We can also cross particularly soft second serves off the list. At the US Open last year, Fils averaged 115 miles per hour on first serves and 92 miles per hour on seconds. That’s a gap of 23 miles per hour–exactly in line with the norm among players who reached the third round. Jannik Sinner averaged 91 miles per hour with his second serves, so raw speed isn’t the problem.

That leaves us with where the second serves are landing. Unscientifically, I get the impression that Fils’s second serves don’t land particularly deep. Khachanov, for instance, hits a bog-standard topspin second, yet it’s fine because he consistently drops it deep in the backhand corner. The Frenchman sometimes hits that serve, but just as often his not-enough-topspin delivery lands in the middle of the box. In 2025, against this field, that’s not going to cut it.

Match Charting Project data can’t tell us how deep the serves are landing, but it does tell us what direction they go:

           Dc-Wide  Dc-Body   Dc-T   Ad-T  Ad-Body  Ad-Wide  
Fils 2nds    17.5%    38.1%  44.4%  11.3%    20.4%    68.3%

First, the Frenchman rarely goes for the forehand. With a really good second serve, that’s smart. But with less imposing strikes, it gives opponents options. Last week I linked to an analysis of Alcaraz’s loss to Djokovic in Melbourne, where Alcaraz went to the backhand side on second after second–probably too often. That gave Novak the flexibility to position himself differently and play the returns more aggressively. Fils is making a similar offer to everyone he plays, especially on the ad side.

Second, that’s a lot of deuce court serves down the middle. “Body” is misleading–usually when we talk about body serves, we mean the really good ones, flying 125 miles per hour at the returner’s left hip. That’s not what’s happening here. A more appropriate name for the category is something less inspiring, like “serves that aren’t in a corner.” Whether the returner has move a couple steps or none at all, those are booming forehand returns waiting to happen.

Here are the directional breakdowns of a few men with strong second-serve results, for comparison:

           Dc-Wide  Dc-Body   Dc-T   Ad-T  Ad-Body  Ad-Wide  
Fils         17.5%    38.1%  44.4%  11.3%    20.4%    68.3%  
Shelton      27.3%    40.3%  32.4%  21.6%    35.0%    43.4%  
Djokovic     35.5%    38.8%  25.6%  30.6%    27.2%    42.2%  
Sinner       14.1%    61.5%  24.4%  15.0%    49.8%    35.1%

Both Shelton and Djokovic mix things up a lot more. Sinner does everything I’ve just criticized about Fils and, at least in New York last fall, he did it at the same speed. Sheepish grin emoji. Surely there’s more going on there, but we’ll have to save it for another day.

In development

In one way, clear weaknesses are a good thing. It’s easier to identify a clear target area for practice than to vaguely aim to get a little better at everything. I’m sure Fils and his team are aware that he should get more out of his second serve, and we’ll see him change things up.

The question, then, is if those efforts are likely to bear fruit. Many players struggle to meaningfully improve their stats once they’ve established themselves on tour. It’s hard enough to tread water. Opponents figure out how to counteract their weapons, age and wear-and-tear take their toll, and–if the player is lucky enough to climb the rankings–the average opponent in later rounds is stronger.

Fils has compared himself to Jo-Wilfried Tsonga. Tsonga never had a sub-50% second-serve win rate, but he did have middling figures around 51.5% in his first two years on tour. On the other hand, Tsonga was a late bloomer: He was barely playing Challengers when he was 20.

For a more comprehensive answer, I found 75 men who played full seasons on tour at age 20 since 1991. All but five of them eventually bettered their age-20 second-serve win rate, and the average improvement was 2.7 percentage points. If that holds true for Fils, he’ll peak around 52% on second serves. That’s not bad, though I suspect he would be disappointed if he never does better than that. It would still be an underperformance for someone with his first-strike weapons.

Indeed, the one-third of these players who posted sub-50% second-serve win rates at age 20 improved more than the larger population. They gained 3.4 percentage points. Among them are some names that might inspire even greater feats from the young Frenchman:

Player           Age 20 2ndW%  Peak  Peak 2ndW%    
Andrey Rublev           49.3%  2020       53.9%    
Nicolas Almagro         49.1%  2012       55.1%    
Sam Querrey             48.2%  2015       54.1%    
Tommy Haas              47.7%  2006       54.8%

All four won fewer second-serve points at age 20 than Fils did in 2024. Each one fully shored up the weakness– at least for one season. 54% isn’t elite, but it’s more than good enough, especially when paired with a top-notch first serve.

