Category: Records

Round Robin Shutouts

At this year’s World Tour Finals, we were spared the knottiest sort of round robin tiebreakers.  Each group had a clear winner (Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic) who went undefeated, along with another player (David Ferrer and Richard Gasquet) who failed to win a single match.

Since 1987, 33 players have recorded a 3-0 record in Tour Finals round-robin play.  This year is the first time since 2010 (Nadal and Roger Federer) that two players have done so, and before that, we have to go back to 2005 (Federer and Nikolay Davydenko).  It’s not that rare of an event–this year is the 11th time since 1987 that two players have beaten every opponent in their group.

Undefeated players are hardly guaranteed further advances, however.  Those 33 undefeated competitors have a mere 17-16 record in the semifinals, and the 17 men who reached the final won the title only nine times, against nine final-round losses.  (Twice, two undefeated players faced off in the finals–the aforementioned 2010 event along with 1993, when Michael Stich and Pete Sampras contested the title.)

The tiny sample of three round-robin matches pales in predictive value next to the old standby of ATP ranking.  In the last 26 years, the higher-ranked player has won 16 finals.  In the more top-heavy 21st century, the title has gone to the man with the superior ranking 11 of 13 times.  (Advantage: Nadal.)

That said, the gap between the two finalists is traditionally greater than it is expected to be tomorrow.  (If Stanislas Wawrinka upsets Novak Djokovic in the second semifinal, you can disregard this paragraph.  Sorry, Stan, but I’m betting against you.)  Only twice in the round-robin era have the top two players in the ATP rankings met in the concluding match of the Tour Finals–2010 (again) and 2012 (Djokovic d. Federer).

Not a shutout, but shut out

Exactly as many players–33 through 2012–have gone 0-3 in the round robin as the number who did the opposite.  Ferrer and Gasquet find themselves in quality company.

Ferrer is the 7th player ranked in the top three to lose three round robin matches.  In 2001, #1 Gustavo Kuerten was winless, only a year after claiming the championship.  Jim Courier (1993), Juan Carlos Ferrero (2003), and Nadal (2009) went 0-3 from a #2 ranking, while Thomas Muster (1995) and Djokovic (2007) did so while ranked #3.

Ferrer is notable for another dubious achievement: going 0-3 twice.  He previously did so in 2010, so this year, he matches the mark of Michael Chang, the only other man in the round-robin era to post multiple 0-3s, having gone winless in both 1989 and 1992.

His age may work against him, but there is a glimmer of hope for Ferrer.  Four players (including Kuerten, mentioned above) have gone 0-3 at one Tour Finals and won the title at another.  Andre Agassi was winless in 1989, then won the event in 1990.  Stich was 0-3 in 1991, then claimed the title in 1993.  As we’ve seen, Djokovic failed to win a single match in 2007, yet came back to win the tournament in 2008.  (Then did so again last year.)

If Nadal wins tomorrow, we can add one more name to this list, in his case finally adding the trophy to his collection four years after suffering through a winless week.  His 4-0 record so far this week may be no guarantee of success in the final, but it will hardly count against him.

—

Match reports: I charted today’s Federer-Nadal semifinal, as well as yesterday’s Federer-del Potro match.  Click the links for exhaustive serve, return, and shot statistics.

Worth a read: Carl Bialik analyzes ATP rematches–pairings like Fed-Delpo that faced off in back-to-back weeks.  As usual, we have to rewrite the rules for Rafa.

Can Rafael Nadal Win Seventeen Slams?

Rafael Nadal just won his thirteenth Grand Slam.  He’s 27 years old.  If he wins four more, he’ll match Roger Federer. If he wins five more, he’ll set a new all-time record. (Assuming, of course, that Roger is done. No guarantees there.)

Can Rafa do it?  I think he can, and while he is one of a kind, there are some historical precedents that suggest he will.

Before diving into the numbers, there’s the argument I’ve always used in favor of Nadal piling up plenty of Slams.  They hold the French Open every year.  Each clay season that Rafa is healthy and playing like Rafa, he’s probably going to add at least one title to the list.

He’ll be just shy of his 28th birthday at the 2014 French Open, meaning that if he keeps winning every match he plays at Roland Garros, he’ll have four more French Open titles right about the time he turns 31, at the 2017 French Open.  With what seems like half the tour playing quality tennis at age 30, and with Rafa aggressively skipping events this year, it’s easy to imagine him winning four more Slams on clay.

