Juan Martin del Potro and Return of Serve Gaps (+Updated WTForecast)

While Juan Martin del Potro isn’t known for his return of serve, it isn’t a major hole in his game.  This year, he has won 38.5% of return points, worse than most of the top 10, but better than Stanislas Wawrinka, Jo Wilfried Tsonga, and about 30 other members of the ATP top 50.

Where del Potro underwhelms is more specific.  Despite effectively returning second serves, he’s far worse than average against first serves.  In 2013, his 28.4% of first-serve-return points won ranked him 36th among the top 50, only 0.1% above Milos Raonic and far behind every other member of the top 10.  Yet Delpo is in the top ten when it comes to second-serve-return points.

Even for a big server like del Potro, it’s difficult to reach the top five without an effective return game.  While he breaks serve less often than any other World Tour Finals qualifier this year, he’s within a percentage point of Wawrinka, Tomas Berdych, and Roger Federer, so it’s clear that statistically, the Argentine is far from being a John Isner-style one-trick pony.

What sets him apart, then, is the enormous gap between first- and second-serve-return effectiveness.  To illustrate the difference, I calculated the ratio of second-serve-return points to first-serve-return points for all eight men in London this week, plus Andy Murray.  Delpo is third among all players with 40 or more tour-level matches this year, while the bottom five names on this list are all in the opposite third of ATP regulars.

Player                  v1W%   v2W%  v2/v1  
Juan Martin Del Potro  28.4%  53.4%   1.88  
Tomas Berdych          30.6%  54.6%   1.79  
Richard Gasquet        30.5%  54.2%   1.78  
Stanislas Wawrinka     30.7%  50.3%   1.64  
David Ferrer           34.5%  56.4%   1.63  
Andy Murray            33.7%  54.7%   1.62  
Roger Federer          32.9%  51.6%   1.57  
Novak Djokovic         35.5%  55.4%   1.56  
Rafael Nadal           35.0%  54.6%   1.56

An aspect–or perhaps a cause–of del Potro’s first-serve-return woes is his knack for letting aces sail by him.  In 2013, 10.5% of his opponents’ first serves were aces, more than any other member of the top 50.  Controlling for opponent serve quality (he did play Isner twice this year), he “improves” to third-worst, ahead of Dmitry Tursunov and Feliciano Lopez.  After this adjustment, we discover that Delpo allowed 22% more aces than an average player would have against the same set of opponents.

When aces are removed from the calculation, del Potro still stands out in comparison to other top players, but he is no longer quite so extreme.  His ratio of second-serve-return points won to first-serve-return points won ignoring aces is 1.55, just a bit higher than Berdych’s 1.53, Richard Gasquet‘s 1.52, and David Ferrer‘s 1.51.

If Delpo gets a racquet on the ball, then, he’s not that much less effective against first offerings than his London competitors.  But he doesn’t get his racquet on as many balls, and however we might manipulate the numbers for fun and profit, the Argentine doesn’t have the option to ignore aces.

So, how much does a poor first-serve return matter?  As with Murray’s infamous second serve, it’s tough to say.  In both cases, the weakness doesn’t keep its possessor from winning big matches against the game’s best, but it might be what is preventing him from ascending from the very top of the rankings.

Were del Potro to improve his first-serve return to the level of the next-worst London participant, Gasquet, it would mean a jump this year from 28.3% of first-serve-return points won to 30.5%.  That would bump up his overall return points won to just short of 40%, and improve his break percentage from its current middle-of-the-pack 23.8% to a nearly-top-ten 26.0%, in the neighborhood of Berdych and Federer.

An improvement of that nature would make Delpo a much bigger factor at the very top of the men’s game.  But like Murray’s second serve, it isn’t that easy.  There’s more than one route to the top–del Potro’s game isn’t so unbalanced to keep him from beating the best players in the world, so perhaps he could more easily improve, say, his second serve than his first-serve return.  It’s tough to tell from the sideline or, especially, the statsheet.

In the meantime, if you’re supporting del Potro tomorrow against Novak Djokovic, you might consider becoming one of those boorish fans that cheers every first-serve miss off of Novak’s racquet.  Lots of Djokovic second serves might be Delpo’s best path to victory.

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London forecast: With Berdych’s win today, all eight players remain in contention.  A lot hinges on Friday’s match between Wawrinka and Ferrer, while we won’t gain much clarity on Group B until tomorrow.

Player     3-0  2-1  1-2  0-3       SF      F      W  
Nadal      70%  30%   0%   0%    98.4%  57.0%  34.1%  
Djokovic   42%  46%  11%   0%    88.3%  54.9%  30.9%  
Ferrer      0%   0%  54%  46%    14.8%   5.5%   2.0%  
Del Potro  22%  50%  28%   0%    71.6%  36.3%  16.4%  
Federer     0%  30%  51%  20%    29.9%  13.1%   5.9%  
Berdych     0%  30%  70%   0%    36.0%  12.4%   4.0%  
Wawrinka    0%  46%  54%   0%    50.9%  17.4%   5.6%  
Gasquet     0%  10%  44%  45%    10.1%   3.2%   1.0%

For the pre-tournament forecast, click here.

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Berdych d. Ferrer: Click here for detailed serve, return, and shot-by-shot stats for today’s evening match.

