What Is Ben Shelton’s Ceiling?

Also today: First serve stats, and new Tennis Abstract reports.

Ben Shelton is one of the rising stars of men’s tennis, the most exciting young player this side of Carlos Alcaraz. He possesses a monster serve, he’s not afraid to unleash old-school tactics, and he wears his heart on his sleeve. It’s impossible to root against this guy.

Shelton is also, by the standards of the game’s elite, not a very good returner.

Any discussion of his potential has to come to terms with this most obvious limitation. His rocket of a lefty serve will never hold him back; indeed, it’s already earned him places in the US Open semi-finals and the Australian Open quarters. You don’t have to do much dreaming to see him going even further and winning a major outright. What’s tougher to forecast is the sort of sustained performance that would take him to the top of the rankings.

Last year, Shelton won 32.6% of his return points at tour level. Average among the top 50 was 37.1%, and the top four players on the circuit (and Alex de Minaur) all topped 40%. Of the top 50, only Christopher Eubanks, at 30.9%, came in below Shelton.

There’s plenty of time for Ben to improve, and I’ll get to that in a moment. But first, let me show you the list of the year-end top-ten players with the lowest percentage of return points won (RPW%) since 1991, when the ATP began to keep these stats:

Player              Season  Rank   RPW%  
John Isner            2018    10  29.4%  
Kevin Anderson        2018     6  33.7%  
Milos Raonic          2014     8  33.8%  
Andy Roddick          2007     6  34.0%  
Hubert Hurkacz        2023     9  34.3%  
Greg Rusedski         1997     6  34.5%  
Matteo Berrettini     2019     8  34.6%  
Ivan Ljubicic         2005     9  34.6%  
Hubert Hurkacz        2022    10  34.7%  
Greg Rusedski         1998     9  34.7%  
Stefanos Tsitsipas    2023     6  34.7%  
Mark Philippoussis    2003     9  34.8%  
Andy Roddick          2010     8  34.9%  
Pete Sampras          1996     1  35.3%  
Jo Wilfried Tsonga    2009    10  35.3%  
Goran Ivanisevic      1995    10  35.4%  
Andy Roddick          2009     7  35.5%  
Pete Sampras          2000     3  35.5%  
Pete Sampras          2001    10  35.6%  
Andy Roddick          2008     8  35.6%

In 33 years, out of 330 top-ten finishes, only one man has reached the threshold with a RPW% lower than Shelton’s last year. And it’s someone you can’t exactly pattern a career after: If you look up “outlier” in the dictionary, you find John Isner’s face staring back at you.

Even more striking to me is that no one has finished in the top five with a RPW% below 35%. Then comes another outlier, Pete Sampras and his 1996 campaign. If your goal is to finish a season at number one, you’ll usually need a strong return. Sampras and Andy Roddick are the only two men who have topped the rankings with a RPW% below 38%. Otherwise, you’ve got to ask yourself one question: Are you Pete Sampras?

Here are the lowest RPW% numbers for top-three finishers since 1991:

Player           Season  Rank   RPW%  
Pete Sampras       1996     1  35.3%  
Pete Sampras       2000     3  35.5%  
Andy Roddick       2005     3  36.0%  
Milos Raonic       2016     3  36.1%  
Andy Roddick       2003     1  36.4%  
Casper Ruud        2022     3  36.9%  
Pete Sampras       1999     3  37.3%  
Andy Roddick       2004     2  37.5%  
Boris Becker       1994     3  37.6%  
Michael Stich      1993     2  37.9%  
Pete Sampras       1998     1  38.0%  
Marat Safin        2000     2  38.1%  
Grigor Dimitrov    2017     3  38.2%  
Patrick Rafter     1997     2  38.2%  
Roger Federer      2009     1  38.3%

(Did you expect to see Casper Ruud on this list? I did not.)