Or seven more.  As long as he can stay healthy enough to play on his favorite surface, one gets the sense it’s up to him.

Setting aside Rafa’s historic dominance in Paris, a look at other modern-era players who have piled up Grand Slam titles suggests that 27 or 28 is hardly the end of the road.

In the last 40 years, only 25 Slam titles have gone to players over the age of 27 and a half.  But an awful lot of those 25 titles have been claimed by players who–like Nadal–had already put together quite the resume.

In search of precedents, I looked at the six other players who have won the most Grand Slams in the Open era.  To make the list, you need at least eight.  Of those, only Bjorn Borg failed to win at least one after his 27th birthday.  (Borg, of course, was basically out of tennis at 26.)  The other five each won at least three when they were older than Nadal is now.

Federer won four of his 17 from the age of 27 and 10 months.  Pete Sampras won three from the age of 27 and 11 months.  Ivan Lendl won three of his eight slams from the age of 27 and a half.  Jimmy Connors had only won five of his eight slams by the age of 29 and 10 months.  Andre Agassi won five of his eight slams after turning 29.

In other words, the players who came closest to matching Nadal’s level of  achievement had plenty left in the tank for the last few years of their careers.  And most of these players accomplished these feats in eras when 30 year olds weren’t nearly as successful as they are right now.

Average these six players, and we find that they won 23% of their slams after turning 27.  (More, if Federer wins another.)  If Nadal matches that number, he’ll have won four more, tying Roger’s all-time record.

It seems likely that Rafa will defy–and improve upon–history in at least one way: by showing that Roland Garros can be won by a “old” player.  Since 1974, only four French Open titlists have won the tournament while older than Nadal is now.  Lendl and Federer did it age 27, Agassi won at 29, and Andres Gomez won at 30.  Every other Slam has had more winners in this age bracket.

But with Nadal’s performance this year, dominating on both clay and hard courts, it seems foolish to point to any precedent that suggests he might soon falter at the French.

While there’s no such thing as guaranteed Grand Slam titles–surely Novak Djokovic would have something to say about that, even in Paris–the evidence strongly points to at least a few more for the King of Clay.  And as the newly-minted King of North American Hard, Nadal is well positioned to win five more and claim the all-time record.

Guaranteed Five-Setters, Exhausting Routes to R4, and Master Bakers

With so many of the world’s top players in action yesterday, it’s only fitting to lead with Denis Istomin and Andreas Seppi.

Istomin and Seppi have now met four times in the last 15 months, all at Grand Slams.  And thanks to yesterday’s effort, they’ve now gone five sets in all four of those matches.

Cue the chorus: “That’s got to be some kind of record, right?”

Yep, it is.  While their US Open third-rounder was Seppi and Istomin’s seventh meeting overall, it was only their fourth at a major, meaning that each time they’ve met in the best-of-five format, they’ve gone the distance.  Two pairs of players (Thomas Muster and Albert Costa, and Guillermo Canas and Gaston Gaudio) have met three times in a best-of-five and reached a decider each time, but no two players had ever gone four-for-four.

In fact, Seppi and Istomin are only the eighth pairing in the Open era to record four or more five-setters.  Petr Korda and Pete Sampras played four five-setters in five matchups, but their first such meeting, a 1992 Davis Cup match, only went four sets.  Radek Stepanek and David Ferrer are also close, having played four five-setters in five best-of-five meetings.

Most of the pairs that have played so many five-setters required many more meetings to do so.  You might be familiar with some of the guys who make up the three head-to-heads that have played five five-setters: Jimmy Connors–John McEnroe, Stefan Edberg–Ivan Lendl, and Roger Federer–Rafael Nadal.  But all of those pairs met more than 10 times in best-of-five situations.  In this context, all those three- and four-setters seem rather weak.

When the Australian Open draw comes out, while everyone else figures out whose quarter Federer landed in, I’ll be checking Seppi’s proximity to Istomin.

—

When Marcel Granollers edged by Tim Smyczek in five sets yesterday, the big story was the futility of American men’s tennis.  (Thankfully, for the depressed patriots among us, Sloane Stephens was putting up a spirited challenge against Serena Williams on another court.)

