Category: Tactics

In May this year, Aryna Sabalenka unleashed a new weapon: a drop shot she was willing to use far more than ever. After winning six of six drop-shot points in a Rome first-rounder against Katie Volynets, Sabalenka inflicted 28 droppers on Elina Svitolina. That match went to a third-set tiebreak, and her 15 outright drop-shot winners represented more than the margin of victory.

In her career up to that point, Sabalenka’s drop shots represented 1.1% of her (non-serve) strokes–about half the tour average of 2.2%. That rate nearly quadrupled, to 4.1%, for her eleven matches in Rome and Paris. On faster courts since, it has fallen, but not all the way back. Her drop-shot rate since June has been 1.9%. As we will see, the weapon has continued to give her more value even as she uses it less often.

The tactic makes perfect sense for a player with Sabalenka’s skills. She hits hard from the baseline, so opponents are usually positioned defensively, on the back foot. She’s capable in the forecourt (former doubles #1!), so not only does she have the touch to pull off the deception, she has the ability to deal with the rapid-fire net play that can ensue when someone runs a drop shot down.

The only question–had we thought to make the suggestion, say, a year ago–was whether the idea appealed to her. Not everyone is Carlos Alcaraz, ready to throw the tennis equivalent of a curveball into any point. Sabalenka was doing fine bashing groundstrokes into submission; why change? Now we know she’s comfortable with the tactic, even if 4% is probably reserved for the slowest courts.

How, then, does Aryna’s drop shot stack up against those of her peers, in terms of frequency, success rate, and value? I wrote two articles in March that outlined various ways of analyzing drop shot tactics. Those pieces looked at Alcaraz, Alexander Bublik, and the men’s game in general. The same approach can shed light on Sabalenka and the women’s tour, as well.

Getting the drop

All the data in this piece is based on the shot-by-shot logs from the Match Charting Project. I’ve limited the scope to the last decade. Nearly every tour-level Sabalenka match is charted, but for many other players, coverage is more limited. It’s also not necessarily random, so these numbers are approximate.

It’s also important to define “drop shot.” For the purposes of this piece, I’m looking only at the first drop shot in each point. “Re-drops” are a skill of their own, and probably a very different one. They are also tough to study because they are so much rarer than the already-uncommon standard drop shot. So we skip them for now.

Let’s start with the most prolific WTA drop-shotters since 2015. Remember that tour average is 2.2%–one dropper per 45 shots or so. Here are the thirteen women who have equaled or exceeded clay-Aryna’s 4.1% for their entire (charted) careers:

Player                Drop%  
Yulia Putintseva       8.6%  
Ons Jabeur             8.2%  
Laura Siegemund        7.6%  
Anastasija Sevastova   6.6%  
Marketa Vondrousova    6.3%  
Petra Martic           5.6%  
Kristina Mladenovic    5.2%  
Su Wei Hsieh           4.5%  
Agnieszka Radwanska    4.2%  
Karolina Muchova       4.2%  
Kiki Bertens           4.1%  
Viktorija Golubic      4.1%

Everything checks out so far. Putintseva dropshots to drive you nuts, Jabeur hits them to show off, and Aga did it just because she could.

The other end of the list has its amusements as well. In over 50 charted matches, spanning over 7,000 points, Camila Giorgi hit five drop shots. Yes, five. Two of them went for winners, and she lost the other three.

More important than frequency is points won. Here are the 14 women whose career drop-shot win rates surpass Sabalenka’s recent clip of 55.6%:

Player                 Drop%  Point W%  
Dominika Cibulkova      2.5%     61.4%  
Qinwen Zheng            2.0%     60.7%  
Sara Sorribes Tormo     2.3%     60.4%  
Ashleigh Barty          1.7%     59.5%  
Barbora Krejcikova      1.8%     59.0%  
Marketa Vondrousova     6.3%     58.7%  
Emma Raducanu           1.6%     58.3%  
Liudmila Samsonova      1.3%     58.2%  
Bianca Andreescu        3.2%     58.1%  
Anett Kontaveit         1.1%     57.4%  
Sofia Kenin             4.1%     57.4%  
Aliaksandra Sasnovich   3.3%     56.6%  
Sorana Cirstea          1.9%     56.3%  
Kiki Bertens            4.1%     56.1%  
…                                       
Average                 2.2%     52.6%  
…                                       
Aryna 2017-Apr '24      1.1%     53.2%  
Aryna 2024 Rome/RG      4.1%     61.9%  
Aryna 2024 2nd half     1.9%     55.6%