Shelton’s serve means that he could reach the top without the return-game success of Alcaraz or Novak Djokovic. But if he wants to move beyond the fringes of the top ten, this second table shows the range he needs to aim for. Setting aside the hot-and-cold tactics of Pistol Pete (we’ll come back to that, too), we can simplify things and say that a would-be world-beater needs to get his RPW% up around 36% or 37%.

How much can a return improve?

Bettering your core stats is possible, but not easy. Another lefty, Feliciano Lopez, offers a cautionary tale. In his age-20 season, he won 31.7% of return points, not far below Shelton’s mark. Here’s how his career developed:

Lopez didn’t top 34% for more than a decade, and he only reached 35% when he was 34 years old. In seven of his ten seasons between the ages of 21 and 30, his return was no more than 1.5 percentage points better than that first season.

Here’s another one. Milos Raonic won 33.5% of his return points as a 20-year-old. He’s a better comp for Shelton, because Raonic’s serve was similarly effective as well. This graph shows how Raonic’s return evolved:

He barely improved on that 33.5% mark until 2016, when he peaked at number three in the ATP rankings, and he couldn’t sustain it. His career RPW% went into the books at 33.9%.

Many of you, I’m sure, are ready to object: Lopez was never the pure athlete that Shelton is! Raonic certainly wasn’t, and he played through one injury after another. Fair enough–if there are natural gifts that make it more likely that a player develops a tour-average return game after arriving on tour, Ben probably has them. Tough to argue with that.

Still, the numbers are brutal. There have been 99 players who racked up 20 or more tour-level matches in their age-20 season since 1991. 22 of them never improved–they never won return points at a higher rate than they did when they were 20. Of the lucky ones who managed to do better at some point in their careers, their peak was, on average, 1.7 percentage points higher than their age 20 number. For Shelton, that’s a peak RPW% of 34.3%, well below the targets established above.

Of that group of 99 20-year-olds, one out of ten improved (eventually) by at least ten percent–not percentage points–a gain that would move Shelton up to 35.9%, essentially the border of where he needs to be for a top-three finish. Let’s not understate the difficulty of the task. Players who reach tour level by age 20 are extremely promising, almost without exception, and Ben needs to put himself in the top tenth of that group.

It’s not obvious why boosting your return-game results is so difficult, or so rare. (It’s harder than improving serve stats, but that’s a topic for another day.) One factor is that as you climb the rankings, you face tougher opponents, so even if your game gets better, your stats appear to stagnate. The median rank of Shelton’s opponents last year was 54.5. The same number for Andrey Rublev is 40, and Daniil Medvedev’s was 27.

Another reason is that returning is a young man’s game. The skills that contribute to the service return–vision, reaction time, quickness, speed–peak early. I have no doubt that Lopez, Raonic, and just about everybody else on tour worked hard to get more out of their return over the years, but many of their gains simply cancelled out the losses they suffered from the aging process.

Beyond RPW%

Sampras was famous for tanking some return games, then going all-out late in the set. The energy-saving strategy was time-tested, going back another half-century to the “Big Game” theories of Jack Kramer and his mentor Cliff Roche. If you hold your serve (almost) every time you toe the line, you only need to break once–or win the tiebreak. Why waste the effort on every return point?

Shelton doesn’t go quite that far; he rarely looks apathetic on return. But he clearly gets energized when an opportunity presents itself, or when he decides it’s time to create one. If a player can consistently play better in big moments, his RPW% won’t tell the whole story. Nick Krygios did this on break points, though it wasn’t enough to get him into the top ten.

There’s some evidence that Shelton does as well. If he always played the same way–the level that earned him 32.6% of his return points–a simple model would predict that he would break serve 13.3% of the time. Instead, he broke 16% of the time, a rate that the model would have predicted for a returner winning 34.4% of points. Still not top-three territory, but getting closer.

Isner often overcame his return woes by securing more tiebreaks than his first-twelve-game performance would have suggested. He won more than 60% of his career breakers, coming close to a 70% mark in two separate seasons. Shelton might be using similar tactics, but he isn’t yet getting the same sort of results: He went a modest 18-16 in tiebreaks last season.