However, the Spaniard was making a bit of history of his own.  In beating Jurgen Zopp, Rajeev Ram, and Smyczek, he’s won three five-setters in his first three rounds, becoming only the 15th man to do so in the Open era, the first since Janko Tipsarevic did so at Wimbledon in 2007.  It’s only the third time someone has done it at the US Open.  The last man to do so in New York was Wayne Ferreira, in 1993.

Amazingly, three players have gone five sets in each of their first four matches in a slam.  The last such occurrence was when Dominik Hrbaty reached the fourth round at the Australian, in 2006.  He fell to Nikolay Davydenko in the fourth round.

This is one bit of history that Granollers surely won’t be making.  As remarkable as it is to reach the fourth round of the back of all those five-setters, it isn’t a good sign when you lose two sets apiece to three players ranked outside the top 100.

It certainly doesn’t bode well when your next opponent is Novak Djokovic.

—

As Federer, Nadal and Djokovic plow their way through the early rounds this year, none is wasting any time.  All three players have posted a 6-0 set in their second- or third-round matches, exclamation points amidst broader displays of dominance.

A quick check of the database reveals yet another category in which Federer is charging toward the top.  The Open era record for bagel sets won at Grand Slams is held by Andre Agassi, who retired with 49.  Fed’s bagel of Adrian Mannarino on Saturday was the 43rd of his career.

Here is the all-time list:

Player           Slam bagels  
Andre Agassi              49  
Roger Federer             43  
Ivan Lendl                42  
Jimmy Connors             41  
Bjorn Borg                35  
Guillermo Vilas           29  
John Mcenroe              29  
Stefan Edberg             25  
Boris Becker              23  
Rafael Nadal              22  
Novak Djokovic            21

Andy Murray is tied for 19th, with 16.

This is one category which highlights the extreme dominance of some of the greatest female players in history.  Chris Evert puts Agassi, Federer, and everyone else to shame, with a record 104 Grand Slam bagels.  Serena Williams’s first-round defeat of Francesca Schiavone moved her past Arantxa Sanchez Vicario into fifth place on the all-time list:

Player                   Slam bagels  
Chris Evert                      104  
Steffi Graf                       74  
Martina Navratilova               70  
Monica Seles                      51 
Serena Williams                   49 
Arantxa Sanchez Vicario           47  
Margaret Court                    44  
Gabriela Sabatini                 44  
Lindsay Davenport                 43  
Maria Sharapova                   41

With a quarterfinal matchup against Carla Suarez Navarro, it’s possible Serena isn’t done for the year.  Each of the two previous times the two women have played, Williams has won a 6-0 set.

Rules for Records

Every tennis record comes with an asterisk.

What we’re mainly interested in are achievements at the top level of the men’s or women’s game.  I often use the term “tour-level” as shorthand for this, kind of like saying “Major Leagues” for baseball to cover the American League, National League, and a handful of long-ago defunct organizations.  It disguises unnecessary complexity and allows to get to the point.

For men’s tennis, “tour-level” generally means all ATP events, plus grand slams, plus Davis Cup.  Excluded are challengers, futures, and qualifying at all levels.  Usually we limit consideration to the professional era, though if we’re talking only about Slams, there’s no artificial start date.

Which Davis Cup matches? Grigor Dimitrov is 16-9 this year, but two of those wins were in Davis Cup Group 2 against Finns outside of the top 900.  Should we exclude Group 2?  (The ATP does.) How about Group 1? (The ATP doesn’t.)  How about any rubber when the opponent is outside the top 200?

And therein lies a major problem, and one that is not limited to records and streaks.  The level of a tennis match is not defined by the ranking points on offer; its difficulty is determined by the quality of the opponent.  In the middle of Robin Haase’s 15-month streak of lost tour-level tiebreaks, the Dutchman did win a breaker, in Rome qualifying against 81st-ranked Sergiy Stakhovsky.  It doesn’t “count.”  But a main-draw match one month later against 640th-ranked Mate Pavic does.

There’s no good solution.  It isn’t a matter of tennis’s “analytics problem,” it is a reflection of the structure of the sport.

Robin Haase’s Unlucky 13 Tiebreaks

Yesterday, Robin Haase lost a second-set tiebreak to Kenny De Schepper, a mere blip en route to a three-set victory and a place in the Casablanca quarterfinals.  However, it was yet another set-ending failure for the Dutchman, who has now lost thirteen consecutive tour-level tiebreaks.  And another reason to hate Casablanca.