To be clear, I’m not forecasting a Haas-like, seven-point improvement for Fils. Repairing weak points at tour level is exceptionally difficult, and even the three-percentage-point norm will take a lot of work. It is nonetheless a challenge the Frenchman will need to undertake. He has come a long way on the back of a big first serve, but to breach the top ten, he’ll need a more well-rounded attack.

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Monthly Roundup #1: January 2025

Indoor tennis in 1908, at the 7th Regiment Armory in Manhattan

Hey, look, another new thing! I’m aping TheZvi and ACX in an attempt to clear out my notebook and help you find the better tennis stuff out there.

It will be a mix of worthwhile links, historical tidbits, and trivia that doesn’t quite merit the full Notebook treatment. There will also be some self/site promotion, partly because it’s my blog and I can do what I want, and also because I regularly find that readers don’t know about features on the site.

As with the Trivia Notebooks, please send me things if you think they belong here.

1. The Match Charting Project has reached 15,000 matches. (And counting!) I still remember getting excited when we reached 100. Now we have 100 matches each for several dozen individual players, not to mention 500-plus for each of the Big Three. Thank you to all contributors.

2. If you’d rather read my analysis in Italian or Spanish, there’s an ever-growing body of translations, too. Edo published Italian versions of my latest pieces on Jannik Sinner and Madison Keys in the last few days, and Ángel recently translated my post from last year on Ugo Humbert and Surface Sensitivity into Spanish. (These two guys are adding to the Match Charting Project totals, too!)

3. New academic paper on serve strategies from Axel Anderson, Jeremy Rosen, John Rust, and Kin-Ping Wong:

Do the world’s best tennis pros play Nash equilibrium mixed strategies? We answer this question using data on serve-direction choices (to the receiver’s left, right, or body) from the Match Charting Project. Using a new approach, we test and reject a key implication of a mixed-strategy Nash equilibrium: that the probability of winning the service game is identical for all possible serve strategies. We calculate best-response serve strategies by dynamic programming (DP) and show that for most elite pro servers, the DP strategy significantly increases their win probability relative to the mixed strategies they actually use.

I haven’t read the paper, partly because I am not optimistic that I would understand it. Still, it is heartening to see a treatment along these lines find that players are not optimizing. Most of the ones I’ve seen tend to conclude that they are, or that they are close.

4. Gill noticed that Frances Tiafoe was the “leader” in aces-against, making him a fun matchup for Giovanni Mpetshi Perricard in Brisbane:

It’s a good reminder that (a) this is a real phenomenon, and (b) you can find it on the TA leaderboards. Tiafoe was indeed the vAce% leader in 2023 as well. His last-52-week rate is up to 13.5%, in part because two of his last five matches were against Mpetshi Perricard. Arthur Rinderknech posted a 20% ace rate against him in Melbourne, too.

When I say this is “real,” I mean that it’s persistent, not just the year-to-year fluctuations of luck. Some players are better at ace prevention than others. It’s not necessarily a good thing: Returners who get more balls in play win those points at a lower rate, so it can come out in the wash. That said, a remarkable example of the persistence of ace prevention is Gael Monfils. I wrote about the stat all the way back in 2012, and Monfils was then the least aceable player on tour. Thirteen years later, he’s still in the top three.

5. I love finding footage of historical players I’ve never seen before. Here are ten minutes of Julie Heldman (and Billie Jean King) in the 1974 US Open semi-final:

There’s a wealth of historical match footage, but what has survived is (understandably) heavily concentrated on the biggest names, like BJK. A couple more exceptions I’ve come across lately are this 1977 clip of Martina Navratilova against Marise Kruger, and (compare and contrast!) a full match from 1990 of Martina against Halle Cioffi.

6. Hugh gives us a great technical breakdown of Holger Rune:

[H]e’s leaving speed on the table in numerous areas. He could keep the left hand on the throat for longer like Sinner and Alcaraz to coil the torso more, he could lift the hitting elbow higher and invert the racquet without adding the left hand like Berdych, he could flex the elbow more in the setup like Verdasco, or he could simply have a higher takeback but keep the racquet tip up like del Potro. All these solutions add a little more length and would help provide more and smoother racquet speed.