There is virtually no correlation between frequency and success rate, so players like Vondrousova and Kenin (and slow-clay Sabalenka) really stand out.

Here’s the same dataset, with more players, in visual form:

Most women cluster in the 1-2% frequency range, regardless of their drop-shot skills. Vondrousova and Putintseva really stand out for their combination of frequent attempts and consistent success.

Chasing down value

As much as youngsters dream of someday showing up on a leaderboard on this blog, what really matters is winning points. You can do that by hitting tons of drop shots and winning those points at a decent rate (like Putintseva), or by choosing moments carefully and executing well (like Qinwen Zheng).

Assume for the time being that the typical drop shot is hit from a perfectly neutral position, one in which each player has a 50% chance of winning the point. Combine the two metrics we’ve seen so far–multiply frequency by the difference between winning percentage and 50%–and we have the value added by a player’s drop shots. I’ve multiplied the results by 1,000 so all the zeroes don’t make our eyes hurt.

Player                 Drop%  Point W%  Drop Pts/1000  
Marketa Vondrousova     6.3%     58.7%            5.4  
(Aryna 2024 Rome/RG)    4.1%     61.9%            4.9  
Yulia Putintseva        8.6%     55.1%            4.4  
Sofia Kenin             4.1%     57.4%            3.0  
Dominika Cibulkova      2.5%     61.4%            2.9  
Kiki Bertens            4.1%     56.1%            2.5  
Bianca Andreescu        3.2%     58.1%            2.5  
Sara Sorribes Tormo     2.3%     60.4%            2.4  
Petra Martic            5.6%     54.2%            2.3  
Aliaksandra Sasnovich   3.3%     56.6%            2.2  
Qinwen Zheng            2.0%     60.7%            2.1  
Su Wei Hsieh            4.5%     54.5%            2.0  
Karolina Muchova        4.2%     54.8%            2.0  
...                                                   
(Aryna 2024 2nd half)   1.9%     55.6%            1.1  
Average                 2.2%     52.6%            0.6  
(Aryna 2017-Apr '24)    1.1%     53.2%            0.4  
...                                                    
Elise Mertens           1.9%     46.1%           -0.7  
Sloane Stephens         1.1%     42.2%           -0.8  
Amanda Anisimova        2.0%     45.8%           -0.9  
Kristina Mladenovic     5.2%     47.1%           -1.5  
Laura Siegemund         7.6%     47.7%           -1.7  
Ons Jabeur              8.2%     47.3%           -2.2

Clay may be particularly drop-shot friendly, but still, how about clay-Aryna!

At the other end of the spectrum… is Jabeur actually bad at drop shots? We need more context before we could establish any such conclusion. Perhaps the Tunisian hits droppers at particularly desperate times. Still, it’s jarring to see the star’s name at the bottom of the list.

Did someone say context?

The most common situation for a Sabalenka drop shot is when she makes a first serve and the ball comes back to her backhand. Over her entire career, when she hits a dropper with her second shot, she wins 51.1% of points. If she doesn’t go for the drop, she wins 51.8%.

Without camera-tracking data, that (and the dozen-plus analogous categories) is as far as we can drill down. Maybe the returns to the backhand that she dropshots are different from the ones she doesn’t. Match Charting Project data can’t tell us that.

Adjusting for context remains valuable even with those limitations. We can classify each drop shot by whether the player who hit it was the server or returner, whether it was a first or second serve point, whether it was a forehand or backhand-side drop shot, and how far into the rally it occurred. When Aryna waits one more shot on a first-serve point, her drop is much deadlier. Instead of the 47% of points she wins on a third shot from her backhand side with something other than a drop shot, she wins 55%.