Roger Federer and the Missing Tiebreaks (+Updated WTForecast)

For most of his career, Roger Federer has been one of the very few players to play better in tiebreaks than in standard deuce games.  His career record, winning breakers at a 65% clip, illustrates his success at the business end of tight sets.  But there’s more to the story.  Even a player a good as Federer has been should not have won that many tiebreaks.

As I wrote in a pair of posts a year ago, there is very little evidence for any kind of tiebreak-specific skill.  Some players do well in tiebreaks, of course, but their success is almost always due to being good in general–better players win more points, and that translates into tiebreaks.  Plenty of big servers, such as Ivo Karlovic and Milos Raonic, don’t win any more tiebreaks that you would expect simply by looking at the rate at which they win points.

However, a tiny fraction of players defy this regression to the tiebreak mean. Playing a ton of tiebreaks seems to help a bit–John Isner always wins more than expected–and a few other cases might be explained by extreme confidence or intimidations.  These include Pete Sampras and–you guessed it–King Roger.

In the eight seasons from 2004 to 2011, Federer won almost 10% more tiebreaks than his stats say he should have.  In 2006, his outrageous 37-14 tiebreak record was a big part of his equally outrageous overall success.  But even a player as good as Roger was that year “should” have only gone 31-20.  That would still have been an impressive win rate, and let’s not forget, many of his tiebreaks were against excellent players who had already pushed him that far.

As with so much else, that tiebreak magic has eluded Fed in the past two seasons.  Last year was the first season since 2003 when he failed to win more tiebreaks than expected.  He has been neutral this year and last.

It’s tempting to wonder, then, how big a part the disappearance of Roger’s tiebreak magic has played in his overall decline.  If he had won tiebreaks at the “extra” rate he did throughout his peak, he would have claimed two, or possibly three more than he actually did, flipping his pedestrian 13-10 tiebreak record to a more Fed-like 15-8 or even 16-7.  (This post was written before Fed’s tiebreak win over Djokovic in London on Tuesday.  In any event, improving his record to 14-10 doesn’t drastically change anything.)

How much of an impact would those bonus tiebreaks have had?  With a bit of guesswork and a handful of counterfactuals, we can put a number on it.  We’re looking at “flipping” two or three of Roger’s ten lost tiebreaks.  Of those ten, three didn’t end up mattering, as he won the match anyway.   The remaining seven occurred in five matches:

The final match in this list provides the simplest illustration of the math involved here.  Flip the lost tiebreak in the Delpo match, and Federer wins the title, earning 200 additional ranking points.  Since we’re only switching the outcome in two or three tiebreaks, that’s either a 20% or 30% chance of that particular tiebreak counting among those switched, for either 40 or 60 additional points.

It gets much more involved with something like the Stakhovsky loss.  Not only do we need to consider the different outcomes of flipping both tiebreaks (and Roger winning) and flipping just one (and Roger maybe winning), we also need to estimate Fed’s chances of progressing through the draw.  Despite the very early loss, Wimbledon was almost double the lost opportunity of any of the other matches, as his path to the semifinal would’ve gone through Jurgen Melzer, Jerzy Janowicz, and Lukasz Kubot.  To quantify the effect of flipping the Wimbledon outcome, we must consider the probability of his reaching those later rounds and the number of points he would have collected had he gotten that far.

Crunch all the numbers, and if you flip two tiebreaks, Federer gains about 380 ranking points.  Flip three, and it’s about 560.  Either of those numbers would move him in front of Berdych in this week’s rankings and given him a lot more breathing room on the road to London.  These bonus points would still have left a huge gap between him and the top five.

Perhaps more important than a few hundred ranking points, how different would the 2013 Federer storyline look if you flipped just a small number of those results?  Give him the 4th set against Stakhovsky and the 2nd with Delbonis, watch him win the deciders, and there’s a different Fed narrative for the summer.  Whether it’s bad luck, decreased confidence, less intimidation, or something else entirely, it’s crucial that we remember that tiebreaks are often decided by a single bad service point or great return point.  If a narrative can’t hold up against a couple of points going the other way, it probably isn’t telling us very much about a player’s actual performance level.

Yet, if Federer has turned a corner this fall, it would be a mistake to expect improved results to come from a resurgence of his tiebreak mojo.  Whatever mysterious factors cause a tiny minority of players to exceed tiebreak expectations, it seems less likely that fading 30-something Fed has them.  He certainly hasn’t benefited from them for the last two years.  But most of all, unless he gets back into more very high-profile matches–as he may this week–the few hundred points he could gain from tiebreak magic just won’t make much of a difference.

—

London forecast: Today, the results went as expected, with Nadal beating Ferrer and Novak defeating Federer.  Nadal was such a heavy favorite that his win doesn’t affect his chances much, but Djokovic enjoys a bigger bump. The top two seeds are now almost equal, while Federer faces increasingly long odds.

