Monthly Roundup #4: April 2025

The “Babes”–Evelyn Colyer and Joan Austin–at Wimbledon in the 1920s

Previous: March

Lots of tennis this month, and I have an even-more-mixed bag than usual for you:

1. The Match Charting Project hit a fun milestone a few days ago, as we added our 2,000th unique player, Hanna Chang. She was quickly followed by 1989 Australian Open semi-finalist Jan Gunnarsson. We’re also just a few charts away from 7,000 women’s matches.

2. Stat of the month has go to Jenson Brooksby, who saved match point in three separate matches en route to the Houston title. Voo de Mar has some context: It was the first time for such a feat in nearly 25 years:

Runner-up stat of the month might be that Patrick Maloney–ranked 390th when he lost to Brooksby in Houston qualifying–came back a week later and knocked Brooksby out of the first round of the Tallahassee Challenger. As Mike Cation put it: Tennis, man.

3. Hollywood agent Ari Emanuel, with partners, is buying the Miami and Madrid tournaments from IMG as part of a $1 billion deal.

I generally don’t care much about who owns which tournaments, but in this case, there could be impact on the tennis itself. Not necessarily positive or negative: IMG likes to give wild cards to its own up-and-coming clients. 16-year-old Moises Kouame was one beneficiary this week, for instance. New owners might favor youngsters, too, but presumably not IMG clients in particular.

4. Hugh recaps the Barcelona final:

If we cast our eyes back to the first break point of the match that Alcaraz won, we’ll note that he had to do just that: win it. In other words, Rune wasn’t giving anything in this match. He played the role of counterpuncher perfectly from a deeper court position, yet never abandoned his forecourt instincts when the opportunity arose. Perhaps the rashest shot he hit all day was the forehand return he threaded on set point.

5. Speaking of Barcelona, did you know it now plays slower than Monte Carlo? I did not. Here are my surface speed ratings from the last 52 weeks:

(A few tournaments are included twice because their 2024 editions fell less than 365 days before the current one.)

For many years, Monte Carlo was the most extreme of any event above the 250 level. By my metric, at least, it has now swapped places with Barcelona, which suddenly got slower in 2023. It was never fast, by any means, but 2023-25 is a new era for conditions at the event.

6. The college tennis season is hotting up, which means it’s time to point you to CollegeTennisRanks. Chris does an impressive job, from upcoming schedules to his mind-bogglingly complex What-If scenarios.

7. Archive video of the month is courtesy of the USTA, with a 1989 US Open second-rounder between Jimmy Connors and Bryan Shelton:

If that isn’t enough, there’s also video–thanks again to Voo–of a 1994 final featuring ATP bigwig Andrea Gaudenzi.

8. Was Ethel Mildred Brooksmith (1865-1944) the early lawn tennis player known as Miss M. Brooksmith? It seems likely.

9. A few days ago I wrote about the Ostapenko-Swiatek head-to-head. Our new task is to analyze the Ostapenko-Azarenka matchup (5-0 in favor of Vika) for clues, just as Wim Fissette and many other coaches are probably doing.

If the Vika method doesn’t work, what’s Iga’s next move? Many of you suggested that she needed more variety. Sure, I guess, it doesn’t hurt. But that misses the point. The average rally length in these matches is usually below three shots–there’s no time for variety! If you win all the long rallies, congrats, you’ve won what, six points? The match is decided on serve, serve returns, and some plus-ones. The best you can do is nudge Ostapenko away from cleaning up in those categories.

Hyper-aggressive game styles are endlessly fascinating to me, in part because they end up influencing everything else. Against Swiatek in Stuttgart, the average rally length was 2.7 shots. Against Sabalenka in the final, it was 2.6. Basically the same, against two such different players! Sabalenka arguably played better defense, even though her scoreline was more lopsided.

And then, after all this, Ostapenko went to Madrid and lost her first match to the unranked (not unseeded, unranked) Anastasija Sevastova. She’ll have to wreak more havoc another time.

10. One hundred years ago this month, the British LTA banned photographers:

The header photo above, of Evelyn Colyer and Joan Austin, shows just how scandalous the dress of the day could be.

11. Also in April 1925–a century ago today, in fact!–Bill Tilden was a very busy man. He won the singles final at the Greenbrier Country Club in West Virginia, then lost the doubles. In the third set of the mixed final, rain wiped out the remainder, and the match was called a draw.

As if that wasn’t enough, Tilden began a 500-mile journey to Rye, New York, for an exhibition match the next day.

Best part of it all is that both venues–the Greenbrier and the Biltmore (now Westchester) Country Club–are still around.

12. Matt Futterman has a great profile on rising American Ethan Quinn:

“I thought I was going to come on tour and explode, like Ben Shelton did, or Alex Michelsen,” Quinn, a 21-year-old native of Fresno, Calif. with wavy blond hair and a boyish visage, said during a March interview in Indian Wells. “I thought I was going to take it by storm. That didn’t happen.”

Nearly two years on from Quinn’s decision, he has evolved into a better tennis player but also into a fable whose ultimate lesson remains unknown.

Futterman came on my podcast a few years ago. He asked me then what kind of coverage I’d like to see more of in the Times. I’m not sure I gave him a good answer. Now I have a better one: More of this, please!

12. In the Munich event’s first year as an ATP 500, the field seemed cursed. Several players withdrew the previous week, and five more pulled out after the draw was made. It was so bleak that Christopher O’Connell got in as a lucky loser despite falling in the first round of qualifying.

I expected to find that the level of the 2025 field was no better than what came before. (There are, certainly, some 250s with fields as strong as Munich’s this year.) But even with the injuries, the first edition as a 500 was a big step up. The median rank of players in this year’s field was 52.5, compared to last year’s 91. This year, 25 of the 32 main-draw entrants ranked in the top 100, 14 of them in the top 50. Last year, only 15 of 28 were in the top 100.

13. Andre Agassi is headed to the booth:

TNT Sports has hired eight-time Grand Slam winner Andre Agassi as a studio commentator for the network’s coverage of the French Open this year. Agassi, who won the 1999 French Open and was runner-up three other times, will be a studio analyst during the semifinal and championship rounds at Roland-Garros. In 2024, TNT Sports reached a 10-year, $650M agreement with the French Tennis Federation to add the French Open to its portfolio of premium sports rights in the U.S.

Always great to see more voices–especially the very best players–do commentary. My impression is that commentary is extremely difficult, and most former players quickly start repeating themselves. I’d rather hear a wide range of perspectives, which means every new voice is welcome.

14. I enjoyed this rundown of the evolution of Wimbledon qualifying, 1919-1925.

15. Jannik Sinner is now guaranteed to have 52 weeks at ATP #1:

This, including a three-month suspension.

Elo agrees that Sinner remains the best player on tour, even though my algorithm applies a 100-point penalty to players who miss so much time.

Another way of seeing Sinner’s dominance is to compare the current men’s and women’s lists. No, the lists aren’t meant to be compared, but after decades in which the top women built higher Elo ratings than men–mostly because the level of competition wasn’t as deep–they’ve begun to look similar. For instance, #4 to #10 on the men’s and women’s lists have nearly identical ratings.

Well, even after the 100-point penalty, Sinner is still 50 points ahead of any other man, and 40 points ahead of Aryna Sabalenka.

16. More high-quality Challenger streaming! It’s fantastic that all Challenger matches are streamed, but I have a hard time staying interested in the single-camera broadcasts. This will be so much better.

Also, I continue to be thankful for the Masters events that stream qualifying, as Madrid did this week. Now, WTA, take the hint already!

17. Speaking of Challenger-level women’s tennis… Raluka Serban won her first-round match in Bogota against Nuria Parrizas Diaz despite committing 22 double faults. She hit 48 second serves and missed nearly half of them. On the bright side, she won 20 of the remaining 26 points.

