Credit: Hanson K Joseph
I’m counting down the 128 best players of the last century. Separation anxiety is starting to set in…
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Novak Djokovic [SRB]Born: 22 May 1987
Career: 2005-present
Plays: Right-handed (two-handed backhand)
Peak rank: 1 (2011)
Peak Elo rating: 2,470 (1st place, 2016)
Major singles titles: 21
Total singles titles: 91
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It’s easy to forget, but Novak Djokovic’s first tennis-playing hero was Pete Sampras. The first match Novak saw on television was the 1993 Wimbledon final, Pete’s first title at the All-England Club. Sampras overcame compatriot Jim Courier in four sets in a classic battle of offense versus defense.
After working with the six-year-old Djokovic for just three days, coach Jelena Genčić pronounced him a “golden child.” It took a bit longer to convince the boy to give up his Sampras-style one-handed backhand.
Djokovic pays tribute to Pete’s legacy just as sincerely as Roger Federer does, even if Fed’s game style and records are more closely associated with the American. Novak told Sampras’s biographer, Steve Flink:
In the moments when most players would break down, [Pete] was the guy that showed the resilience and mental strength and the laser-like focus that separated him from everyone else and made him an all-time great.
We all know which moments Djokovic is talking about. Sampras was famous for his knack for erasing break points with one pinpoint serve, not to mention his prowess in tiebreaks. Courier told Flink that Pete would come alive at 4-all, that “he could summon his greatness late in a set.”
Novak has the same ability. For me, the quintessential Djokovic experience is a tight set on a hard court, a feisty underdog–let’s say David Goffin–staying even through eight games. Then, at 4-all, the Serbian finds a new level. A backhand down the line, maybe a couple of forced errors, a serve that registers a tick faster than anything he’s struck all day… in five minutes, a dead heat at 4-4 becomes a routine 6-4 set. If the man across the net is up for a battle, the second set might go the same way. Otherwise, it’s already over.
In other words, exactly the treatment Courier remembers getting from Sampras.
When we run the numbers, though, we find that the parallels only take us so far. 4-all–or any score at the business end of a set, for that matter–is not where Novak most reliably raises his game. To become the greatest player of the most demanding era of men’s tennis history, Djokovic backs himself in games that Pete ignored.
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To face Djokovic is to spend a couple of hours–awkward, self-doubting hours–on the back foot. It’s even worse than that, because for all your struggles, he’s never off-balance himself.
It starts from the first point. Heaven forbid you win the toss and choose to serve. Heh.
Novak’s equivalent of Sampras’s 4-all is, improbably enough, returning to start a set, at love-all. The Match Charting Project has logged every point of 435 Djokovic matches, from his 2005 Australian Open defeat to Marat Safin through his full title run in Turin last month. The resulting dataset allows us to determine how well he performs at each game score, relative to his showing in the match as a whole.
In the typical charted match, Djokovic won about 41% of his return points. His career mark is a bit higher, at 42%, but the data is skewed slightly toward more important clashes with tougher opponents. In 751 return games at love-all, he won 44.5% of points. That’s almost exactly the same as his season-long rate in 2011–the greatest season in decades, at least until he complicated the discussion with his 2015 campaign.
I apologize if you’ve heard me say this too many times before: That difference of three percentage points may sound small, but due to the small margins in tennis, it’s enormous. Setting aside extreme players like Reilly Opelka, the entire tour wins return points at rates within about ten percentage points of each other.
In practical terms, the set-starting boost makes it that much more likely that Djokovic’s opponent begins at a disadvantage. Grabbing 41% of return points translates into breaking serve about 29% of the time, already a fearsome figure. Upping that number to 44.5% means breaking 36% of the time. Commentators don’t talk about break percentage much, so the visceral impact of that number isn’t what it should be. Nobody breaks at 36%.
Well, except Novak in 2011. And Rafael Nadal in a couple of his best seasons. That’s what the tour has had to face in the first game against Djokovic for more than 15 years.
The Serbian’s other strongest games also come relatively early in the set, especially if he finds himself in a hole. He gets a similar three-percentage point boost when returning at 2-4. He gains about two and a half points returning at 2-3. His numbers are in the same range serving and returning at 0-3, but that’s such a rare occurence that it’s tough to draw conclusions from the limited data.