Player     3-0  2-1  1-2  0-3     SF      F      W  
Nadal      50%  42%   9%   0%  91.2%  52.5%  31.5%  
Djokovic   43%  46%  11%   0%  88.5%  54.4%  31.0%  
Ferrer      0%  29%  50%  21%  31.9%  12.2%   4.5%  
Del Potro  22%  50%  28%   0%  71.3%  36.6%  16.7%  
Federer     0%  30%  51%  20%  30.2%  14.1%   6.3%  
Berdych     0%  14%  48%  38%  16.4%   5.7%   2.0%  
Wawrinka   13%  48%  38%   0%  60.5%  21.2%   6.9%  
Gasquet     0%  10%  44%  45%  10.0%   3.3%   1.1%

Click here for the pre-tournament forecast.

Tomas Berdych and Seasons Without Titles (+ Updated WTForecast)

Alone among the eight competitors in London this week, Tomas Berdych has yet to win a title this year.  He reached three finals–in Marseille, Dubai, and Bangkok–but failed each time to close the deal.

This isn’t the first time Berdych has reached the Tour Finals despite lacking a title, either.  In 2010, he finished the year at #6 in the rankings but lost both of the finals he played, at Wimbledon and the Miami Masters.

It isn’t easy to maintain a top-ten ranking without a single tournament win, and Berdych is one of the few players in the recent past to have done so.  In the 23 seasons since 1991, only eleven times have players finished a year in the top ten without a title to their credit, and only three times has a title-less player finished in the top seven.

Twice, a player has finished at #6 without a title (Berdych in 2010 and Tim Henman in 2004), and once, a player has finished at #7 without a title (Jiri Novak in 2002).  If Berdych holds off Roger Federer, Stanislas Wawrinka, and Richard Gasquet this week, he’ll add another season to the list of title-less #6’s.  Unless, of course, he wins in London.

However, winning his first title of the year at the Finals would be far more remarkable than getting this far in 2013 without a championship.  Berdych will be only the sixth player since 1991 to participate in the Tour Finals without a title to his credit, and it wouldn’t take much for him to outperform the previous five.  None of his predecessors–Sergi Bruguera in 1997 (0-2), Novak in 2002 (1-2), David Nalbandian in 2003 (1-2), Henman in 2004 (1-1), and Berdych himself in 2010 (1-2)–have made it out of the round robin stage, winning only four matches among them.

Even if Berdych’s season ends with a poor showing in London, we can still marvel at his ability to rack up points while losing every week.  In the ATP ranking system, winning a late-round match is worth much, much more than an earlier-round contest, so bunching together your successes–reaching finals and winning tournaments–is more valuable than consistently maintaining a decent but lesser level.  Berdych has fallen into that consistent and mediocre category this year, but has done so better than anyone else.

In 22 tournaments this season, the Czech has reached 15 quarterfinals. Only David Ferrer played more quarterfinals this year, though Rafael Nadal (15 of 16), Novak Djokovic (13 of 15), and Andy Murray (9 of 12) reached quarterfinals at a higher rate than Berdych did.

Similarly, Berdych reached eight semifinals, better than everyone except for Nadal (15), Djokovic (11), Ferrer (11), and Juan Martin del Potro (9).  It’s only past this point that he failed, reaching fewer finals than John Isner and as many as the likes of Fabio Fognini and Mikhail Youzhny.

You have to win big matches to make your presence known at the very top of the ATP.  But as the Czech has shown, you can spend years in the bottom half of the top ten without posting many notable victories at all.  For all his talent, Berdych’s status as the forgotten man in London is well-deserved.

—

With the first two matches in the books, Wawrinka and del Potro are more likely to advance in London this week, while Berdych and Gasquet have tough roads back into contention.  Here is the revised forecast, reflecting Monday results:

Player     3-0  2-1  1-2  0-3     SF      F      W  
Nadal      35%  44%  18%   3%  80.8%  48.1%  30.3%  
Djokovic   25%  45%  26%   5%  70.9%  43.0%  24.6%  
Ferrer      8%  34%  42%  16%  42.4%  16.6%   6.0%  
Del Potro  23%  51%  27%   0%  71.4%  37.7%  17.9%  
Federer    11%  37%  39%  12%  46.9%  22.8%  10.0%  
Berdych     0%  14%  49%  36%  16.5%   6.1%   2.3%  
Wawrinka   14%  49%  38%   0%  60.3%  21.8%   7.5%  
Gasquet     0%  11%  45%  44%  10.8%   3.9%   1.3%

(For comparison, here is the original forecast.)

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I charted the Gasquet-del Potro match today, so you can find detailed serve, return, and shot-by-shot stats by clicking here.

Stanislas Wawrinka and Hanging With the Top Ten

Only three ATP players this year have won more than five matches against top-ten-ranked opponents: Rafael Nadal (20), Novak Djokovic (18), and Stanislas Wawrinka (7).  It’s a good single-stat representation of Stan’s great year, as the Swiss had only won 18 matches against top-ten opponents in the previous eight seasons, including a painful 2-11 showing last year.

Wawrinka’s ability to play at the level of the very best players makes one wonder if he will move even higher in the rankings next year.  Is it possible that players who amass so many top-ten victories are slated for bigger and better things?

Certainly, seven top-ten wins in a season is no mean accomplishment.  Andy Roddick finished the 2003 season as World #1 with only six such wins, and Nadal ascended to #2 in 2005 with only five top-ten wins.  Since 1991, 25 players have finished a season in the top five while winning fewer matches against top-ten opponents than Wawrinka did this year.  And of course, with at least three matches against top-flight opponents this week, Stan might not be done.