My friend Kees, who charted the match and passed along the tidbit, asked if anyone had ever won a match with such a high double-fault percentage. My WTA matchstats data goes back to about 2010, and excluding retirements and lower-level Fed/BJK Cup matches, Serban does crack the top ten:

Sara Errani, of course, is our champion. Runner-up is the altitude in Bogota.

18. Even more history for you this month. Fifty years ago this week, Chris Evert waltzed to the Family Circle Cup title:

The final took so long, Evert said, because her mind was elsewhere. Her on-again, off-again romance with Jimmy Connors was back on, and the pair was engaged. The day that Chrissie faced Martina, Jimbo was in Las Vegas, playing a million-dollar exhibition match against John Newcombe at Caesar’s Palace.

Connors suffered no such distraction. He shut down Newk in four sets, collecting around half a million dollars–equivalent to about $3MM today–for his efforts.

19. RIP Pope Francis. Or, as we in the tennis world knew him, the recipient of Juan Martin del Potro’s US Open-winning racket.

20. This month’s send-off music:

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Why Can’t Iga Swiatek Beat Jelena Ostapenko?

Jelena Ostapenko in Stuttgart

Jelena Ostapenko is now 6-0 against Iga Swiatek. Their first meeting doesn’t really count: It was on grass, and Iga was 18. Since then:

One was close, and Swiatek picked up a set in two others. These are (usually) not blowouts. But most of the time Iga faces an opponent outside the top 20, it is a blowout–in the other direction.

Ostapenko is a special case. No one on tour is more aggressive. Her make-or-break style, standing inside the baseline and swinging for winners even on service returns, turns every match into something more like a coin flip. If her aim is off, she can lose to anyone. By the same token, she’s the worst opponent for a top seed to draw in the middle rounds:

Career, Ostapenko has 25 top-ten wins, 21 of them when she was outside the top ten herself. It’s an exaggeration to say that her opponent doesn’t matter, but opponent matters less to the Latvian than to probably anyone else on tour.

Keep it simple

It’s tempting to go straight to the mental explanation: Ostapenko has gotten into Iga’s head, etc. That might explain why the head-to-head is 6-0 instead of 4-2 or 5-1. But there is a more concrete basis for the fact that the underdog keeps coming out ahead.

One of Swiatek’s lesser-known assets is her ability to win serve points. While she doesn’t have the best serve on tour, her opening delivery is quite fast, she rarely misses, and it sets up the rest of her game to finish off points. Over the last 52 weeks, she has held 79% of her service games, more than any other WTA player: Yes, even Aryna Sabalenka.

In their last five meetings, Ostapenko has broken her 31 times.

Against everybody else, Iga gets her share of service winners, and when the ball comes back, her unparalleled baseline skills keep the odds in her favor. Though she can rally with the best of them, she keeps points relatively short. Her serve points average 3.8 strokes, compared to tour average of 4.2.

Against Ostapenko on Saturday, her average serve point lasted 2.8 shots.

Another way to see the Penko effect is to look at the horrible things she does to Swiatek’s top-line serve numbers:

Matches   1stIn  1st W%  2nd W%  
Last 52   64.9%   68.3%   50.3%  
vs Penko  57.8%   51.8%   45.7%

Among the WTA top 50, Iga ranks in the top dozen for all three of those stats. The Latvian turns her into a wholly ineffectual version of herself. (In my earlier piece about Ostapenko, I wrote that she turns the rest of the tour into Madison Brengle. Even Iga!)

52% of first-serve points won is atrocious. No top-50 player stands below 57%. Sara Sorribes Tormo is the only woman who can compare. 46% isn’t quite so dire: Elise Mertens typically plays at that level, to take one example. But it’s a marked decline from Swiatek’s usual standard.

If you want to make case that Ostapenko has gotten into Iga’s head, the first-serve-in rate is one place to start. There is some tactical basis for taking more first-serve risks against a free swinger. But in this case, they don’t seem to pay off at all. That dreadful 52% win rate on first serve points is the result of hitting them bigger! Iga took more chances on second serves as well. She is typically one of the stingiest women on tour when it comes to double faults, but she piled up eight of them on Saturday.

The clay conundrum

I intended to write a version of this piece back in February, when Ostapenko trounced Swiatek in Doha. Though I missed my chance, I intended to make clear that Iga couldn’t beat her nemesis on hard courts.

And here we are, two months later. Ostapenko leads the clay-court head-to-head, 1-0.

Sort of. Stuttgart’s conditions are hardly those of Rome or Roland Garros. The tournament is held indoors, and the surface doesn’t behave like the crushed brick in Paris. Big servers have traditionally done better in Stuttgart than elsewhere on European clay. Ashleigh Barty won the title in 2021, and both Linsday Davenport and Maria Sharapova three-peated. Iga is a two-time champ as well, but not because the surface is particularly favorable.

Ostapenko scored her latest “upset,” then, on a relatively fast dirt court, one of that doesn’t give Swiatek’s topspin the big bounce it gets on traditional clay. A lower bounce lets the Latvian step in and swing away, much like she does on hard.

On the other hand, Penko is far from hopeless on the slow dirt. She beat Simona Halep to win the 2017 French Open! Worse, from Iga’s perspective, surface speed doesn’t seem to hinder her game style. Here are the rally lengths from the last few “slow clay” Ostapenko performances logged by the Match Charting Project:

Match               Result           RallyLen  
2024 Rome           L vs Sabalenka        2.6  
2023 Roland Garros  L vs Stearns          2.7  
2023 Roland Garros  W vs Martincova       3.4  
2023 Rome           L vs Rybakina         2.9

It’s not the most instructive sample–Ostapenko vs Sabalenka is going to come out under three shots per point on a court made of glue–but it’s clear that the Latvian doesn’t morph into Chris Evert when the conditions change.

At a certain level of aggression, surface just doesn’t matter that much. While Ostapenko doesn’t have an elite serve, she successfully targets the corners, opening up space for easy (for her) winners on the next shot. She takes such breathtaking risks that opponents sometimes are still leaning the wrong way as her shot finds a corner. Slow clay gives players an extra split second to react and respond. A split second is not enough to negate the Ostapenko barrage.

What to do?

Swiatek is one of the best players in the world–indeed, she already ranks among the all-time greats. It can’t really be hopeless.

There are basically two options: Stop Ostapenko from playing her game, or play Ostapenko’s game, but better.

In Stuttgart, Iga seemed to attempt the second. As we’ve seen, she took more chances on both first and second serves, though that tactic didn’t work out. She hit service returns harder, aiming for lines rather than relying on her topspin to give her a Nadal-esque margin of safety on groundstrokes.

At times, it worked. Swiatek hit nearly as many winners as Ostapenko in the second set. When the Latvian lost her way a bit, Iga barely let her win a second-serve point, picking up nearly three out of four. Penko broke her six times, but Swiatek got four of them back.

The play-like-Penko approach should ultimately stop the bleeding. This was the third time the women reached a deciding set; one of these times, the Latvian’s risk-taking will fail to pay off. Nearly everyone else on tour has picked up a win or two against Ostapenko: If Yulia Putintseva can do it, certainly Swiatek can as well.

Iga, though, would prefer something more than just continuing to flip the coin. Is there a way to consistently beat someone with such an outrageously dictatorial game style?

I’d love to give you a galaxy-brain answer here, but I don’t have one. (Wim Fissette hasn’t helped Iga find one either, so I certainly don’t have much of a chance.) At times on Saturday, Swiatek seemed to be trying to wear down the Ostapenko backhand. It is the Latvian’s weaker side, but it is still the source of numerous, often improbable winners. Riskier serving came up empty. The topspin is worthless, though it may have its place in more favorable conditions.

No one on tour owns Ostapenko the way she owns Iga. (Edit: Except Victoria Azarenka–thanks to several of you for pointing that out.) No style or set of tactics–except Vika’s, so far–stops her every time. Sabalenka had won all three meetings with the Latvian, then she managed just five games in yesterday’s Stuttgart final. Sabalenka is one of the few women who can out-hit anybody, but even that level of power isn’t enough to shut out Ostapenko.