Yes, thirteen.  No other active player has a streak of more than seven, and no tour-level regular has lost more than his last six.  In fact, Haase is now one lost tiebreak away from tying the all-time ATP record of 14, jointly held by Graham Stilwell and Colin Dibley, two players who accomplished their feats in the 1970s.

As I’ve shown before, tiebreak outcomes are rather random. Aside from a small minority of players with extensive tiebreak experience (such as Roger Federer, John Isner, and Andy Roddick), ATP pros tend to win about as many breakers as “expected.” The good players win more than average, the not-so-good players win fewer than average, but there are few players who seem to have some special tiebreak skill–or a notable lack thereof.

It would be premature, then, to read too much into Haase’s streak.  After all, the last fifteen months haven’t been particularly bad for him in general.  When he last won a tour-level tiebreak, in January of last year, he was ranked 62nd in the world.  Now he is #53, and he will pick up another few spots next Monday.  This despite winning only two of the matches in which he lost one of his consecutive tiebreaks.

If history is any guide, the Dutchman will probably turn things around.  Dibley won six of the 10 breakers that followed his streak, and Stilwell won four. Nikolay Davydenko and Thomas Johansson, two otherwise excellent players who lost 13 tiebreaks in a row, each won 5 of their next 10.  More remarkably, the already-missed Ivan Navarro followed a 10-tiebreak losing streak with a 8-2 record in his next 10.

In the ATP era, 43 players have suffered tiebreak losing streaks of 10 or more (full list after the jump).  32 of those have gone on to play at least 10 more.  Naturally, every tiebreak that follows a losing streak is a win, or else it would be considered part of the streak.  In the nine tiebreaks that follow the streak-breaking win, those 32 players won 134 of 288 tiebreaks, or 46.5%.

While the numbers don’t exactly presage Isnerian greatness for Haase, even a return to his pre-streak tiebreak winning percentage of 41% would be welcome.  Fortunately, that’s much more likely than another 13 losses in a row.

Update: In the Barcelona first round, Haase tied the record, losing a third-set tiebreak to Pablo Carreno-Busta.  On May 6, he lost a tiebreak in the second set of his Madrid first-round match against Alexander Dolgopolov to set a new all-time record of 15 straight lost tiebreaks.

Update 2: On 8 May, Haase lost to Jo-Wilfried Tsonga, 7-6 7-6. (How else?) That’s 17 straight tour-level tiebreaks lost.  The all-time tiebreak winning streak is 18, held by Andy Roddick.

Update 3: On 27 May, in the second set of his first round match at Roland Garros, Haase WON A TIEBREAK. The historical event came against Kenny de Schepper, the Frenchman who appears in the first line of this post.

Continue reading Robin Haase’s Unlucky 13 Tiebreaks

Federer, Nadal, and Semifinal-or-Later Streaks

The Indian Wells men’s draw has been released, and a big question has been answered.  Rafael Nadal, about as dangerous a floater as can be imagined with a #5 seed, landed in Roger Federer‘s quarter.  (Sorry Roger, it had to happen to someone, and David Ferrer has suffered enough lately.)

If Fed and Rafa both win three matches, they’ll face each other in a quarterfinal match.  That’s something that’s never happened before.  The pair has met 28 times, 26 of them in a semifinal or final.  The only exceptions are their first match in 2004, when Nadal was seeded 32nd in Miami, and a round-robin pairing at the 2011 tour finals.  Ignoring the round-robin, that’s 26 matches in a row in one of the last two rounds of an event.

That’s a historically great streak, but it’s not the record.  In fact, one player is a part of two streaks–the only two streaks–that are better.

Jimmy Connors is 1st, with 28 consecutive semis or finals against Ivan Lendl, and 2nd, with 27 consecutive semis or finals against (who else?) John McEnroe.  He’s also eighth (21 straight against Bjorn Borg) and 12th (14 with Ilie Nastase).

Until the threat of this week’s draw, Federer and Nadal were right on Connors’s tail.  If Roger and Rafa meet in the quarters, the heir presumptive pair will have to include Novak Djokovic.