The list looks quite a bit different when we take these additional factors into consideration. I tallied each player’s results in each of those categories, so we can compare their drop shot winning percentages with how they fared in the same mix of situations. “DSWOE” is Drop Shot Wins Over Expectation, the ratio between the two numbers:

Player               Drop W%  Exp W%  DSWOE  
Dominika Cibulkova     63.5%   50.1%   1.27  
Petra Martic           54.2%   42.9%   1.26  
Sara Sorribes Tormo    60.4%   47.9%   1.26  
Martina Trevisan       59.5%   48.7%   1.22  
Marketa Vondrousova    58.7%   48.1%   1.22  
Danka Kovinic          56.0%   46.1%   1.21  
Sorana Cirstea         56.8%   46.8%   1.21  
Kaja Juvan             58.5%   48.4%   1.21  
Ashleigh Barty         59.1%   49.3%   1.20  
Kiki Bertens           56.2%   47.2%   1.19
...  
Average                51.3%   49.2%   1.04
...  
Ons Jabeur             47.3%   47.8%   0.99  
Agnieszka Radwanska    48.9%   49.9%   0.98  
Maria Sakkari          48.6%   49.9%   0.97  
Jelena Ostapenko       49.7%   52.9%   0.94  
Caroline Wozniacki     50.0%   53.3%   0.94  
Elise Mertens          46.1%   50.2%   0.92  
Serena Williams        45.5%   49.8%   0.91  
Amanda Anisimova       45.8%   50.4%   0.91  
Sloane Stephens        44.1%   48.8%   0.90  
Iga Swiatek            49.6%   56.2%   0.88

(The winning percentages here are very slightly different from the ones above because some of the data wasn’t detailed enough to be used for this calculation.)

The average rate of 1.04 seems plausible. Players generally know what they’re doing; they wouldn’t hit drop shots if they didn’t have reason to think it would improve their odds. Jabeur does indeed look better in context. She still finds herself in the bottom ten, but a DSWOE of 0.99 means that if she is costing herself anything with all the droppers, it isn’t much. It’s possible that even this more granular approach is missing some details that would explain why Ons makes the decisions she does.

I must also acknowledge the oddity of finding Swiatek at the bottom of the list–or any list. Her 49.6% drop shot win rate isn’t that bad: It’s what she does the rest of the time that is such an outlier. She isn’t known for her drop shot, and she doesn’t hit many. So as with Jabeur, it’s possible that these categories don’t capture how hopeless the situations are when she tries to drag her opponent up to the net.

This metric confirms our story about Sabalenka. Her drop shots were fine–if rare–before May, became devilishly effective on the clay, then settled back to a more modest level on faster surfaces:

Player       Drop W%  Exp W%  DSWOE  
2017-April     53.3%   51.2%   1.04  
May            61.9%   51.4%   1.20  
Second Half    55.6%   52.4%   1.06

Buried in the details of Aryna’s respectable 1.06 ratio since June is a particularly encouraging trend. Remember those plus-one backhands that she shouldn’t have been dropshotting? Since June, she basically stopped. Out of 108 total drop shots, those have represented only five.

Drop and roll

For someone who hits as hard as Sabalenka does, throwing in a drop shot can be about more than just winning a point. Once an opponent realizes that they might have to chase down a dropper, they are that much less focused on defending against deep groundstrokes.

That’s the idea, anyway. When I wrote about drop shots in the men’s game, I was surprised to discover that drop shots didn’t influence the outcome of subsequent points in the way I expected. The majority of drop shots are hit by servers, but after they hit one, servers are less likely to win points later in the same game. If there is any discernable pattern in the ATP data, it is that once a drop shot is played–whichever player makes the move–the returner has an edge for the rest of the game. This probably isn’t a causal relationship: Perhaps drop shots are more likely to come into play when the server is struggling to control the action.