The only player reliably able to defeat Penko is herself, and even she hasn’t managed it with Iga standing across the net. She may have another chance in just a few days: The two women are lined up to face each other in the Madrid fourth round. Ostapenko is a mere 5-7 at the event in her career, but she is surely salivating at the chance for another shot at her favorite victim.

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Lorenzo Musetti and the One Hand to Rule Them All

Few backhands are as good as Musetti’s looks

2024 did not go as planned for Lorenzo Musetti. He started the season having fallen out of the top 20, and he didn’t win back-to-back matches until Miami. The skid continued on clay, where he suffered first-round exits in Estoril, Barcelona, Madrid, and Rome.

Somehow he found form on grass, reached the Wimbledon semis, then picked up a bronze medal at the Olympics. That was good enough for a return to the top 20, and with last week’s run to the Monte Carlo final, he’s on the cusp of the top ten. Elo already rates him that highly, and even though he is skipping Barcelona this week, he’s likely to rise from 11th to 10th on the ATP computer next Monday.

Some of the slump could be attributed to distraction: His partner had a baby in the middle of it. (Though that doesn’t explain his decision to play Challengers after losing early in Madrid and Rome.) He’s still just 23, so we could write off the losing streak to the grind of the tour. It takes time to adjust–especially to so much hard-court tennis–and Musetti’s early success might have raised expectations too early.

The oddest part, though, is the surface mix. Last February, I introduced a stat to measure “surface sensitivity“–how much a player’s results were influenced by surface speed. Not just surface type, but the degree to which a server could dominate. At the time, Musetti was the ultimate slow-court specialist. Guys like Rafael Nadal, Alejandro Davidovich Fokina, and Stefanos Tsitsipas showed strong preferences for the most stately surfaces. But Musetti was more extreme than any of them.

Then he went near winless on the dirt, and then he went 12-3 on grass. Predictions are hard, especially about the future.

Yet Musetti’s surface profile is sorting itself out. He excelled at the Paris Olympics, and in the best vindication of my surface sensitivity numbers, he came within a set of scoring his first major title in Monte Carlo. The principality hosts the slowest courts of any major ATP event; it’s no accident that Tsitsipas and Davidovich Fokina have thrived there as well.

Was 2024 a blip, and is he now Lorenzo, king of the dirtballers? Or is there more to the Italian’s game than slow-court success?

The one-hander

Musetti’s signature stroke is his one-handed backhand. He’s now the top-ranked guy with a one-hander, ahead of #16 Tsitsipas and #17 Grigor Dimitrov. Like those two, the Italian is a Federer acolyte.

Almost by definition, the Musetti backhand is lovely to watch. No winner looks better in a highlight reel than a one-handed backhand winner, and he delivers more than his share. Still, we have to ask: Is it any good?

The eye test says yes, but the eye test is not trustworthy when it comes to one-handers. Fortunately, the stats agree. My Backhand Potency (BHP) metric, which balances winners (plus forced errors) against unforced errors, as well as shots that precede one or the other, puts Musetti among the top third of ATP regulars:

The chart shows BHP per 100 backhands for all players with at least 10 charted matches in the last 52 weeks. That includes five guys with one-handed backhands, highlighted in orange. Among those, only Denis Shapovalov is close to the Italian. The other three are in negative territory.

(You can look up other players on the career list. Federer and Stan Wawrinka are both around neutral. Richard Gasquet stands at +2.0, close to Musetti’s current level.)

We don’t have BHP for every match, but there are signs that Musetti’s backhand was particularly effective last week. The stat reached +5.5 in both his second-rounder against Jiri Lehecka and the final against Alcaraz. Whatever the limitations of the one-handed backhand in general, the shot isn’t holding the Italian back.

The best defense…

Topspin backhands, even pretty ones, are best in moderation. Given a choice, just about everyone this side of Alexander Zverev will hit a forehand instead. It’s particularly important to pick the right spots with a one-hander, as the stroke takes more time to prepare. It is also less forgiving when the timing isn’t perfect.

While no single formula applies to everyone, the ideal player will run around some backhands in favor of their forehand, and they’ll skip other backhands in favor of more conservative slices. Here’s how Musetti ranks against his peers over the last year–and the career numbers of a few all-time greats–as measured by forehands-per-groundstroke and slices-per-backhand:

Player              FH/GS  BH Slice%  
Grigor Dimitrov     48.5%      55.4%  
Lorenzo Musetti     50.5%      39.4%  
Stefanos Tsitsipas  52.4%      22.3%  
Mpetshi Perricard   55.1%      32.4%  
Denis Shapovalov    56.8%      32.4%  

Career:                               
Roger Federer       48.8%      37.0%  
Richard Gasquet     45.0%      22.9%  
Stan Wawrinka       49.9%      31.3%

The Federer number reminds us that FH/GS isn’t about how often a player would prefer to hit a forehand. Everybody targets the backhand, and the worse your backhand, the more they take aim. So Fed’s 48.8% is what results when far more than half of shots were aimed at that side. He slipped around them for as many forehands as he could justify.

The Italian’s numbers are surprisingly close to both Fed’s and Wawrinka’s. He manages to hit a few more forehands–perhaps because the data we have for him is skewed a bit toward clay–and he slices more than Roger did. That’s a clue as to why Musetti can hold his own on grass: He’s right at home prolonging points with slice backhands.

Forehand-finding is also a clue as to why Lorenzo’s fortunes are on the uptick. Here’s a selection of his FH/GS rate in recent notable clay-court matches:

Match                 Result          FH/GS  
2025 Monte Carlo F    L vs Alcaraz    62.0%  
2025 Monte Carlo R32  W vs Lehecka    56.0%  
2024 Olympics BR      W vs FAA        49.2%  
2024 Olympics SF      L vs Djokovic   44.9%  
2024 Olympics QF      W vs Zverev     44.8%  
2024 Umag F           L vs Cerundolo  41.8%

The Alcaraz match is a tough one to parse, because the stats incorporate Musetti’s attempt to play it out with an injury. But though he lost, he was right there with the Spaniard for the first ten or eleven games. He only needed to hit two plus-one backhands in the entire first set.

However we handle the Monte Carlo final, it should be clear by now that there’s a big difference between 45% and 55% forehands. At 45%, opponents are trying to exploit that wing and the player is happy to hit backhands, a la Zverev or Daniil Medvedev. The Italian may finally be taking a page from the playbooks of compatriots Matteo Berrettini and Lorenzo Sonego, saving his backhand for when he really needs it.

Going hard?

If Musetti is going to make a permanent home in the top ten, he’ll need more hard-court wins. He could get by with an annual romp through clay season, especially if he continues to rack up wins on grass. But the latter seems like a big ask, and there just aren’t enough events on dirt these days for a single-surface guy to find stardom.

The Italian does have a hard-court title: Naples in 2022, where he beat Berrettini in not-so-fast conditions. He added a final last year on speedy courts in Chengdu; the caveat there is that he didn’t face a single top-40 opponent.

Bigger picture: Musetti is 3-11 against top-tenners on the surface, and those three wins don’t inspire confidence. He knocked out a passive Zverev in Vienna last year, beat Casper Ruud in Paris, and got past Diego Schwartzman back in 2021. In those 14 matches, he won fewer than 57% of service points. None of the wins were straight-setters, and all of the losses were.

His game, let’s face it, was made for clay. He’s one of the most passive players on tour. Here are the tour’s least aggressive players–by rally aggression score, a measure of how often the player ends points for good or bad, scaled between -100 and +100–over the last 52 weeks, minimum ten charted matches:

Player            RallyAgg  
Daniil Medvedev        -93  
T M Etcheverry         -79  
Alex de Minaur         -73  
Lorenzo Musetti        -58  
Sebastian Baez         -53  
Rafael Nadal           -53  
Alexander Zverev       -47  
Gael Monfils           -46  
Novak Djokovic         -46  
Marcos Giron           -45

Musetti is less aggressive than Zverev. Less aggressive than Sebastian Baez. He hasn’t scored above average on this metric for a single non-grass match in two years.