Here’s the all-time top ten:

Streak  Player1          Player2           
28      Jimmy Connors    Ivan Lendl        
27      Jimmy Connors    John McEnroe      
26      Rafael Nadal     Roger Federer     
23      Rafael Nadal     Novak Djokovic    
22      Stefan Edberg    Boris Becker      
22      Roger Federer    Novak Djokovic    
22      John McEnroe     Ivan Lendl        
21      Bjorn Borg       Jimmy Connors     
19      Stefan Edberg    Ivan Lendl        
17      Ivan Lendl       Boris Becker

If Nadal stays #5 for long (unlikely as that seems), both the all-time #3 and #4 streaks could be halted.  But as long as Federer stays within the top four, the current #6 streak will climb the rankings.

Of course, there are a couple of other combinations with the potential to crack this list, even reach the top:

Streak  Player1         Player2        
11      Andy Murray     Roger Federer  
10      Novak Djokovic  Andy Murray

But we shouldn’t get ahead of ourselves.  It took five years for Fed and Nadal to get from 11 up to 26.  As the top of the list shows, it takes two consistently great players to put together a streak like this.

All is not lost, though.  If they play in the quarters, they’ll just have to shift their focus to a new record: consecutive meetings in quarterfinals or later.  27 straight would put them behind Connors-McEnroe (32), Connors-Lendl (29), and one pair they’re unlikely to chase down: Nadal-Djokovic (29).

Nick Kyrgios and the Youngest Challenger Titlists

Last week at the Sydney Challenger, 17-year-old Nick Kyrgios won the title while only dropping a single set.  The young man has been on quite the run, first winning the Australian Open boy’s singles title, reaching the semifinals at his first challenger, then winning in Sydney.

Claiming a title at this level–even against a relatively weak challenger field like that in Sydney–is an impressive feat for any teenager, let alone a 17-year-0ld playing only his second challenger.  And while much has been made of the increasing age of the top ATP contenders, winning a challenger at 17 has never been a common feat.

In fact, this is only the 27th time it has happened, and Kyrgios is only the 16th man to do it.  The list he joins of previous 16- and 17-year-old winners is littered with some of the game’s contemporary greats.  (On Twitter earlier, I offered slightly different numbers; I mistakenly included Donald Young, who won a challenger on his 18th birthday.)

See below for the full list, or click here for a sortable table.

Date      Tournament         Winner                  Age  
20130225  Sydney CH          Nick Kyrgios           17.8  
20100201  Burnie CH          Bernard Tomic          17.3  
20090223  Melbourne CH       Bernard Tomic          16.4  
20060731  Segovia CH         Juan Martin Del Potro  17.9  
20060403  Aguascalientes CH  Juan Martin Del Potro  17.5  
20051031  Montevideo CH      Juan Martin Del Potro  17.1  
20051031  Aachen CH          Evgeny Korolev         17.7  
20050509  San Remo CH        Novak Djokovic         18.0 [17.98]  
20041101  Aachen CH          Novak Djokovic         17.5  
20040517  Budapest CH        Novak Djokovic         17.0  
20030922  Grenoble CH        Richard Gasquet        17.3  
20030811  Graz CH            Tomas Berdych          17.9  
20030728  Segovia CH         Rafael Nadal           17.2  
20030714  Olbia CH           Nicolas Almagro        17.9  
20030714  Budaors CH         Tomas Berdych          17.8  
20030623  Reggio Emilia CH   Richard Gasquet        17.0  
20030421  Napoli CH          Richard Gasquet        16.9  
20030324  Barletta CH        Rafael Nadal           16.8  
20030310  Sarajevo CH        Richard Gasquet        16.7  
20020701  Montauban CH       Richard Gasquet        16.0  
20020513  Fergana CH         Jimmy Wang             17.3  
20020204  Belgrade CH        Mario Ancic            17.9  
20000515  Samarkand CH       Mikhail Youzhny        17.9  
19981207  Perth CH           Lleyton Hewitt         17.8  
19970908  Espinho CH         Marat Safin            17.6  
19950306  Garmisch CH        Nicolas Kiefer         17.7  
19920803  Ribeirao CH        Gabriel Silberstein    17.8

Jerzy Janowicz and the Frequency of Tiebreak Shutouts

In Marseille this week, Jerzy Janowicz played two dominant tiebreaks.  In his second-round win over Julien Benneteau, he put away the first set with a 7-0 breaker en route to a straight-set victory.  In the quarterfinals, he won another 7-0 tiebreak to even his match with Tomas Berdych before falling in three.