On the other hand, tallying a bunch of victories against top-ten opponents doesn’t always predict further success.  Since 1991, 42 players have won at least seven such matches while finishing outside the top five.  Of those, only 12 improved their overall winning percentage the next year.  On average, those players saw their overall winning percentages drop eight percent.

One particularly bizarre precedent for Stan’s top-ten success is Vince Spadea‘s 1999 campaign.  While he barely broke even on the season, winning 33 of 60 matches, eight of those wins were against top-ten opponents, including Pete Sampras, Andre Agassi, and Yevgeny Kafelnikov (twice!).  The next year, he lost his first sixteen matches in a row and tallied only three tour-level wins–against anyone.

There are a few extreme examples in the other direction.  Sampras went 8-7 against top-ten opponents in 1991, finishing the year at #6.  He continued his climb into the tennis stratosphere the following season.  19-year-old Lleyton Hewitt won 10 of 16 top-ten matches in 2000 en route to a #7 ranking.  A year later, he was #1 in the world.  And for a case even closer to home for Wawrinka, a young man named Roger won 10 matches against top-ten opponents in 2002, finishing the year at #6.  It would be a long time before his ranking returned to such a low point.

Of course, Pete, Lleyton, and Roger were youngsters on their way up.  No matter how distended the ATP aging curve becomes, it’s safe to assume that Wawrinka is not at an equivalent stage of his career.

It’s a familiar story with tennis statistics.  Wawrinka has a great season, so we look for the reason why.  (Top-ten wins? Improved second-serve win percentage? Better tiebreak win percentage?) It’s easy to find numbers that show us what worked this year, much more difficult to convincingly explain why.  It’s more difficult still to support a conviction that the player has “turned a corner” and we can expect more of this high-quality play from him next year.

Top-ten win tallies like Wawrinka’s aren’t any better at picking future winners than tiebreak records like his 17-12 mark are.  It’s no more than a fun stat and a useful marker of a solid year.  But don’t fret, Stan fans, it doesn’t make a coherent case for a decline, either.  Stan may well be a top-ten mainstay for the next few years–after all, somebody’s got to be.

2013 World Tour Finals Forecast

The field for the World Tour Finals next week is set, and the round robin groups are determined.  That allows us to simulate the event, and–using my player ratings–project the outcome.  (My ratings don’t yet incorporate Paris results. David Ferrer and Roger Federer may get mild boosts once their showings this week are considered.)

Obviously, Rafael Nadal is your favorite.  He has a substantial advantage in every category. He’s more likely than any other contender to progress through the round robin stage undefeated, to reach the final four, to play in the title match, and to win the championship.

Not only is Nadal the best player in the field–even on hard courts–but he was also favored by the draw.  For all of Ferrer’s success in Bercy, he is a weaker hard-court player than Juan Martin del Potro, who will play in Novak Djokovic‘s half during the round robin stage.  Federer, despite his decline, is a still more of a hard-court threat than Tomas Berdych–and Nadal drew Berdych.  The only disadvantage in Nadal’s fortunes is represented by Stanislas Wawrinka, who is considerably more dangerous than Richard Gasquet.  As the forecast below shows, Gasquet is very unlikely to be a factor here.

Here is the complete forecast, showing each player’s chances of winning 3, 2, 1, or 0 matches in the round robin, along with reaching the semis, reaching the final, and winning the event:

Player     3-0  2-1  1-2  0-3     SF      F      W  
Nadal      35%  44%  18%   3%  81.0%  49.2%  31.1%  
Djokovic   25%  45%  26%   5%  70.8%  43.0%  25.0%  
Ferrer      8%  34%  42%  16%  42.4%  16.4%   6.0%  
Del Potro  15%  41%  35%   9%  55.9%  29.4%  14.1%  
Federer    11%  37%  39%  12%  48.4%  23.8%  10.7%  
Berdych     7%  32%  43%  18%  39.6%  15.2%   5.4%  
Wawrinka    6%  31%  43%  19%  37.0%  13.7%   4.8%  
Gasquet     4%  22%  45%  29%  24.9%   9.3%   3.1%

As I mentioned above, while Nadal (and, to a lesser extent, the other three members of his group) got the fortunate draw, the impact isn’t that great.  Here is a “draw-neutral” forecast, which randomizes the group assignments with each simulation:

Player        SF      F      W  
Nadal      77.9%  48.4%  30.2%  
Djokovic   74.4%  43.8%  25.7%  
Ferrer     40.6%  16.0%   5.9%  
del Potro  57.3%  30.2%  14.5%  
Federer    50.5%  24.4%  10.6%  
Berdych    37.7%  14.6%   5.3%  
Wawrinka   32.4%  12.4%   4.3%  
Gasquet    29.3%  10.2%   3.4%

The biggest losers in the draw ceremony were Djokovic and Gasquet.  While Novak’s chances of reaching and winning the final are similar, the draw pushed his probability of surviving the round robin stage from 74.4% down to 70.8%.  The odds are against Gasquet in any scenario, but the specific group assignments determined today knocked his chances of surviving the first three matches from 29.3% down to 24.9%.