In other words: He lets the game come to him, and alas… it does.

The tour’s most common surface may be the achilles heel of the one-handed backhand. It is of course possible to win on hard with a one-hander, as Federer showed us for the better part of two decades. To grossly oversimplify, he did it by hiding that backhand. Tstisipas’s recent resurgence in Dubai came from maxing out the aggression on that wing.

You can win on hard courts with passive tennis–go Medvedev!–or you can win on hard courts with a well-shielded one-hander. But it is increasingly clear that you can’t do both. Musetti has proven his potential on both of the game’s natural surfaces, showing off the value of both topspin and slice groundstrokes to do so. That’s enough to make him a top-tenner–barely. To win on hard courts, he will need more Federer-esque tactics to go with his Roger-inspired backhand.

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What Do We Make of Sofia Kenin These Days?

Sofia Kenin in her run to the Tokyo final last year

Is Sofia Kenin back? Was she ever gone? Was she ever there in the first place? Has any player so persistently defied categorization?

Big questions aside, Kenin is suddenly more relevant than she has been in at least 18 months. This time last year, she was suffering through a nine-match losing streak. She would add another bad patch in the summer and fall out of the top 150 before reaching last October’s Tokyo final. Since then, she has lost only one first-round match (when she drew Coco Gauff in Melbourne) and made another 500-level final in Charleston. Kenin had set point on Sunday to force Jessica Pegula into a third set before the veteran summoned her mysterious forces and finished the job.

This is all a far cry from 2020, when the American bracketed the pandemic pause by winning the Australian Open and reaching the French final. But her Charleston showing moves her ranking back up to 34, the highest it has been since late 2023. Her Elo rating is even better, good for 25th on tour.

What is working again for Sonya? Is she back in the top 40 to stay?

Oh, those groundstrokes

When the Kenin game is clicking, it is a joy to watch. She is one of the most versatile players on tour, with the ability and willingness to deploy just about every shot in the book. She tried ten drop shots in the Charleston final against Pegula and sent both forehand and backhand slices across the net. I’ve even seen her win points with moonballs.

In the 2020s WTA, though, versatility can only be the icing, not the cake. Fortunately for the 26-year-old, both her forehand and backhand are among the game’s best. By my Forehand Potency (FHP) metric, she ranks 16th on tour over the last 52 weeks, in between the fearsome weapons of Iga Swiatek and Amanda Anisimova. Her backhand is the signature shot, and it rates even better, coming in 9th.

Combined, she gets more value from her groundstrokes than almost anyone else. Here is the top ten, based on charted matches since this time last year:

Player                 FHP/100  BHP/100  Combined  
Jelena Ostapenko          18.7     11.0      29.7  
Amanda Anisimova           9.2     14.1      23.3  
Aryna Sabalenka           13.0      9.3      22.3  
Ekaterina Alexandrova     13.6      8.5      22.1  
Danielle Collins          12.7      9.0      21.7  
Linda Noskova             14.1      7.4      21.5  
Iga Swiatek               10.0      9.0      19.0  
Madison Keys              11.3      7.5      18.8  
Sofia Kenin                9.4      7.8      17.2  
Jessica Pegula             8.3      8.0      16.3

For all the heavy hitters on that list, Kenin is more like Pegula than the rest. She attempts to dictate with placement, not power. Give her an opening, and she’ll rarely squander it. She’ll miss as much as some of these sluggers, but that’s because she relentlessly aims for the lines. The overall tally tilts in her favor.

She falters when she doesn’t have enough space to work with. Pegula, boasting perhaps the best anticipation of anyone on tour, consistently cut down the angles Kenin had to work with on Sunday. Sonya doesn’t have the patience to wait for the next opportunity, so she aimed for narrower and narrower spaces. The result, predictably, was a giant pile of unforced errors. She committed 33 of them off the ground–nearly one in four points.

Speaking of patience: That’s one category where she resembles the power hitters on that last list. Her average point in the past year has averaged just 3.4 shots, the same as Madison Keys and Ekaterina Alexandrova, fewer than Clara Tauson or Donna Vekic. A bit of a paradox is emerging here: Kenin has an impressive range of all-court and defensive skills, but she doesn’t play like it.

Is she a… servebot?

The American doesn’t seem like a weak returner. Aggressive, yes. Too aggressive, maybe. But any woman with such an effective backhand should be able to post decent numbers against the serve.

Yet: It is a constant struggle to break serve. The typical player in the WTA top 50 breaks 37% of the time. Swiatek grades out at 45.5%, and several more women top 42%. Pegula stands at 38.5%. Kenin, at 30.3%, ranks 48th of 50. Here are her peers at the wrong end of the list:

Player                Break%  
Lulu Sun               19.7%  
Linda Noskova          28.4%  
Sofia Kenin            30.3%  
Katie Boulter          30.8%  
Clara Tauson           31.2%  
Magda Linette          31.5%  
Xin Yu Wang            32.0%  
Donna Vekic            32.6%  
Ekaterina Alexandrova  32.9%  
Barbora Krejcikova     33.1%

Judging by some of these names, Kenin might be able to sneak into the top 20 with this return game. Vekic is 20th on the WTA points table. Tauson is 21st.

If there’s one characteristic that ties many of these players together, it is that their results run hot and cold. Krejcikova has won two slams but often struggled to get past early rounds. Noskova is a nightmare for Iga but manageable for others. Low break rates mean that the margins will always be narrow: Good for upsets and the occasional hot streak, bad for any semblance of consistency.

Kenin essentially takes the racket out of her own hands. Of players with at least ten matches in the charting database over the last year, only Danielle Collins puts fewer returns in play:

Player                  RiP%  RiP W%  
Danielle Collins       61.9%   55.7%  
Sofia Kenin            62.5%   54.0%  
Ekaterina Alexandrova  63.2%   58.3%  
Amanda Anisimova       64.3%   58.9%  
Alycia Parks           65.9%   59.6%  
Linda Noskova          66.4%   53.9%  
Liudmila Samsonova     66.9%   56.6%  
Barbora Krejcikova     67.3%   53.9%  
Bianca Andreescu       67.4%   54.4%  
Madison Keys           68.1%   57.6%

A lot of these names are starting to look familiar. As with the FHP/BHP lists, Kenin shares space with some of the game’s biggest hitters, even if I wouldn’t think of her that way. Maybe she disagrees: She certainly takes chances on return as if she does.

Yet the results aren’t there. The rightmost column, winning percentage on returns in play, shows that Kenin trails Collins, Alexandrova, Anisimova, and most of the rest by a healthy margin. She is roughly equal to Noskova and Krejcikova, though the Czechs get more balls back to start with. It’s fine to win 54% of points if the denominator is big enough–to take one example of many, Paula Badosa stands at 52%–but Sonya loses too many points without forcing the server to hit even one more ball.

As for the question in my subhead: No, Kenin isn’t really a servebot. Her serve itself ranks in the middle of the pack. But alas, her return stats are better suited to someone with a much more powerful first strike.

Same as the old Kenin?

It is tempting to conclude that Sonya’s 2020 was a remarkable streak of luck. She won the Australian Open after sneaking past Ashleigh Barty in the semi-final, winning fewer than 51% of points. She picked up the Lyon title a month later with four three-setters and five tiebreaks. She reached the Covid Roland Garros final even though Samsonova won more points than she did in their first-round encounter.

On the other hand, Kenin is a fundamentally different player than she was five years ago. One indicator is her now-languishing break rate:

Year  Break%  
2018   34.0%  
2019   34.0%  
2020   34.7%  
2021   33.9%  
2022   23.3%  
2023   31.5%  
2024   28.3%  
2025   30.9%

34% or 35% isn’t great, but it’s worlds apart from where she is now. Rybakina, while off her own peak lately, gets by with just 36%.