The data for women’s tennis tells a different story. On the point after a drop shot–win or lose!–the drop-shotting player wins 51.1% of the time. Two points later, there’s still an advantage, and the edge stays in place for the remainder of the game:

Situation          Win%  
Next point        51.1%  
Two points later  50.7%  
Same game         50.7%  
All others        49.9%

That advantage is not the same for every player. The following list shows the point winning percentages for players who get the biggest post-drop-shot bang for the buck, along with those who–like servers in the men’s game–see their post-drop fortunes dip.

Player                Same game  All others   Diff  
Jasmine Paolini           56.5%       50.4%   6.2%  
Marta Kostyuk             55.9%       50.1%   5.8%  
Sloane Stephens           55.0%       49.9%   5.1%  
Beatriz Haddad Maia       53.0%       48.7%   4.3%  
Qinwen Zheng              54.5%       50.7%   3.8%  
Naomi Osaka               54.5%       50.8%   3.7%  
Anastasija Sevastova      53.3%       49.7%   3.7%  
Maria Sakkari             53.1%       49.7%   3.3%  
Angelique Kerber          53.8%       50.5%   3.3%  
Su Wei Hsieh              50.9%       47.9%   3.1%  
Karolina Pliskova         54.0%       51.0%   3.1%  
Danielle Collins          53.7%       50.7%   2.9%  
Marketa Vondrousova       52.8%       50.0%   2.8%  
Agnieszka Radwanska       54.0%       51.4%   2.5%  
Garbine Muguruza          53.4%       50.9%   2.5%  
Aryna Sabalenka           55.0%       52.5%   2.5%  
…                                                   
Average                   50.7%       49.9%   0.7%  
…                                                   
Ons Jabeur                50.2%       50.3%   0.0%  
…                                                   
Emma Raducanu             49.6%       51.1%  -1.5%  
Ashleigh Barty            51.5%       53.0%  -1.5%  
Eugenie Bouchard          48.9%       50.6%  -1.7%  
Svetlana Kuznetsova       47.8%       49.8%  -2.0%  
Karolina Muchova          48.6%       50.7%  -2.1%  
Monica Niculescu          46.9%       49.1%  -2.2%  
Barbora Krejcikova        47.4%       50.1%  -2.7%  
Jessica Pegula            47.6%       50.6%  -2.9%  
Lesia Tsurenko            44.5%       47.5%  -3.0%  
Caroline Garcia           44.9%       49.6%  -4.7%

Jasmine Paolini! It’s tough to pinpoint exactly what she does that has caused her improvement in 2024. Her post-drop-shot success rate is too niche a skill to account for much of it, but it’s fascinating to consider.

I added Jabeur to this list because she illustrates one of the factors that makes analyzing drop shots so complicated. As noted, the theory is that once a player hits a drop, her opponent has to start thinking about it. But against Jabeur, opponents have to think about it from the moment they step on court! One more drop shot from the wizard isn’t going to change that.

That’s just one reason why the relationships between frequency, success rate, and post-drop-shot success rate are unpredictable. Some players, like Stephens and Osaka, play droppers rarely. They don’t win much when they do. But the after-effect might make up for it. At the other end, Muchova has a great drop shot that she deploys often, and for whatever reason, her results on subsequent points suffer.

Back to Sabalenka one last time. I snuck her into the table above because, even before she hit lots of drop shots, she saw a post-drop boost. You will not be surprised to learn that those numbers have gotten better in the last six months:

Span            Same game  All others  Diff  
2017 - Apr '24      54.3%       52.3%  1.9%  
2024 Rome/RG        60.2%       53.7%  6.5%  
2024 2nd half       58.9%       54.2%  4.8%

Clay-Sabalenka got the best of both worlds. She won more points by playing the drop, and she won more points because of the tactic’s lingering effect. Perhaps because of her growing reputation as a drop shot queen, the effect has persisted since June, even when she doesn’t go to the well so often.

The Aryna Sabalenka path to drop shot success won’t help everybody. But no matter how we slice up the numbers, it sure has worked for her.

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