For the most part, Djokovic performs at his usual level–no higher–in the games we traditional think of as clutch, like 3-all, 4-all, and so on. He even gets a little shaky at 5-all and serving at 5-6, though the effect isn’t as dramatically negative as the love-all trend in the other direction. By that point in the set, we might be seeing the effect of opponents bringing out their own big guns.
More likely than a struggle at 5-all, though, is an end to the set before things get that far. Novak has won 76% of his sets at tour level, a figure that increased to a barely comprehensible 84% in 2015. He’s just as good as Federer in tiebreaks, but he’s played less than two-thirds as many.
The only thing better than the ability to raise your game in the clutch is to avoid high-pressure situations and win anyway.
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It’s tempting to read Djokovic’s early-set performance as a sign that he’s a man in a hurry. As a junior, he had very little margin for error, and he rarely had the luxury of time.
Novak trained with Genčić–also an early guide for Monica Seles and Goran Ivanišević–throughout the NATO bombing of Belgrade in 1999. They chose courts in areas that had been recently attacked, reasoning that the enemy would choose other targets for a little while.
At 12, he went to Germany to work with former pro Niki Pilić, who typically limited his academy to students 14 and over. Even as the youngest boy in camp, Djokovic stood out as the most diligent, the most serious about his future. He recognized that his family’s fortunes depended on him. His father, Srdjan, borrowed money from loan sharks to fund his development.
Raising a tennis star is not cheap for anyone, but neither the Federers nor the Nadals ever faced financial ruin. Novak’s family gambled it all. The situation was dicey enough that Djokovic–a devoted and vocal patriot–considered taking funding from the Lawn Tennis Association and playing for Great Britain. When he reached the quarter-finals at Roland Garros in 2006–losing to Rafa in the first of their 59 meetings–the result was as much a relief for its six-figure prize money as it was an encouragement that his game was moving in the right direction.
Even before the 19-year-old made that breakthrough, the secret was out. A famous story has Toni Nadal watching just a few minutes of the Serbian’s play at Wimbledon in 2005 before going to find his nephew. “Rafael,” he said, “we have a problem.”
The Nadals were among the first to recognize how much of a threat Djokovic posed. Soon enough, Novak would be everyone’s problem.
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The key word used to describe Djokovic’s greatness is “complete.” Aside from some early, unpredictable health issues, he has never really had a weakness. His two-handed backhand has long been the best in the game, and while none of his other weapons rank quite so high, there’s no respite for an enterprising opponent. There’s nothing to expose.
More important than the strokes are Novak’s anticipation and movement. He is able to play a bruising baseline game on a fast court without giving up ground. Highlight reels tend to emphasize his gumby-like ability to stretch for groundstrokes. More often, he’s already there.
Djokovic’s anticipation is most evident on his return of serve. There are basically two ways to be a great returner. One is to play deep, get the serve back in play, then grind out return points. That–broadly speaking–is the Nadal approach. The other strategy is to step up, swing big, and hope for the best. Call that the Andre Agassi method.
Both approaches can be described in statistical terms. The stereotypical clay-court grinder gets a lot of serves back in play, but he doesn’t win an overwhelming number of those points. Swing-and-pray guys don’t get many returns back, but when they find the range, the success rate is high.
Novak comes as close as anyone to reaping the advantages of both extremes. Again we can draw on Match Charting Project data. Djokovic puts 71% of his returns in play, better than–to name just two more conservative examples–Dominic Thiem or Alexander Zverev. When he gets the ball back, Novak wins 52% of points. Of the 30 guys with the most extensive charting data, that’s second only to Agassi. And Andre landed just 63% of his returns.
Here’s a graph that shows the percentage of returns put in play (horizontal axis) and win rate when the point was prolonged (vertical axis). The nearer you are to the upper right corner, the closer you’ve come to tennis nirvana.
Djokovic and Nadal are roughly equals here. Both men have won just over 42% of career return points. The Match Charting Project data gives them lower numbers (as it does for most of the players shown here) because it is less likely to include routine, lopsided matches. Novak has a healthy edge on hard courts, while Rafa leads by a few percentage points on clay. There’s no one optimal strategy. If you can figure out a third way to win 42% of your return points, by all means do it. Feel free to send me a share of your prize money.