What about break points? This is one area where Sampras noticeably stepped up his game. From 1991 to 2000, he won 44 more break points than expected, based on his return-point stats on non-break points. It’s not a huge advantage–about one extra break of serve every 16 matches–but most players break even. This is one way in which Pete’s RPW% understated his effectiveness on return.

Here, Shelton really shines. My model suggests that he “should” have won break points at a 35.0% clip last year, since on average, players win break points more frequently than other return points. (Break points arise more often against weaker servers.) Incredibly, Ben won more than 41% of his break point chances. Instead of 96 breaks of serve, he earned 114. Since 1991, only a few dozen players have ever outperformed break point expectations by such a wide margin for a full season. Sampras never did, though he once got close.

If Shelton can sustain that level of break-point play, we might as well make room for him in the Hall of Fame right now. A modest improvement in RPW%, combined with reliably clutch performance in the big moments, would move him into the Sampras/Roddick range, where big servers can break serve just enough to catapult to the top of the rankings.

But… it’s a big if. Sampras averaged just four or five extra breaks per season, and he’s one of the all-time greats. In 2003, James Blake also exceeded break-point expectations by a margin of 18. The next year his score was negative 5. Across 2,600 pairs of player-seasons, there’s virtually no correlation between break point performance one year and the next. Shelton may defy the odds, just as Isner rewrote the book on tiebreak performance. But the smart money says that he won’t be so lucky this year.

Where does this leave us? If we’re optimistic about Shelton’s athleticism, commitment, and coaching team, there’s reason to expect that he’ll eventually win more return points–though probably not enough to reach the 36% threshold that usually marks off the top three. If he proves able to execute Kramer/Sampras/Kyrgios tactics under pressure, that might be enough to make up the difference. If he can do that, and he can remain as fearsome a server as he already appears to be, we might have a multi-slam winner, a top-three, maybe even number one player on our hands. The ceiling is high, but the ladder is steep.

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First serve dominance

James Fawcette asks:

[At the United Cup] de Minaur lost only 1 point behind his first serve vs Djokovic, 33 of 34. Has anyone ever won every first serve point vs the then world number one in a completed match?

No!

Going back to 1991, when the ATP started keeping these stats, no one else lost only one, either. Here are the 18 matches in which a player lost three or fewer first-serve points against the world number one. In seven of the matches (noted with asterisks), all that big serving was for naught, and the favorite won anyway.

Tournament         Rd   Winner      Loser       Lost     
2024 United Cup    QF   de Minaur   Djokovic       1     
1992 Tour Finals   RR   Ivanisevic  Courier        2     
1993 Osaka         QF   Courier     Raoux          2  *  
1993 Tour Finals   RR   Sampras     Bruguera       2  *  
1996 Dusseldorf    RR   Kafelnikov  Sampras        2     
2000 Miami         SF   Kuerten     Agassi         2     
2002 Hamburg       QF   Safin       Hewitt         2     
2008 Indian Wells  SF   Fish        Federer        2     
2011 Tour Finals   RR   Ferrer      Djokovic       2     
1992 Paris         QF   Becker      Courier        3     
1992 Brussels      R16  Courier     Leconte        3  *  
1996 Tour Finals   SF   Sampras     Ivanisevic     3  *  
2000 Scottsdale    R16  Clavet      Agassi         3     
2002 Rome          R32  Moya        Hewitt         3     
2008 Halle         SF   Federer     Kiefer         3  *  
2008 Olympics      R64  Federer     Tursunov       3  *  
2010 Tour Finals   F    Federer     Nadal          3     
2018 Canada        R32  Nadal       Paire          3  *

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New toys

Yesterday I added two new features to Tennis Abstract. First, there’s a list of today’s birthdays:

Second, there’s a “Bakery Report” (one each for men and women) with comprehensive stats on 6-0 and 6-1 sets won and lost:

The birthday list will update daily, and the bakery report will refresh every Monday, expect in the middle of grand slams.

Enjoy!

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