Back then, the American wasn’t so quick to pull the trigger. Based on the 17 matches we have in the charting database, her average point in 2020 lasted 4.1 strokes, another sharp contrast to her 3.4 of the last 52 weeks. 4.1 is at or above tour average, equal to Coco Gauff’s usual mark.

A big part of the difference is that she put more returns in play. In those 2020 matches, she got 71.7% of serves back, nearly ten percentage points higher than her current rate. She also won more of those points:

Span      RiP%  RiP W%  
2020     71.7%   55.0%  
Last 52  62.5%   54.0%

By just about every metric I have, Kenin is more aggressive now than she was at her best, and the strategy isn’t paying off. Perhaps she feels that she has to hit harder–or at least adopt tactics that mimic her more powerful peers–to keep up. Maybe she has lost a bit of quickness: Ankle and foot injuries sidelined her for much of 2022.

2020-era Sonya, then, is not back. Her form over the last six months suggests she might have landed on something that will work, if not anywhere near her peak level. The stats keep telling us she’s just like Alexandrova, and the risk-taking Russian has spent years in the top 30, picking up a title every year or so and making trouble for her higher-ranked peers. Kenin is on track to do the same.

Yet unlike Alexandrova, Anisimova, and the rest, Kenin is a former slam champ, with memories of an entirely different level of tennis. Performances like Tokyo and Charleston suggest she is getting closer to recapturing that magic. If she starts getting more serves back, then it’s time for the rest of the tour to worry.

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Trivia Notebook #4: Number Ones, Past and Future

Would Medvedev now settle for this?

Previous: Trivia Notebook #3

Welcome back for some more trivia! Again, thanks to all those who have suggested topics. Feel free to drop them in the comments here, on Twitter, etc.

Today we’re going to look at Daniil Medvedev’s high ranking sans finals, revisit what would make a good year-end showing for Joao Fonseca, and see who has beaten multiple number ones (past, present, or future) in the same tournament.

Daniil’s Drought

Daniil Medvedev hasn’t won a title since 2023; he hasn’t reached a final since Indian Wells in 2024. He won plenty of matches last year–Wimbledon semi, US Open quarter–so when he lost at Indian Wells last month, he was still ranked sixth in the world. He has now fallen out of the top ten, but for a fortnight, he was a top-tenner without a single final in the previous 52 weeks.

That is unusual:

Since 1982, the beginning of my reliable week-by-week ATP rankings data, only a few dozen players have held a place in the top 30 without the points from a single final.

Only nine have clung to a spot in the top 20. (I’m not counting Roger Federer, who remained in the top ten after the Covid-19 pause and held on to a top 20 place for a long time because of the pandemic adjustments to the ranking rules.)

Medvedev is not the first top-tenner, but his ranking in Miami is the “best” of all-time:

Rank  Player                 Date  
8     Daniil Medvedev    20250317  
10    Fernando Gonzalez  20100301  
19    Goran Ivanisevic   20020701  
19    Lucas Pouille      20191014  
20    John McEnroe       19921026  
20    Gaston Gaudio      20060731  
20    Andrei Medvedev    20000529  
20    Petr Korda         19990125  
20    Mardy Fish         20120813

(Each player is listed only once, with their best ranking. Most of them spent multiple weeks in the top 20 without the points from a final.)

Gonzo had seven semi-finals to his credit, including Rome and Roland Garros. His final-less ranking position is the only one that comes close to what Medvedev has (not) achieved lately.

Fonseca’s company

In the first Trivia Notebook, I looked at big ranking leaps into the top 100. The goal was to find some context for Joao Fonseca, who started the year at #145 and had already reached an Elo rating in the top 50. Sure enough, his position on the official table has quickly followed. He’s up to 59th, and he doesn’t have many points to defend for the rest of the year.

And he’s up to 11th on my Elo list. That’s not a guarantee he’ll climb so high on the ATP table, but it suggests he won’t be 59th for long.

A one-hundred point leap into the top 50, as it turned out, wouldn’t be all that historic. Eric J followed up to ask:

How high would he have to get from his starting position for it to be a historically interesting result?

Let’s say that the reference class for Fonseca consists of players who finished a year ranked between 120 and 180. Again going back to the early 80s, here are the players from that group who reached the best rankings in the following year:

Player               Year  YE-Rk  Next YE  Gain  
Goran Ivanisevic     2000    129       12   117  
Mikael Pernfors      1985    165       12   153  
Andy Roddick         2000    156       14   142  
Paradorn Srichaphan  2001    120       16   104  
Fernando Gonzalez    2001    139       18   121  
Henrik Holm          1991    131       19   112  
Nicolas Jarry        2022    152       19   133  
Jan Lennard Struff   2022    150       25   125  
Jan Siemerink        1990    135       26   109  
Milan Srejber        1985    121       27    94  
Claudio Mezzadri     1986    138       28   110  
Bohdan Ulihrach      1994    142       28   114  
Dmitry Tursunov      2012    122       29    93  
Francisco Cerundolo  2021    127       30    97  
Tommy Robredo        2000    131       30   101  
Michael Chang        1987    163       30   133

(“Year” refers to the season with the ranking between 120 and 180: The breakthrough came the following season.)

No one has ever gone from a ranking in this range to the top ten. Fonseca has a chance to be the first.

Perhaps more to the point is how the Brazilian would stack up against other teens. Most of the players on that list are young, but the whole notion of “ranking leaps” can distract us from what really matters.

Fonseca will be 19 at the end of the year. Here are the last ten teenagers to finish a season in the top 20:

Player           Year  YE Rank  
Carlos Alcaraz   2022        1  
Holger Rune      2022       11  
Novak Djokovic   2006       16  
Andy Murray      2006       17  
Rafael Nadal     2005        2  
Richard Gasquet  2005       16  
Andy Roddick     2001       14  
Lleyton Hewitt   2000        7  
Andrei Medvedev  1993        6

Pretty good company. Again, there’s a lot to do in the next seven months or so. Elo is a good forecasting tool, but the exact timeline is much tougher to get right. If Fonseca does live up to expectations on schedule, he’ll be in elite company.

Defeats of past and future

In the February roundup, I linked to full match video of Andy Murray’s 2005 US Open match against Arnaud Clement. Edo took the cue and charted the match (he’s now past the 1,700 mark!), and he observed that in the same tournament, Clement beat Murray–then a future number one–and former top dog Juan Carlos Ferrero.

Pretty good run for the 91st-ranked Frenchman, especially in retrospect. Alas, he lost to Nicolas Kiefer in the third round.

It turns out that a lot of players have beaten multiple (past, present, or future) number ones in the same tournaments. It’s especially common in eras where several men have cycled through the number one position: Not only are number ones comparably weaker, there are more opportunities.

Let’s strengthen the parameters to make it more interesting. How many players have done the same as Clement, beating a former number one and a present or future number one at the same event, while ranked outside the top 50 himself?

Clement is one of 25 men to accomplish the feat. But the Frenchman is an even more unique case. He is one of just two players–Slava Dosedel is the other–to have done it twice! A year after his US Open run, he beat Lleyton Hewitt, Marat Safin, and Murray again (also charted by Edo) to win the Washington title.

Dosedel is the only man to have done this on multiple surfaces. He won the 1996 Munich title with wins over Boris Becker and Carlos Moya on clay. Then he defeated Jim Courier and Pat Rafter at the 1999 Adelaide event, before–get this–losing to Hewitt.

Clement and Dosedel both came along in the right era for this: 24 of the 27 instances took place between 1995 and 2006. The only example since 2006: the 2018 Australian Open, when Hyeon Chung knocked out both Novak Djokovic and Daniil Medvedev.

Most impressive of all is a run you’ve surely heard about before. Goran Ivanisevic claimed the 2001 Wimbledon title as a wild card, with wins against former number ones Moya, Rafter, and Safin, plus a victory over future number one Andy Roddick. That single tournament–not to mention Goran himself–continues to be the trivia answer that keeps giving.

See you next time!

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Monthly Roundup #3: March 2025

The “under-the-hill gang,” pictured in the March 1975 issue of Oui magazine.