The good news for Gasquet is that he’s a much, much better eight seed than Janko Tipsarevic was last year.  And with Richie at the end of what may be his career year, it’s that much more likely that anyone in the field of eight could make things interesting this week.

[update: Thanks to Jovan M. for catching some dodgy numbers in the first table. Due to a coding error, I showed each player’s chances of reaching each win total to be too low.  The SF/F/W columns in both tables are unchanged.]

The Most Predictable Quarterfinals

This week in Paris, all eight quarterfinalists are among the top nine seeds, the most tightly packed final eight since the 2009 Canada Masters, which was the only Masters or Grand Slam event this century in which all of the top eight seeds reached the quarterfinals.

This quarterfinal lineup is a reminder that, even with the decline of Roger Federer and the temporary absence of Andy Murray, men’s tennis is a top-heavy game.  At the Masters and Grand Slam levels, there have been eight other events since 2000 where all eight quarterfinalists were drawn from the top fourteen seeds–and all eight have been in the last five years.  By contrast, there were only two events between 2000 and 2005 where each player in the final eight came from the top 25.

This year, the average Masters and Grand Slam event has featured 6.5 seeds in the quarterfinals.  That number has hovered between 6.5 and 7 since 2009.  From 2000 to 2009, however, it never topped 6.25.  In 2000 it was as low as 4.4; in 2003 the figure was 4.6.

The median seeds (or ATP rankings, for those players who were unseeded) tell a similar story.  This year, the median quarterfinalist rank at the average Masters or Slam was 7.8, indicating that typically, four of the final eight were seeded 7th or better.  That number didn’t fall below 9.0 between 2000 and 2009 and reached as high as 18.3 in 2003.

What triggered this research, though, wasn’t a desire to quantify the top-heaviness of the men’s game, but to look at whether certain tournaments lent themselves to this sort of late-round predictability.  Given this year’s lineup in Paris and the notable eight-for-eight showing four years ago in Canada, it seems a reasonable guess that, for whatever reason, these two events were particularly prone to a seed-laden final weekend.

They aren’t.  In fact, measured by the median quarterfinalist seeding since 2000, the Canada Masters event ranks as the least predictable among the current slate of Masters and Grand Slam events.  The defunct Hamburg Masters is the only event that compares.  Paris has not been so unpredictable, but it doesn’t rank in the top half of Slam and Masters events by this metric.  Despite the blue clay, the most predictable event has been the Madrid Masters in its years on clay.

Given that seedings are based on ATP rankings, which are in turn based on a season that is hard-court heavy, I’m surprised to find any clay events near the top of the list, even Roland Garros.  More in line with expectations are Monte Carlo, Rome, and most extreme of all, Hamburg.  Another surprise is Shanghai near the top of the list.  Conventional wisdom suggests that players don’t prioritize the Asian swing.

If there’s any rhyme or reason to why some of these tournaments are more likely to see predictable final eights, it is elusive.

Here is the full breakdown, sorted by median quarterfinalist seeding:

Event                 Surface  Yrs  SdQFs  AvgQF  MedQF  
Madrid Masters        Clay       5    6.6   13.1    6.7  
US Open               Hard      14    7.1   14.1    8.5  
Roland Garros         Clay      14    7.0   14.8    8.5  
Shanghai Masters      Hard       4    5.8   17.5    8.8  
Australian Open       Hard      14    6.7   14.6    9.8  
Madrid Masters        Hard       7    5.3   19.1   11.1  
Indian Wells Masters  Hard      14    6.1   20.1   11.3  
Miami Masters         Hard      14    6.8   17.1   11.5  
Paris Masters         Hard      14    5.9   16.9   11.8  
Cincinnati Masters    Hard      14    5.1   18.1   12.2  
Monte Carlo Masters   Clay      14    5.1   22.3   12.7  
Wimbledon             Grass     14    6.3   36.1   13.4  
Rome Masters          Clay      14    4.9   19.8   13.8  
Canada Masters        Hard      14    4.8   22.4   16.1  
Hamburg Masters       Clay       9    3.9   27.7   22.9

Winning Matches With Very Few Return Points

Yesterday in Paris, Gilles Simon won the first set of his match over Nicolas Mahut (a.k.a. Nicolas Massu), doing so with the benefit of a single break.  That’s not unusual, but his return performance in the set was.  He won only four return points in the entire set–all, of course, in that single game.

It’s possible to win a set while claiming only one return point, if you reach a tiebreak and win every point on your own serve.  In theory, then, a player could win a best-of-three-set match while winning only two return points, or a best-of-five with only three.  If no sets reach tiebreaks, a player could win a match with as few as four return points per set, as Simon did in the first set yesterday.

In the last 20-plus years of ATP tour-level matches, no one has ever posted such an extreme win, winning only two return points (or even eight return points in a match with no tiebreaks) en route to victory.  But on several occasions, players have come close.

Since 1991, six players have won matches while winning only ten return points.  The most recent was Philipp Kohlschreiber‘s 6-4 7-6(4) victory over Jonathan Dasnieres de Veigy at the 2011 Metz tournament.

More impressive, though, was Albert Montanes‘s 2002 victory over Felix Mantilla in Acapulco.  He won 6-4 6-4 with only ten return points won, meaning that he “wasted” only two of those return points.  Mantilla had ten service games, lost two them, and held to love in at least six of the others.