The point is, of the most effective returners, Novak is the one who splits the difference between staying safe and swinging big. Or, more accurately, he is able to play both ways as the situation demands. He can chip back a return and grind out a long rally against Andy Murray. He can swing away at a Stan Wawrinka bomb and flat-foot the Swiss player with a winner.
Yes, Nadal can also go for broke, and Agassi had it in him to play more conservatively. But no one has ever balanced the two return tactics so successfully.
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You can see which strategy Djokovic prefers when he gets a crack at a second serve. He neutralizes second-chance deliveries so effectively that he turns them into what some commentators have called his “third serve.”
The witty tag is more than just a figure of speech. He converts defense to offense in a meaningful way. In a point between average players, the server starts with an edge, and the returner works his way to even terms as he gets more balls back in play. Around the sixth stroke of the rally, the server’s advantage is erased.
When an opponent misses his first serve against Djokovic, the edge is gone, never to return. In his career on hard courts, Novak has won 56% of second-serve return points. In the thirty-plus years that the ATP has maintained these stats, only Agassi is better. Even Andre would probably give up the top spot if we added his missing numbers from 1986-90, years for which these numbers aren’t available.
Djokovic’s return is so potent that he forces servers to fight their way into their own points. When I first analyzed this subject in 2013, I limited my view to a handful of elite opponents. Against Nadal, Wawrinka, and Juan Martín del Potro, Novak got the most value from his first two shots after the serve. The other men saw their results improve the longer that return points lasted. Djokovic, by contrast, essentially reset the point with one swing of the racket, then waited to see if the man across the net could fight his way back in. The majority of the time, even these big-hitting opponents weren’t able to do so.
The underlying skills that go into such an effective, aggressive return game–eyesight, anticipation, footwork–would seem to make it a young man’s game. Yet in 2022, Novak led the tour by winning 55.8% of his second-serve return points. Almost every player lands in the same ten-percentage-point range, but he outpaced the field with a 1.4-point advantage.
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The end result of a complete player with a relentless return game? Winning. Lots and lots of winning.
Djokovic, as you surely know, owns 21 major titles. He has at least two at every slam. In another era, he might have been as successful at Roland Garros as he is at Melbourne Park. While he is most dangerous on a hard court, he has been the second-best clay courter on tour for more than a decade.
Most impressive to me is Novak’s ability to take on each one of the best players in the game–regardless of surface–and consistently come out on top. You might remember early last year, when Daniil Medvedev won eleven straight matches against top-tenners. Pretty good! Djokovic did that too, in 2014-15. Except that was his seventh-longest such streak. Novak owns five of the eight longest top-ten win streaks since 1985, including one in 2015-16 that reached 17 victories.
Oh, and he’s got another one going. Since losing to Nadal at the French, he’s won eight straight against the likes of Medvedev, Stefanos Tsitsipas, and Casper Ruud.
It’s so much winning sometimes that fans don’t quite know what to do with him. After Djokovic secured the Australian Open in 2008, Sports Illustrated called it “Wii tennis.” Nick Bollettieri, in a 2015 column praising every aspect of Novak’s game, described him as “the most perfect tennis machine.”
The talk of machines and videogames was an obvious contrast to the “religious experience” of watching Federer or the red-streaked guts of Nadal.
With Federer and Nadal monopolizing both headlines and fan affection, spectators missed the things that would humanize the Serbian. His history made him as much of an underdog as any champion of his era. His early-career retirements, had he communicated better, could have made him a figure of sympathy instead of derision. He has always been the most plain-spoken of the Big Three and the most likely to cut loose in public.
But by the time he overcame Roger and Rafa–emphatically–in 2011, most fans had already picked a side. Djokovic snuck off with matches that Federer should have won at the US Open, striking his most significant service return of all to save a match point in 2011. In the same 12-month span, he won seven straight decisions against Nadal–all of them finals, two of them on clay. The Maestro and the Matador were supposed to be the greatest we’d ever seen. Yet as we settled in to watch the rivalry unfold, the heroes were confronted with an even stronger foe.
The problem with rooting against Novak, though, is that you risk blinding yourself to magnificence. Ignore the “machine”–if you insist on seeing him that way–and focus on the heights his game can reach. No one has ever sustained such an astounding level on a tennis court. For fifteen years, we’ve been the ones lucky enough to see it.
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