Previous: February

Off we go…

1. One of the Miami quarter-finals pitted two guys who I have recently highlighted as having weak still-developing second serves, Arthur Fils and Jakub Mensik. Mensik advanced, yet neither one showed much progress in that problematic category:

For Mensik, 50% isn’t bad.

2. Electronic Line Calling (ELC) is here, and it is quickly spreading to the lower levels of tennis. Colette updates us on the status of ELC in college tennis, where players previously called their own lines.

3. Roberto made a nice graphic of the longest non-retirement streaks in WTA history:

There’s a men’s version, too.

4. RIP Yola Ramirez, the greatest Mexican tennis player in history. She was twice a French Open finalist and picked up two doubles major crowns.

My records, which are not 100% complete, give her a career singles record of 376-144, spanning the era from 1951 to 1972. She amassed at least 51 career titles, almost all on clay. In five of them, she defeated women who made my Tennis 128 list: Maria Bueno, Darlene Hard, Ann Jones, and Nancy Richey.

5. The PTPA filed a lawsuit against various tennis bodies, and it raised the usual crop of questions and takes about tennis finances. I appreciate Pete Bodo for framing at least part of it so clearly:

Tennis has sometimes tried to manage the number of players considered to be pros, for instance by limiting the number of tournaments/round that grant ranking points. But as Pete hints, that isn’t the issue. If there’s a pot of gold for top players, there will be an endless supply of aspirants, whether those aspirants are globetrotting juniors, college players, ITF warriors, or Challenger tour regulars. Enough people out there have federation or family support that they can chase their dreams without earning anything like a living wage (or in some cases, anything at all).

In practice, the answer is “the number of players who make grand slam qualifying cuts.” But even that is too vague, because players don’t necessarily stay at that threshold for long. All this is to say: People who lobby for a different financial structure should start with these questions. How many players should earn a living wage from tennis? And then, what changes would be necessary to make that happen?

5. Patrick Ding writes about women’s tennis like no one else does, often covering players you haven’t heard of. Here he is on the scheduling decisions of Tereza Valentova.

6. There’s a tennis element in the new BBC series, Towards Zero, based on an Agatha Christie novel. Simon Briggs looks into the true story behind the fiction:

On the tennis court, Strange and Goold were each renowned for their “killer” backhands – a detail which becomes a key plot point in the book. And if Christie has transposed the drama from the French Riviera to the English one, that is probably because of her own upbringing in Torquay.

7. Ben Marrow built a tennis twist on a basketball dataviz I included in last month’s roundup:

He also made a slick interactive version.

8. If you’re not reading Andrea Petkovic, well … maybe this, about Monica Niculescu will finally get you started?

She was an immensely talented player who did everything she could to mess with your technique and I’m not afraid to admit that it worked. I got my revenge once we were older and I was taller and stronger and didn’t have a complete meltdown every time she hit a slice. But the panic reared its ugly head until the very end of my tennis player’s days whenever I saw Moni Niculescu near me in the draw. Some things fade, some things are forgotten but Monica Niculescu remains forever.

Great stuff about Aga Radwanska and others in the same article.

9. Alison Riske is up and running on Substack, too. Her first update is about all things Charleston.

10. RIP Juan Aguilera, 1990 Hamburg champion. He peaked at #7 in the world, scored seven top-ten wins, and never made the trip to Australia.

11. This month’s match video is the 2004 US Open third-rounder between Venus Williams and Chanda Rubin:

Venus wasn’t playing her best tennis–she lost in the next round to Lindsay Davenport–but it was a good effort from Chanda nonetheless. I happened to see one of Rubin’s earlier-round matches that year on a side court. All I remember is one of the few other fans, with a thick Caribbean accent, incessantly shouting “Go Chanda!”

12. I almost scratched this monthly roundup so I could write about Francisco Cerundolo today instead. I can’t stop thinking about his position on this graph from my Mensik post:

Cerundolo is even more of an outlier than Mensik, just in the opposite direction. He’s a bit below average in putting first serves away when the return comes back, but he’s better at converted in-play second serves than anyone else on tour.

This isn’t exactly the same as second-serve winning percentage, but it’s closely related. The Argentinian blew everybody away in the more standard category in Miami:

The streak lasted even a bit longer: Cerundolo won 70% of second-serve points in the first set of his quarter-final against Grigor Dimitrov. Alas, he finally came back to earth–37% in the final two sets–though he nearly won the match anyway. If he can keep this up away from the South American Slam, it will merit a longer treatment.

13. Here’s some new (in English) research into the Sumarokov-Elstons, the first family of pre-Soviet Russian tennis.

14. One more that we lost this month: RIP John Feinstein. He was better known as a golf and basketball writer, but he covered tennis as well, including the 1991 book Hard Courts. Pete Bodo wrote a nice remembrance, and I enjoyed this thread from a colleague.

15. Now that Alexandra Eala has ignited tennis mania in the Philippines, how long until we get a WTA event in Manila? There has been some tennis in the islands for more than 100 years, and competitive women’s tennis back to at least 1935. Eala is surely the best from the country so far, though I did notice that early champ Minda Ochoa upset visiting American Helen Marlowe–a two-time national junior finalist–in 1936.

16. Forgot this one last month: In her WTA debut in Austin, Malaika Rapolu got called for a time violation on return. I know it’s not unprecedented, but it’s rare enough to be a harsh welcome to the tour. Now, umpires just need to apply the same standards to players inside the top 500.

17. Tennis execs are surely paying attention to the TGL, an indoor, team-based, simulator-driven golf tournament that just wrapped up. With an eleven-week season, it requires more buy-in than any tennis upstart is going to get; in that sense, it more closely resembles 1970s-era World Team Tennis. The high-tech approach seems to have worked, deviating from the traditional version of the sport more than any tennis exhibition ever has.

18. One more non-tennis note: I recently read James Astill’s The Great Tamasha, about Indian cricket from its beginnings to the (then–the book was published in 2014) new Indian Premier League. Another example of a sport ramping up fan engagement and shortening formats, and succeeding.

This, though, is what will stick with me:

[Bengali sociologist Ashis] Nandy shook his head. ‘I don’t see much of cricket in this IPL business. It is simply a degraded form of the game. What is the point of it? Is it an effort to catch up with other sports? Why? So many sports are so similar. Why can they not allow us to have one game to be different?’ He paused, and gazed into space. He looked bereft.

19. Someone complained about the lack of music last month, so here ya go:

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Jakub Mensik, Giant Killer

Watch out

On Saturday, Jakub Mensik did it again. Jack Draper was coming off an Indian Wells title, the fortnight of his career, but Mensik was a little bit better. Both sets went to tiebreaks, and twice, at six-all, the 19-year-old Czech took his serving to a new level. He won 14 of 19 tiebreak points and sent the Brit home early.

After such an assured performance, Mensik’s third-rounder felt like a gimme. Roman Safiullin gave him two looks at break points, and that’s all he needed. Behind another monster serve barrage, the Czech waltzed into the fourth round, 6-4, 6-4.

Mensik currently stands outside the top 50, but his ranking doesn’t tell the full story. For one thing, he made his top-50 debut late last year, and his Miami points will almost certainly be enough for him to return. Beyond that, he has proven that he fears no one on tour. Draper was his 6th top-ten win in 11 tries. What’s more, Mensik won a set in three of the five losses, including a meeting in Shanghai last fall with Novak Djokovic.

Djokovic called him “one of the best servers we have in the game.” Indeed, since the US Open last year, the six-foot, four-inch Mensik is cracking aces on more than 15% of his serve points. Only Giovanni Mpetshi Perricard and Quentin Halys rate better among tour players. He has taken things to a new level in Miami. In each of his three matches–against Roberto Bautista Agut, Draper, and Safiullin–he has hit an ace on at least 26% of his serve points. That’s Reilly Opelka-level serve dominance, and even Opelka hasn’t posted three straight ace rates like that since 2022.