And:

You can’t fire a cannon from a canoe.

7. RIP Rino Tommasi (1934-2025). The Italian journalist covered tennis (and boxing) for well over a half-century. He was also a passionate record-keeper. He is at least indirectly responsible for the fact that Italians are disproportionately represented in pretty much every historical and data-oriented tennis project.

8. Sad to see that we’ve lost Czech coach Jiri Fencl, as well. He was probably best known for his work with Lucie Hradecka, and he even wrote a bit about analytics, in connection with his Resultina app.

9. Giri asks, Has the Tennis Ball Gotten Worse? Tough to say:

As for the guys playing on TV, I wonder if some of the changes in game style they decry have just as much to do with factors beyond the balls, such as the advances in technique or strength and conditioning that enable the likes of Alcaraz and Sinner to hit as big as they do on every single shot. I also wonder if I’d helped to bring their malaise into existence by raising the topic of the ball at all.

It sounds like the ATP, at least, is moving toward more standardization, which is long overdue. However different, worse, or otherwise the balls are, they ought to be the same from one week to the next.

And:

Medvedev and Rublev both seemed to think that “tactics” were gone in men’s tennis, but for nearly opposite reasons: Everybody can rally forever, or nobody can rally for two shots.

I’ll probably have more to say about whether “tactics are dead.”

10. Speaking of footguns, Madison Keys won’t be able to play in next month’s Austin event, as planned:

“With World No. 6 Jessica Pegula already committed to the event, WTA rules prevent us from having a second Top 10 player in the draw. When we entered an agreement with Madison, her ranking was World No. 21. Now with her title wins in both Adelaide and Melbourne, her ranking has moved to World No. 7. As a result of her new ranking, Madison will, unfortunately, not be able to compete in this year’s ATX Open.”

My first reaction was not just that this was idiotic, but that it was nonsensical: Wasn’t the entry list for Austin finalized six weeks before the tourney started? But no, apparently WTA entry lists are settled four weeks before, in this case just after Keys’s ranking boost.

(Also, do I have this right? Had Keys leapfrogged Pegula in the rankings, with both remaining in the top ten, would Pegula have been the one forced out?)

The motivation for the rule is clear: Austin is a 250, and it runs concurrently with a 500 in Merida. The tour wants the best players to compete at the higher-stakes events and, more importantly, to face each other. In general, 250s are getting sidelined on both tours, and this is just one small instance of that. I’m not sure exactly how the rules should be rewritten, but it seems foolish to prevent an American star from appearing in the US in favor of an event elsewhere that is only technically more prominent.

11. James Gray explored Emma Raducanu and Elo rankings, with an assist from me:

But according to one statistical analysis, Raducanu has no reason to fear clashes with top players, and in fact is a good enough player to be seeded, if she can just become consistent enough.

The Elo rankings show she is in fact the 13th best player in the world right now.

And now 12th, after the Australian … and something worse than that on Monday, once her Singapore loss to Cristina Bucsa (Elo ranking: 138) goes on the books. This was not a good month to use Raducanu as an example of the value of Elo. So, of course, Simon Briggs covered it too.

12. Ahead of the 1919 Wimbledon final, former champion Blanche Hillyard wrote to Dorothea Lambert Chambers, who was set to face Suzanne Lenglen in the Challenge Round:

My rheumatism is too damnable for words. How on earth [Phyllis] Satterthwaite has got to the [all-comers’] final, I don’t know. One of the worst styles of players and I always feel I could have given her ½ 30 in my best days. Well, my dear, again good luck and I do hope you won’t have the ‘curse’. I wish she may have it if she does have it at all?

(“½ 30” referred to handicapping, which was considerably more common back then. A handicap of 15 meant letting the weaker player start every game at 15-0 on serve or 0-15 on return. “½ 30” was halfway between a handicap of 15 and 30, so one point in half of games, two points in the other half. Believe it or not, it gets immensely more complicated from there.)

Hillyard said she’d try to “Evil Eye” the Frenchwoman, but Lenglen won–10-8, 4-6, 9-7–in a match for the ages.