Amazingly, this is not the first time anyone on the ATP tour has won two tiebreaks by a score of 7-0 in back-to-back matches.  It is, however, the first time it’s been done in best-of-3 matches.  In 1992, Brad Gilbert won both his 2nd- and 3rd-round contests at the US Open in five sets, winning 7-0 tiebreaks in the 5th set both times.  If that’s not a case for fifth-set tiebreaks at slams, I don’t know what is.

Janowicz’s accomplishment and Gilbert’s feat are the only two times anyone on tour has won two shutout breakers in the same event.  That’s not much of a surprise, since there are typically fewer than 25 such tiebreaks at tour level per year.

What’s particularly odd here is that Jerzy’s two shutouts weren’t the only ones in Marseille.  In the first round, wild card Lucas Pouille was 7-0’d by Benneteau, the same guy who Janowicz victimized first. Weirdly, both losing and winning 7-0 breakers in the same event is slightly more common than winning two.  It has happened three times before, most recently at the 2009 Belgrade event by Lukasz Kubot, who shut out Karlovic in a semifinal tiebreak then got 7-0’d by Novak Djokovic in the final.

Finally, while we’re wallowing in trivia, here’s one more.  Only once has a player lost two 7-0 tiebreaks at the same event.  This is quite the feat, because to pull it off, you have to win the first match despite losing a set in painful fashion.  The only man to do it is Simone Bollelli, who beat Dmitri Tursunov in the 2nd round of the 2007 Miami Masters despite losing the first set in a 7-0 tiebreak, then lost in the 3rd to David Ferrer, who threw in another tiebreak bagel on the way to straight-set win.

Rare, but not rare enough

Shutout tiebreaks don’t occur very often, but they occur more often than we might expect.  On tour since 1991, there have been 30,259 tiebreaks, and 524 of them–about 1.7%–have been by the score of 7-0.  That’s barely more than the number that end 11-9.

However, if we assume that players who reach a tiebreak are reasonably equal, that’s almost double the frequency we would expect.  A discrepancy like that has serious implications about player consistency.

The arithmetic here is simple.  Say that both players have a 70% chance of winning a point on serve.  In order to win a tiebreak 7-0, the player who serves first must win three points serving and four points returning.  The probability of pulling that off is about (0.7^3)(0.3^4) = 0.28%.  It’s easier if you serve second.  You must win four points serving and three returning: (0.7^4)(0.3^3) = 0.65%.  In this scenario, both players have equal skills, so each one has the same chance of winning 7-0, and the chance of the breaker ending in a shutout is the sum of those two probabilities, 0.93%.

Of course, this simple model obscures a lot of things.  First, players who reach a tiebreak aren’t necessary equal.  Just last month, Bernard Tomic got to 6-6 against Roger Federer, and even more recently, Martin Alund played a tiebreak against Rafael Nadal.  Second, any competitor’s level of play fluctuates, and some guys seem to fluctuate quite a bit when the pressure is on.

Still, the gap between predicted (no more than 0.93%) and observed (1.7%) is enormous.  To predict that 1.7% of tiebreaks would end in a 7-0, we’d need to start with much more extreme assumptions.  For instance, if one player is likely to win 77% of serve points and the other only 64% of serve points, the likelihood of a 7-0 tiebreak is 1.7%.  Those assumptions also imply that, if each man kept up the same level of play all day, the better player has a 93% chance of winning the match.  Perhaps true of Nadal/Alund or even Federer/Tomic, but certainly not Janowicz/Benneteau or Janowicz/Berdych, or most of the other matches that reach a tiebreak.

This is all a roundabout way of saying that–breaking news!–players are inconsistent. Or streaky, or clutch, or unclutch … pick your favorite.  Were players machines, 7-0 tiebreaks wouldn’t come around nearly as often.  As it is, we shouldn’t expect more from Jerzy for a while … unless Brad Gilbert is planning a comeback.

The Aceless Career of Filippo Volandri

While other players racked up mighty ace totals and remarked on the fast surface in Sao Paulo last week, one man stood alone.

Filippo Volandri played three matches, eventually losing in the quarters to Martin Alund.  In his seven sets on court, he hit a grand total of one ace.  Fellow quarterfinalists Carlos Berlocq and Albert Montanes, two men who aren’t exactly known for their serving prowess, hit 21 and 10 aces, respectively, for the tournament.