Mensik is one of the most exciting prospects on tour, yet Joao Fonseca-mania doesn’t leave much attention to anyone else. What do we make of those top-ten wins… and the non-top-ten losses that have kept him on the edge of the top 50? How should we rate the rest his game–you know, those occasions when he doesn’t end the point with a first serve? Let’s dig in.

Proof of concept

Here is the top-ten record:

Pretty good for someone with another five months left in their teens.

Draper wasn’t the first top-tenner that Mensik overpowered. In the six wins, the Czech held serve 90% of the time, winning three-quarters of first serve points. Djokovic and Alex de Minaur figured out how to neutralize the serve, but lesser returners (read: most other humans) have not.

Even before the Miami upset, Mensik was just the 21st player since the beginning of the ATP rankings to win at least five of his first ten meetings with top-tenners. (I’m excluding players who were already established in 1973, when the points table debuted.) He’s just the 12th ever to win six of eleven. Here’s the full list:

Player               First 10  First 11  
Alberto Mancini           7-3       7-4  
Miloslav Mecir            7-3       7-4  
Fernando Gonzalez         6-4       7-4  
Marc Kevin Goellner       6-4       7-4
Lleyton Hewitt            6-4       6-5  
Jakub Mensik              5-5       6-5  
Ugo Humbert               5-5       6-5  
Marcos Baghdatis          5-5       6-5  
Marat Safin               5-5       6-5    
Carlos Moya               5-5       6-5  
Chris Woodruff            5-5       6-5  
Magnus Larsson            5-5       6-5  
Boris Becker              5-5       6-5  
Fabian Marozsan           5-5       5-6  
Aslan Karatsev            5-5       5-6  
Matteo Berrettini         5-5       5-6  
Reilly Opelka             5-5       5-6  
Mardy Fish                5-5       5-6  
Nicolas Kiefer            5-5       5-6  
Henrik Holm               5-5       5-6  
Greg Holmes               5-5       5-6

It’s a strong list, if a bit scattershot. We have all-time greats, plus Aslan Karatsev and Greg Holmes, who apparently upset both Mats Wilander and Jimmy Connors. The playing styles might tilt a bit toward heavy hitting and big serving, but not overwhelmingly so.

I mention playing styles because rocket serves, like Mensik’s, have a way of turning matches into coin flips. If the serves aren’t coming back, it doesn’t matter how well the guy returns. Other skills fall by the wayside: We’re headed for a tiebreak. Apart from a pair of early breaks, that’s what happened in the Draper match. John Isner won three of his first ten top-ten encounters, and Opelka earned a spot on this list.

Everything else

When the serves do come back, though, it’s anybody’s ballgame, top-ten opponent or not. For Mensik, just about everything apart from the first serve is a relative weakness. In the last 52 weeks, he has won just 47.4% of his second-serve points, worse than 49 of the top 50 players. (Pedro Martinez is the one guy with a sub-Mensik number.)

The Czech has gotten accolades for his backhand, but it’s not really a weapon. While it doesn’t hold him back, it rates about tour average by my Backhand Potency (BHP) metric. His Forehand Potency is the real issue. At just +1.1 per 100 forehands, he ranks ahead of only a few of his colleagues, including Opelka, Mpetshi Perricard, and Hubert Hurkacz. Hurakcz has proven that it’s possible to hang around the top of the game without much help from the forehand, but it’s a narrow path to follow.

All this adds up to some painful numbers in rallies. I was going to say “long rallies,” but Mensik starts to see a disadvantage about as soon as the word “rally” comes into play. In eleven charted matches over the last 52 weeks (not counting the Draper upset), here are how his results shake out by rally length:

Length      Win%  
1-3 shots  52.2%  
4-6 shots  45.3%  
7-9 shots  41.9%  
10+ shots  42.0%

52% on short points is great! That was enough to crack the top ten list when I looked at the same category last week in the context of Draper’s excellence. Since these stats encompass both serve and return, it tells us that he’s cleaning up more of his own quick points than his opponents can manage of their own.

The rest of the story, though, is bleak. He ranks near the bottom in all three of the other categories. If we lump them together, he win the fewest points of anyone with at least ten charted matches in the last year:

Player              1-3 W%  4+ W%  
Jakub Mensik         52.2%  43.8%  
Mpetshi Perricard    51.6%  43.8%  
Zhizhen Zhang        48.5%  44.1%  
Jiri Lehecka         51.8%  44.2%  
Ben Shelton          50.5%  44.7%  
Hubert Hurkacz       55.0%  45.4%  
Lorenzo Sonego       52.5%  45.5%  
Tallon Griekspoor    49.8%  46.1%  
Flavio Cobolli       44.9%  46.6%  
Alexei Popyrin       50.4%  46.8%  
…                                  
Jack Draper          53.3%  48.8%  
…                                  
Stefanos Tsitsipas   50.5%  50.6%  
…                                  
Alexander Zverev     53.0%  53.1%  
…                                  
Novak Djokovic       53.7%  54.9%  
Carlos Alcaraz       52.5%  55.8%  
Jannik Sinner        54.4%  57.0%

Somehow, it gets even worse. With enough short points, weak long-rally skills are survivable. Yet Mensik plays more long points than most of these guys in the bottom ten. The 1-to-3-shot category accounts for less than 63% of his points, while it makes up more than 70% of Mpetshi Perricard’s. Even Jiri Lehecka, hardly an extreme case like GMP, comes in at 66%.

Second to last

Mensik is hardly an elite returner, but he is good enough for now. He has won about 37% of his return points over the last 52 weeks, a rate that–coupled with strong serving–is sufficient to get him into the top ten. Despite his relatively low ranking, he has posted those numbers against high-quality competition. His median opponent has been stronger than those faced by Stefanos Tsitsipas or Casper Ruud.

The immediate concern for the Czech is his second serve. I mentioned earlier that he wins barely 47% of those points. Ben Shelton, who wins exactly as many first-serve points as Mensik does, converts 55% of his seconds. While that’s unusually good, nearly every player in the same first-serve territory wins at least 51% behind the second serve.

This is a good time to remember that Mensik is 19. He hasn’t been six-foot-four for long. It’s possible that his second serve will look entirely different in two years than it does today. He’ll certainly hope so. He misses more than 12% of his seconds, a double-fault rate that would be acceptable only if he were taking chances and reaping the rewards of those risks. At the moment, he’s just struggling.

The second-serve weakness is more than enough to flip the outcome of a match. In the last year, when Mensik has landed at least 60% of his first serves, his record is 16-5. Under 60%, it’s 12-17.

The root of the problem is what happens when the second serve comes back. The Czech’s second delivery isn’t yet strong enough to generate many easy plus-one opportunities, and his ground game isn’t sturdy enough to make up for it. When his first serves come back, his results are close to tour average. But when the second serve comes back, he ranks at the very bottom of the table.

This scatterplot shows every player with at least ten charted matches over the last year. It compares each player’s win rate when their first serves come back with their results when second serves come back. Guys below the dotted line see relatively worse outcomes behind their second serve:

There’s no single limitation that is depressing Mensik’s second-serve results. The positive spin on that is that he has a lot of areas with room to improve. Even an average second serve–seemingly a reasonable goal for a man with such an imposing first–would probably make him a top-20 player.

The way forward

Nothing makes it easier to dream about a big future in tennis than a monster serve. Any list of overrated youngsters is going to be littered with powerful teens who remained too one-dimensional to convert all their aces into tournament victories.

That, I think, is the low-end forecast for Jakub Mensik. If he simply keeps doing what he’s doing, he could be a top-40 or top-50 player for a long time. His first serve is that good, and the rest of his game is adequate. He probably wouldn’t continue to win half of his top-ten meetings, since the game’s top players would have more time to figure him out.

On the other hand, again, he’s 19! The difference between his first- and second-serve results is a statistical oddity, which could mean either that he is uniquely one-dimensional, or that he has plenty of room to develop. The latter seems more likely. He may remain limited on return, but a second serve to match his first would make him near-unbreakable. That’s the recipe for a lot more top-ten wins, and possibly for a single-digit ranking of his own.