13. At the start of the season, I updated my datasets of rankings, results, and stats for both ATP and WTA. I also updated the dataset of Match Charting Project data.

14. Gill and Ben Ornstein send out weekly editions of The Draw, which is a great resource for finding tennis coverage worth reading. Better than this, for sure.

15. Michal argues that Carlos Alcaraz lost to Novak Djokovic because he was too predictable on second serves:

By completely avoiding the Djokovic forehand return, Alcaraz gives Djokovic an invitation to set up the point however he likes. Djokovic can either step in, and take his backhand return early – made easier by the fact that he can wait in his backhand grip and give up a third of the box. Or, he can back up to get a forehand return anyway – here he can start moving early, while Alcaraz’ ball toss is still in the air, because he knows that the serve will be aimed toward a particular area of the box.

This seems like something a lot of players would let you get away with. Djokovic is not one of those players.

16. Ana gives us the context we need to understand the student protests in Serbia that have prompted Djokovic to speak up:

First, violence against young people—particularly the mass shooting at a Belgrade elementary school (OOS “Vladislav Ribnikar”) in May 2023—has almost certainly contributed to Novak’s new outspokenness. Second, both his age and his parenthood have shaped his thinking: he wants his kids, now 7 and 10 years old, to “also grow up in Serbia,” like he did, but it’s not certain that they will—not merely because they have the resources to live elsewhere but specifically because Serbia may not provide what they need to thrive. Third, while the exodus from Serbia over recent decades (essentially, since the breakup of Yugoslavia) saddens him, he understands it.

17. I probably could have done an entire Trivia Notebook on Gael Monfils’s title in Auckland. He’s awfully old to be winning titles, he’s won 9 of 15 finals (and six of his last seven) after starting his tour-level career 4-16, he beat top-50 opponents in the first two rounds but none in the final three … it was a week of oddities.

The weirdest bit of all how La Monf beat Nishesh Basavareddy in the semi-finals. The score was 7-6(5), 6-4, despite the American outpointing him by one. Most striking is the dominance ratio (DR), the ratio of Monfils’s return points won to his opponent’s return points won. That number was 0.75, low for any victory, let alone a straight-setter. Last year, the lowest DR for a straight-set win was 0.79 (Halys d. Gasquet in Gstaad), and that came from a pair of tiebreaks.

The trick here is that while Basavareddy won a higher rate on return (34% to Gael’s 25%), he had to play a ton of return points: 88 to Gael’s 59. He kept return games close, but couldn’t bunch enough points together to earn a single break. Monfils earned fewer break points, but he converted one.

18. Ravi Ubha asks, What is an Unforced Error?

…Mitchell pointed to probability.

“The speed of the ball coming in, the height of the ball, those things also impact on whether it’s going to be an unforced error or a forced error,” said Mitchell, who estimates he has charted 7500 matches over 30 years. “If it’s a short ball and it is missed, does the player have the ability to make the shot? And if they had the ability to make the shot and missed it, then we can label it as an unforced error.”

Every tennis fan goes through a phase where they discover the limitations of the unforced error stat. (Ravi knows his readership!) Unforced/forced is a simplistic way of looking at a point outcome, and scorers will not always agree.

Probability is the key word here. In a better world, those of us who cared would be able to calculate the chances that a player would miss any shot. Automated systems like Playsight have been doing that for years, even if you can’t see what’s going on internally. The charitable interpretation of “unforced error” is something like, “a shot that a typical tour player would have made more than 60% of the time.” Put in those terms, you might want better stats, but there isn’t anything inherently wrong with what we’ve got.

19. Ben Rothenberg covers the anti-Zverev protest at the Australian Open final:

An aggressive security guard, however, came between us and told me to back away. He told me to stop typing on my phone, and then repeatedly asked me to move further and further away from this woman, continually telling me to move further back meter by meter. He asked me repeatedly to leave the entrance area and return to the seating bowl, but I wanted to keep the woman in my eyeline until I knew what her fate would be. He also photographed my accreditation as well as the accreditation of another journalist who arrived a few minutes later, and reported my presence there to Tennis Australia.

Gross. Not the first time Tennis Australia has overreacted to protest or tried to halt media coverage of it. Apparently it’s only the Happy Slam if you stay in an increasingly narrow lane.