Record-setting in their own way are two more of these ten-return-point matches: Irakli Labadze d. Justin Gimelstob 6-7(2) 7-6(3) 6-2 (2001 Shanghai) and Gustavo Kuerten d. Marat Safin 3-6 7-6(2) 7-6(2) (2000 Indianapolis).  These are the three-set matches in which the winner claimed the fewest return points.  It’s possible that Labadze and Kuerten didn’t win a single return point in the sets they lost, but it makes their eventual victory all the more impressive.

The Labadze win is also notable in that it is the only ten-return-points-won match in which the winner won a double-break set.  The Kuerten victory points in a new direction: Safin hit two double faults, so of the ten return points Kuerten won, he only had to make an effort on eight of them.

Remarkably, that’s not quite the record.  At 1992 Queen’s Club, Shuzo Matsuoka beat Goran Ivanisevic 6-4 6-3 while winning just 12 return points.  Five of those were Ivanisevic double faults, so Matsuoka only won seven points in which he returned the big Croatian’s serve.

One more bit of trivia.  At last year’s US Open, Milos Raonic beat Paul Henri Mathieu 7-5 6-4 7-6(4) while tallying only 16 return points (two of which were PHM double faults).  That’s the record for best-of-five-set matches, just barely edging out Jurgen Melzer‘s 2007 victory in Australia over Ivo Karlovic, 6-4 6-4 7-6(6), in which he won only 17 return points (three of them doubles).

Dr. Ivo, as you might guess, has piled up more than his share of this sort of match.  In fact, he has played 65 matches in his career in which the winner won fewer than 20 return points, amassing a nearly even record of 33 wins and 32 losses.  That impressive total puts him in second place among ATPers of the last 23 years, behind Andy Roddick.  Roddick played 69 such matches, winning 54 against only 15 losses.  Fittingly, Roddick and Karlovic played two of those matches against each other … and the American won both.

Is There an Advantage To Serving First?

There’s no structural bias toward the player who serves first.  If tennis players were robots, it wouldn’t matter who toed the line before the other.

But the conventional wisdom persists.  Last year, I looked at the first-server advantage in very close matches, and found that depending on the scenario, the player who serves first in the final set may win more than 50% of matches–as high as 55%–but the evidence is cloudy.  And that’s based on serving first at the tail end of the match.  Winning the coin toss doesn’t guarantee you that position for the third or fifth set.

Logically, then, it’s hard to see how serving the first game of the match–and holding that possible slight advantage in the first set–would have much impact on the outcome of the match.  There’s simply too much time, and too many events, between the first game and the pressure-packed crucial moments that decide the match.

Yet, the evidence points to a substantial first-serve advantage.

In ATP main-draw matches this year, the player who served first won 52% of the time.  That edge is confirmed when we adjust for individual players.

39 players tallied at least 10 matches in which they served first and 10 in which they served second.  Of those 39, 21 were more successful when serving first, against 17 who won more often when serving second.  (Marcos Baghdatis didn’t show a preference.)  Weigh their results by their number of matches, and the average tour-level regular was 11% more likely to win when serving first than when serving second.  Converted to the same terms as the general finding, that’s 52.6% of matches in favor of the first server.

That’s not an airtight conclusion, but it is a suggestive one.  One possible problem would arise if lesser players–the guys who play some ATP matches against that top 39, but not enough to show up in the 39 themselves–are more likely to choose returning first.  Then, our top 39 would be winning 52.6% of matches against a lesser pool of opponents.

That doesn’t seem to be the case.  I looked at the next 60 or so players, ranked by how many ATP matches they’ve played this year.  That secondary group served first 51% of the time, indicating that the guys on the fringe of the tour don’t have any kind of consistent tendency when winning the coin toss.

For further confirmation, I ran the same algorithm for ATP Challenger matches this year.  That returned another decent-sized set of players with at least 10 matches serving first and 10 matches serving second–38, in this case.  The end result is almost identical.  The Challenger regulars were 9% more likely to win when serving first, which translates to the first server winning 52.2% of the time.

This is a particularly interesting finding, because in the aggregate, these 38 Challenger regulars prefer to serve second.  Of their 1110 matches so far this year, these guys served first only 503 times–about 45%.  Despite such a strong preference, the match results tell the story.  They are more likely to win when serving first.

When we turn our attention to the WTA tour, the results are so strong as to be head-scratching.  Applying the same test to 2013 WTA matches (though lowering the minimum number of matches to eight each, to ensure a similar number of players), the 35 most active players on the WTA tour are 28% more likely to win when serving first than when serving second.  In other words, when a top player is on the court, the first server wins about 56.3% of the time.  24 of the 35 players in this sample have better winning percentages when serving first than when serving second.

For something that cannot be attributed to a structural bias, a factor that can only be described as mental, I’m reluctant to put too much faith in these WTA results without further research.  However, the simple fact that ATP, Challenger, and WTA results agreed in direction is encouraging.  The first-server advantage may not be overwhelming, but it appears to be real.

Saving Time With One-Ad and Short-Set Formats

Earlier this week, a USTA advisory group proposed some major changes to the collegiate “dual match” format so that it would better fit three-hour television windows.  Most of those involved in college tennis hated the proposal, especially since it virtually eliminates doubles.