This isn’t Volandri’s first time defying the trend.  His career ace rate (which takes into account most ATP events and his many challenger appearances since 2007) is 0.8%, which represents less than one ace per typical three-set match.  In no season of his career has he topped 2%.  To compare to Berlocq again: Charly’s career ace rate is close to 5%, and in only one season has his rate fallen below 2%.

As big serves are such a mainstay of the men’s game, it’s amazing to see what the Italian has accomplished without one, even on clay.  (On hard courts, Volandri has an 18 match losing streak going back to Doha in the beginning of 2008.)

Several times he has reached the final of a challenger while hitting only one ace; at the 2008 San Marino Challenger, he won the event without a single free point on serve.  He was particularly impressive early in his career in Umag.  In both 2003 and 2004 at the tour-level event, he reached the final despite hitting only one lone, early-round ace.

Perhaps it is most remarkable just how much time can pass between Volandri aces.  11 times since 2007 has the Italian put together a streak of 10 or more matches with zero aces.  In 2010, he went almost twice as long.  After managing to send a serve past Pablo Andujar in the qualifying round at Costa do Sauipe in early February, he went aceless in a first-round loss to Pablo Cuevas.  He wouldn’t hit another ace for 19 matches, not until he faced Matteo Viola at the Rome Challenger more than two months later.

That’s a stretch of over 1,200 service points.  And for Volandri, it’s not at all uncommon; just last year, he put together a stretch of 16 straight aceless matches between June and September.

Unfortunately, thanks to the speedy surface in Sao Paulo and his single ace last week, the Italian won’t be breaking his personal record soon.  But with a ranking outside the top 100 and a full year of clay-court challengers to draw upon, it’s safe to say that this story is far from over.

Milos Raonic’s (Almost) Unprecedented Three-peat

Last week, Milos Raonic won the SAP Open in San Jose without dropping a set.  Juts like he did last year … and the year before.  In fact, Raonic has won every set he has ever played at this event.

That’s not just impressive, it’s only the second time in ATP history that anyone has pulled off such a feat.

Simply winning an event three times in a row is not easy task, of course, even dropping plenty of sets along the way.  Raonic was only the 27th player in ATP history to do that, though of course many of his precursors strung together streaks of more than three years, and many three-peated at more than one event.  Just last month, David Ferrer made news by going back-to-back-to-back on hard courts in Auckland, having previously three-peated on clay in Acapulco.  (Raonic won’t be joining that club anytime soon.)

What’s particularly impressive about the group of three-peating champions is how tightly it overlaps with the very best in the game’s history.  18 of the 27 three-peaters reached the #1 ranking during their careers.  Two more peaked at #2.  (Honorable mention goes to Balazs Taroczy, who never cracked the top 10, but did win Hilversum five years running.)

For all the accolades earned by those #1s, though, only one of those players did what Raonic just completed.  That was John McEnroe, who went back-to-back-to-back-to-back from 1980 to 1983 at the Sydney Indoor.  Had he not returned to the event in 1992, he would have retired with a perfect record at the tournament.

Johnny Mac had a tougher time of it than did Raonic.  Milos has only beaten one top-20 player in San Jose, and when he edged by #9 Fernando Verdasco to win his first title, he did so while winning far fewer than half of points, resulting in a pitiful dominance ratio of 0.66.  (1.0 represents an even match; Raonic’s average in San Jose is 1.71.)  The Canadian was only broken twice in these three years, but he rarely did much breaking of his own, going to nine tiebreaks.

McEnroe, by contrast, beat at least three top-20 players (including #4 Vitas Gerulaitis) and played only a single tiebreak in his  20-match winning streak.  He also had to play best-of-five-set matches in three of the four finals.

To match McEnroe’s mark, either in number of consecutive titles or difficulty of winning them, Raonic will need to start a new streak. The smaller number of ATP-level events now on the circuit, however, make it more difficult to find the perfect blend of conditions and weak opposition to put together such a streak.

That doesn’t mean McEnroe’s mark is safe, however.  Rafael Nadal is just five matches and one title way from matching at least the straight-set three-peat, sitting on a 10-match win streak in Barcelona.  In fact, Nadal has only lost one set in Barcelona since 2006.  Had he played in 2010, we might have been talking about a very different record right now.