20. Non-tennis, but still sports: Michael Crawley’s book Out of Thin Air, about his time running with elites in Ethiopia, is fantastic. I learned a ton. Here’s an excerpt:

Throughout my time in Ethiopia, in fact, I never heard anyone mention “talent” or “natural ability.” Runners use the word lememed to refer to training as a runner, which literally means “adaptation” or getting used to something. Runners are either good at managing the process of adaptation or they are not. A good runner is most likely to be described as gobez, which means some kind of combination of cleverness and cunning, denoting an ability to plan and manage their training well. As Meseret, a local coach, frequently puts it to the runners, “You can be changed.”

21. I’ll leave you with this 1974 performance of Swing Low, Sweet Chariot from Sonny Rollins and Rufus Harley, the world’s grooviest bagpiper:

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The Locked-Down Serve of Jannik Sinner

It’s all business for Jannik Sinner, and business is good.

There are a lot of things we could talk about after Jannik Sinner’s latest display of dominance. With a second Australian Open title, his exceptional span of hard court performance has stretched to 13 months, and according to my Elo ratings, only eight players in the Open era have ever been better than the Italian is right now.

A year ago, I wrote that Yes, Jannik Sinner Is This Good. If anything, he has improved since then. He holds serve more often than anyone on tour–yes, even more than Giovanni Mpetshi Perricard. Yet he is far from one-dimensional. He couples the serve with elite groundstrokes on both wings. He breaks serve more often than all but six players on the circuit.

One particular aspect of Sunday’s victory stands out. In three sets, spanning 15 service games, Sinner did not face a single break point.

Zero break points faced is one of those stats that sounds really good–then it gets even better the closer you look. Alexander Zverev a top-ten returner. He breaks nearly one-quarter of his opponents’ service games. He earns approximately 0.6 break points per game, or three per set. In three sets, the Italian didn’t allow him one.

Every season there are a couple hundred matches in which the winner doesn’t face a break point. Yet most of those are short best-of-threes, many of them involving overmatched wild cards and qualifiers. In 2024, there were only five matches in which a top-ten player failed to generate a single break point over more than ten return games. Twice the victim was Hubert Hurkacz, probably the weakest returner among the elites. Another hapless outing came from Casper Ruud, who was held to zero by Zverev at the Tour Finals.

The other two standout matches belong to Sinner. In last year’s Australian Open semi-final, then again in the Shanghai title match, he shut down Novak Djokovic. The only recent precedents for Sinner’s plastering of Zverev are the Italian’s own performances.

What can we learn from the latest episode of the Sinner show?

Situational awareness

Twelve months ago, Sinner was developing a reputation as an escape artist. He beat Daniil Medvedev in a five-set Melbourne final, winning just one more point than the Russian. He snuck past Djokovic twice in November 2023, once winning exactly the same number of points, a second time despite winning four points fewer.

Sinner had a knack for erasing break points. Most players are less successful facing break point than on other service points, because stronger returners generate more break points. (Also, break points tend to crop up amid rough patches, at least for players human enough to occasionally slump.) The Italian, though, saved break points at a better clip than his other service points. He hit bigger at those moments, and it worked.

Recognizing that trend a year ago, I tempered the celebration with a dose of reality:

…I can tell you what usually happens after a season of break-point overperformance: It doesn’t last. Taking over 2,600 player-seasons since 1991, 582 (21.7%) of players saved more break points than they won serve points overall. 183 (6.8%) matched Sinner’s mark of saving at least two percentage points more than their serve-points-won rate.

That sound you hear? That’s Darren Cahill laughing at us. Sinner didn’t quite continue at the same pace, but he still serves better facing break point than otherwise. He wins a tour-leading 71.5% of serve points overall, and the number climbs to 72.5% when an opponent has him on the ropes.

(71.5% is circuit-best, but 72.5% is not: Ben Shelton stands at 73.1%. No one told Jannik, though. In their semi-final, Sinner won 6 of 13 break points against the Shelton serve.)

Of course, this specific skill didn’t come into play on Sunday. Sinner didn’t have break-point-faced results, because he didn’t face any break points. If you have an even bigger weapon to deploy at key moments, why wait until it’s absolutely necessary?