Now, the Intercollegiate Tennis Association has issued a counterproposal, a sort of compromise that attempts to shorten the time required by dual matches while retaining the importance of the doubles point. (As usual, Colette Lewis has the scoop. Click that link for her take.)

The ITA’s suggestions boil down to this:

  • Each game follows the “one-ad” format–after deuce is reached the second time, a single point is played to decide the game.
  • Both singles and doubles sets will be played to 5, with a tiebreak played at 5-all.  Currently, doubles sets are played to 7, while singles are played to the conventional 6.

Does this proposal have a chance of solving the problem it aims to address?  How much time will these changes save?

One-ad scoring

On Tuesday, I shared my findings that “no-ad” scoring–that is, the format used by WTA and ATP doubles, and one often proposed by those hoping to shorten any level of tennis–can be expected to reduce the length of the average match by about 10%.

(Today, I’m sticking with percentages, since college matches may last considerably longer than pro matches.  In an ATP Challenger match, that typical 10% reduction amounts to eight minutes; in college, it might be as much as twice as long.)

Of course, “one-ad” scoring will not have as much of an impact.  In ATP Challenger matches this year, 11% of games have gone to a second deuce.  Those second-deuce games, which short-ad would reduce to nine points, averaged 11.8 points.  Thus, going to ‘short-ad’ would reduce the number of points per game by six or seven points per match.  The effect is roughly half that of no-ad.  On a percentage basis, it might be expected to cut match length by 5%.

Recognizing the limitations of ATP Challenger data, I also researched the same numbers using 2013 women’s ITF tournaments, running the gamut from 10K to 100K tournaments.  The numbers are roughly the same; two-deuce games go to 11.9 points, and the overall effect would be a little more than seven points per match.  In the aggregate, we might be looking at  a time reduction of 6% instead of 5%.

While one-ad is a creative compromise between purists and reformers, it probably isn’t enough to get the job done.  A dual match that would otherwise last three and a half hours would be cut by ten or twelve minutes.

Short sets

At first glance, the proposal to stop sets at five instead of six (or seven, in the case of doubles) seems like a tweak more cosmetic than anything else.  Because the doubles matches are played simultaneously and the singles matches are played simultaneously, dual matches often leave several individual matches abandoned.  The matches that would go to a third-set tiebreak rarely get that far.  The relatively quick 6-4 6-2 contests are more likely to count toward the end result.

Still, let’s ignore the simultaneous format for a moment.  How many matches is this tweak likely to affect?

The only singles sets that will be consistently shorted by this proposal are those that currently reach tiebreaks.  A tiebreak is roughly equivalent to two games, so playing a tiebreak at 5-5 requires about the same amount of time as reaching 7-5.

Now using ITF women’s 10K’s as our sample, we can find that singles matches average roughly one tiebreak per six matches.  Using the shorthand of “one tiebreak equals two games,” that means that the time savings is about one game per three matches.  The average match lasts about twenty games, so that’s one game saved per sixty, or a bit less than 2%.  I suppose it might help shorten dual matches in which several simultaneous singles are all going to tiebreaks, but at the aggregate level, short singles sets are less than half as effective as one-ad scoring.

Estimating the time-saving effect of short doubles sets is more difficult, because I don’t have any raw data on first-to-7 doubles sets.

Certainly, cutting two games from the total would be expected to have more than double the effect of one.   Instead of simply avoiding 7-6 sets in singles, we’re avoiding 8-6 and 8-7 sets in doubles.  Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that the time savings in these close sets is triple that of singles matches, or 6%.

Since doubles sets are cut to first-to-six instead of first-to-seven, lopsided sets will get a little faster, too.  For instance, a 7-3 set will be cut to 6-3 or 6-2.  Without knowing the distribution of various doubles scorelines, this is all guesswork, but if the lopsided sets are reduced in time by 12-15% and closer sets are less common, we might guess that the time saved in doubles is, on average, about 10%.

However, that’s 10% of a shorter length of time.  Given that doubles points are generally shorter, and that doubles is one set as opposed to two or three sets in singles, the weighted average of time savings is probably about 4.5%.

Impact of the ITA proposal

Start with the assumption (however questionable, as I discussed Tuesday) of an average dual match length of three and a half hours.  By cutting each set to first-to-five, we can expect a reduction of 4.5%, or perhaps nine minutes.   That leaves us with 3:21.

Cut off another 5% to 6% for short-ad scoring, and we save another 10 to 12 minutes.  Best case scenario, the overall length comes down to 3:09, for a total savings of just over twenty minutes.

Is that good enough?  With on-court warmups eliminated, as both the USTA Advisory Group and the ITA have proposed, it might cut a half hour from each dual match.  Still, that leaves plenty of dual matches on the wrong side of three hours.  Fine with me, and fine with a whole lot of people in college tennis, but probably not good enough for the USTA and its broadcast partners.

Time-Saving Shenanigans and the Effect of No-Ad

Yesterday, Colette Lewis reported on another set of possible rule changes for college tennis.  The goals, as always, are to shorten matches, increase television coverage, and systematically ignore the well-informed preferences of those most closely involved with the game.