Beyond the escape room

Some players–especially left-handers–are more effective serving to the ad court than the deuce court. That helps them save break points, because most break points (30-40 and ad-out) take place in the ad court.

Sinner is right-handed. Across the 250-plus matches for which I have sequential point-by-point data, he is slightly more effective serving to the deuce court:

COURT    A%   SPW%  
Deuce  7.6%  66.6%  
Ad     6.5%  66.3%

The different in points won isn’t anything to build a strategy around, but the ace-rate gap suggests there might be a meaningful difference.

In Melbourne, the success rates took on a new look. Based on the five Australian Open matches in the Match Charting Project database, here are the same metrics:

COURT    A%   SPW%  
Deuce  8.9%  74.6%  
Ad     9.4%  70.8%

The ace rates flipped, but holy four percentage points! 70.8% serve points won is very good, better than anyone else on tour over the last 52 weeks. 74.6%, though: That’s from another planet. It’s better than John Isner’s best season.

It may be a fluke. After all, it’s just five matches, and Sinner’s deuce- and ad-court results were nearly identical in 2024. But I suspect there’s strategy at work here.

Up to eleven

I noted last year that Sinner served bigger facing break point than he did otherwise: 125 miles per hour compared to 122. What about other key situations?

At the US Open last year, the Italian showed some deuce-court preference, winning 72.7% of deuce-court points compared to 71.3% on the ad side. It wasn’t a matter of power, as he averaged almost identical speeds (117.9 to 117.7 mph) in the two directions.

Speed differences turn up at a more granular level. Here are Sinner’s first-serve speeds at the most common point scores he faced:

Score    MPH  
15-30  121.0  
40-40  120.3  
40-15  120.0  
0-15   119.7  
30-30  119.4  
40-30  118.0  
30-15  117.7  
30-0   117.0  
15-0   116.6  
0-0    116.6  
15-15  115.8  
40-0   113.0

(Yes, I know it’d be nice to have 30-40, 40-AD, 15-40, and so on. But this is Sinner we’re talking about. He didn’t face many of those.)

With the exception of 40-15, this list is an awfully good approximation of point scores listed by importance. With more at stake, the Italian hit harder. There’s no apparent trade-off, either. He made more first serves than average at 15-30 and deuce, even with the faster strikes.

The point is that when Sinner feels the need to go big, he has the ability to do so. Most players don’t: Their results don’t get better in critical moments, either because they’re already maxing out their skills on routine points, or because their opponents can raise their levels, as well. But the Australian Open champ has more in the tank than anybody who dares to stand across the net from him.

As the Italian rose through the rankings, he saved that extra oomph for break point. Now that he enters every match as the favorite, he can be even more aggressive. By serving harder at 15-30, or 30-all, Sinner probably doesn’t risk overexposure. With the possible exception of Alcaraz or a time-traveling Djokovic, no one can do much with an accelerated Sinner first serve–even if they’ve seen one recently.

The full arsenal

Put all of this together, and it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that Sinner will continue to climb the all-time list. In terms of peak level, Andy Murray is next:

Rank  Player          Peak Elo  
1     Bjorn Borg          2473  
2     Novak Djokovic      2470  
3     John McEnroe        2442  
4     Ivan Lendl          2402  
5     Roger Federer       2382  
6     Rafael Nadal        2370  
7     Jimmy Connors       2364  
8     Andy Murray         2347  
9     Jannik Sinner       2325  
10    Boris Becker        2320

Sinner wins more service points than anyone else in the game–even when he isn’t particularly trying. At the same time, he is an elite returner.

We’ve seen a few players with a similar service profile. Pete Sampras also had a knack for coming through at the end of sets. But he leaned on his tiebreak skill more than Sinner ever will, because his return game was mediocre. Roger Federer was better: a dominant–and clutch–server, and a more competitive returner than Pistol Pete. Nick Kyrgios had one of the most electric serves in the game’s history, coupled with the ability to focus at critical moments. Yet he was the most one-dimensional of the bunch. His return would have held him back even if he had stayed healthy.

Sinner has all the serve dominance without the drawbacks. He has no apparent weakness. He won’t win all the time, and he won’t stay on top forever, but at the moment, it’s hard to see how anyone will stop him.

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