Colette does a better job of explaining the limitations of the proposed format than I would, so I encourage you to go read her post.

So that we’re all on the same page, let’s summarize the most recent dual-match format:

  • Dual matches–meetings between two schools–have six players to a side. There are three doubles and six singles matches.  The combined results of the doubles matches is worth one point, and every singles match is worth one point, for a total of seven.  The first school to four points wins.
  • First, three doubles matches are played simultaneously.  Each is a single set, first to seven, win by two, and a tiebreak is played at 8-8.  If one school wins two of the three doubles matches while the other is still in progress, the third is abandoned.
  • Next, all six singles matches are played simultaneously.  Each singles match is best of three tiebreak sets.  Once one school has accumulated four points (including the doubles point), the remaining matches are abandoned, and the contest is over.

And here’s the new version:

  • Singles first.  The singles format stays the same, with six simultaneous matches.
  • If and only if a team does not accumulate four points in the singles, a compressed version of the doubles is played: the three doubles matches are reduced to 10-point super-tiebreaks. (This time last year, we were debating the merits of those as third sets.)

The proposed alternative would certainly save time.  It would also effectively destroy doubles as an important part of college tennis.

At last year’s NCAA Men’s Team Championships, 44 of the 63 dual matches were decided by a score of 4-0 or 4-1.  While it’s impossible to know how the abandoned singles matches would have turned out, it’s safe to assume that almost all of those meetings–along with many of the 4-2 outcomes and a few of the 4-3’s–would have been decided before any doubles was necessary.

Since length is such an important part of these debates, I ran some numbers to see what else might be done.

No-ad, no-overtime

The most popular device for speeding up tennis is “no-ad” scoring.  You’re probably familiar with it, as both the ATP and WTA tours use it for doubles.  Once a game reaches 40-40, the receiving team decides whether to play a final point in the deuce or ad court, and the outcome of that point decides the game.

So, how much time does it save? To get a rough idea of the answer, I looked at roughly 3600 ATP Challenger singles matches from this year.  (It’s not the most relevant dataset, I realize, but better “available” than “ideal.”)

In those matches, 24.2% of games went to deuce.  Those games averaged 9.7 points each, meaning that a switch to the no-ad format would save 2.7 points per deuce game.  Overall, such a change would save about 0.65 points per game across the board.  The average best-of-three-sets match lasts about 22 games, so switching to no-ad scoring would reduce the number of points in the typical match by 14 or 15.

At the ATP level, each additional point within a game–that is, one that doesn’t add to the number of changeovers or set breaks–adds about 33 seconds to the length of the match.  So the switch to no-ad scoring would shorten the length of an average match by about eight minutes.

Switching doubles to no-ad would have a lesser effect, because the matches are already shorter.  Figuring an average match length of 10 to 12 games, that’s another four minutes saved.

The impact is a bit more ambiguous than I’ve made it out to be, because no-ad scoring makes service breaks more common.  If the server has a 65% chance of winning a point (typical for male tour pros), he or she has only a 65% chance of holding from deuce in the no-ad format.  The server’s chances might be a bit worse, assuming the returner chooses the side which favors him or her.  In an ad game, that same server has a 77.5% chance of holding from deuce.

It would take a much more in-depth simulation (informed by much more college-specific assumptions) to know the impact of that difference.  Some additional breaks would speed up matches, making 6-0 and 6-1 outcomes more likely, while others would push sets to tiebreaks.

But college tennis takes longer

So far, I’ve been forced to use numbers from the pros to evaluate proposals for collegiates.  Somewhere along the line, the numbers don’t add up.

According to the advisory group responsible for the “hide-doubles-in-the-attic” proposal, the average dual match time at last year’s NCAA championships was over three and a half hours.  What’s taking so long?

On the ATP tour, the average best-of-three match is just over 90 minutes.  Doubles generally moves more quickly, so the first-to-seven matches should be less than half as long.  Plus, since dual matches are often decided while the longest singles matches are still going, the average completed match must be shorter than the average match at the college level.

Thus, even accounting for less serve dominance, longer rallies, and assorted factors such as the absence of ballkids and the higher number of lets (remember, these matches are played on adjacent courts), how are we getting so far beyond the magic three-hour time frame?

One explanation is simply poor data collection and analysis.  The numbers the advisory group cites are from last year’s team championships, a particularly small sample.  And by using an average, and not a median, one or two very long matches can skew the numbers–especially with such a small sample.  The five-hour dual matches are surely beyond saving, so why give them so much weight?

An alternative explanation is that college tennis really is that much slower, in which case many of the numbers I cited above don’t tell the whole story.  Are there far more deuce games in college than the 24.2% on the Challenger tour?  Are interminable, 15- to 20-point deuce games much more common?  Do points take considerably longer?

If so, the effect of moving to no-ad scoring would be greater than the twelve-minute conclusion I reached above.  Twelve minutes is a little less than one-tenth of my estimate for equivalent ATP matches, assuming a 90-minute average singles match and 45 minutes for doubles.  So if dual matches are really lasting three hours and 40 minutes, the equivalent time reduction would be almost double–better than 20 minutes.

Purists may hate no-ad scoring, but given a choice between losing 15-point deuce games and losing college doubles, I’d ditch dramatic deuce games in a second.