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Are Second Serves Mostly Useless?

Novak Djokovic loading up for some topspin

During the Australian Open, Challenger player (and Youtube star) Karue Sell made a bold statement:

Thank you, Karue, for posting this: It is always valuable to get specific claims about the game from the people who are trying to figure out how to win. Right or wrong, testable propositions like these help nudge our understanding in the right direction.

Now: Right or wrong?

Are second serves becoming mostly useless? A first look at the data says no–or, at least, they aren’t becoming any more useless than they were before. Here is second serve win percentage for tour-level matches since 1991:

The important thing here isn’t the trend. It’s the narrowness of the values. The difference between the lowest and highest ticks on this graph is only three percentage points, and half of that happened before the century turned. Strength and strategy may be different–we’ll get to that–but the results aren’t. If anything, second serves have become (modestly) less useless.

This trend holds up even when we tweak the parameters. Yes, the surface mix of the tour has changed since the 1990s. But if we look only at hard-court matches, there’s an even tighter range of yearly averages, between 48.9% and 51.2%. At Sell’s Challenger level, I only have data back to 2010. In that span, hard-court second-serve win rates have drifted less than a single percentage point, between 49.7% and 50.6%.

I can’t help but notice that Sell’s own Challenger-level second-serve win percentage is a healthy 52%. I’m sure it sometimes feels useless: The last match he played before making the comment was a qualifying-round loss in which he salvaged less than 40% of second-serve points. But despite his relatively small stature, he won more main draw second-serve points last year than Matteo Berrettini did–albeit against weaker competition.

Risk and reward

No one wants to settle for historical average. Inevitably, someone brought up the notion of two first serves:

No, two first serves are not the way. But Sell recognizes what might work. At least in theory, players should take more risk on second serves (and perhaps on firsts, as well), hitting bigger and winning more points at the cost of more doubles.

If tennis trends proceeded by opinion poll, I think we’d already see evidence of this. I certainly never see anyone argue that players should be more conservative with the second ball, unless they’re talking about a particular struggling player. But all that matters is what happens on court, and there’s no sign there of more double faults:

Again, the framing doesn’t matter. The numbers are about the same regardless of surface, and Challenger players have moved in the same direction. In fact, the 2025 Challenger rate so far is 9.8%, the first time that the minor leaguers have dipped below double digits.

To be clear, I wouldn’t expect any sudden moves here. A generation of players grows up learning certain serves and tactics, and there’s only so much they can do to change them. An equation might spit out that someone would win, say, 56% of second-serve points in exchange for accepting a 12% double-fault rate. But do athletes really have such fine-grained control of the risks they take? I suspect not, which means another generation may go by before we see a true “1 and 1.5” strategy.

Is 100 miles per hour a must?

How fast do second serves need to be? While I can’t imagine any player would turn down a triple-digit average, we’re nowhere near that level. The rightmost column shows the average second-serve speeds at the 2024 US Open for every player who reached the third round:

Only 4 of 32 averaged triple digits. Just five posted a mark at or above 96 miles per hour. The dominant tournament winner, Jannik Sinner, barely topped 90.

It’s possible that the sensors (or the balls, or the humid conditions, or pick your variable) resulted in low readings: US Open speeds are typically several miles per hour lower than Wimbledon speeds, even for the same players. But the gap isn’t enough to push more than a quarter of these guys over the magic number.

Still, Sell could be correct on the trend, if not on the detail. Maybe second serves are getting faster, or slower second serves are more likely to end in a point lost.

US Open data, though, suggests that second serves have stayed about the same. I have relevant data back to 2014, plus 2011. Splitting second serves into buckets of 100-plus miles per hour, 95-99, 90-94, and so on, it’s tough to find much of a trend:

(In case you’re wondering, the 2012-13 data has serve speeds, but no indication of first or second serves. Not very helpful here!)

Same story with win rates. As with the tour in general, the US Open has seen a steady percentage of second-serve points won. The next graph shows year-by-year win rates both overall and for the 85-89 mile-per-hour bucket, on the theory that if returners were feasting on relatively weak seconds, it would show up there:

While the 85-89 mph results are noisy, there’s not much to see here. The overall win rate in 2024 is almost identical to what it was 13 years earlier. There’s a bit of space between 85-89 mph second serves in 2011 and 2024, but still not much.

It’s certainly true that harder is better, and that hasn’t changed. At every one of these US Opens, the win rate of 100-plusses exceeded the win rate of sub-85s by at least five percentage points, and the gap rose as high as ten points at the 2020 Covid event. But we’ve yet to find much evidence for the notion that second serve speeds or results are any different than they were 10, 13, or even 30 years ago.

Are servers going to the forehand more often?

Finally, we can say… maybe?

I pulled all hard court matches since 2014 between right-handers from the Match Charting Project database. (Hard court, because it’s so much easier to run around second serves on clay; 2014, because that’s when the project started, so there’s not as much bias toward big-name players and matches; right-handers, because lefties, while fascinating, make things way more complicated.)

The charts classify serves into three categories: Wide, body, and T. Second serves to the “body” usually aren’t good: Those are serves that didn’t find a corner. In the men’s game, that’s 35-40% of seconds. It’s tough to tell from the chart–and sometimes even when watching a match–exactly which side the server targeted, because it is so easy for the returner to take a step or two around it and hit a forehand.

Servers are indeed more likely these days to find the forehand corner:

This isn’t an enormous move, but it seems like a real thing. If we throw out the 2020 Covid season, it would look like an even more dramatic shift just in the last few years.

However, more second serves to the forehand corner does not mean fewer second serves to the backhand corner. These extra forehand-targeted serves are coming at the expense of the mediocre “body” seconds. Servers drill the backhand corner 30% to 35% of the time, and that range hasn’t budged over the last decade.

I’d more inclined to say, then, that players have gotten a bit better. And they’ve chosen to use that improvement to keep returners off balance, aiming a few more second serves to the forehand side.

Are players too good from the back?

Sell’s theory is that more second serves are targeting the forehand, because the backhand is no longer such a weak side. We can use the same subset of MCP data to check how (right-handed) returners have fared against second serves to their backhand corner:

Again, 2020 is weird; other than that, we’re just looking at noise. (Or, possibly, the signature of a drunk blue M&M.) The long-term average of this stat is 50.6%, and in ten of the twelve seasons, the single-year number was within half a percentage point of that.

Backhand returns may have gotten stronger, but if so, serves are advancing at the same rate.

What gives?

Why would Karue identify trends that, for the most part, have so little evidence to support them?

First, the tour is getting stronger, at backhand returns and everything else. Some serves that would’ve gone unreturned in 2005 or 2015 are coming back today. As we’ve seen, servers are maintaining a balance. But it’s easy to suffer a few bad results and conclude that drastic changes have taken place.

Second, Karue himself played his best tennis last year. He cracked the top 300 for the first time and played a dozen Challenger main draws. That meant he faced stronger competition than ever. The Challenger tour is full of baseline battlers with sturdy backhands; there isn’t a huge gap between the return skill that Sell faces these days and the elite-level returning we watch on TV. Moving up from ITFs to Challengers means that some weapons don’t work anymore, and–especially for smaller guys–new tactics are needed.

I’d love to see Sell, or anyone else, give a serious trial to the “1 and 1.5” serve strategy. Hit seconds harder, attack the forehand more often, and accept more double faults. Karue might be right about what the future of second serves will look like, but we’re not there yet.

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Trivia Notebook #3: Indian Wells Upset Edition

Belinda Bencic in 2023. Credit: LHC88

Previous: Trivia Notebook #2

Thanks to all who have suggested trivia topics — you’ve sent me some good ones. Keep them coming. Today I’ve got tidbits on three winners from Indian Wells: Belinda Bencic, Tallon Griekspoor, and Camila Osorio.

Better Belinda Bencic

Great dig from Oleg:

Those numbers include Bencic’s upset of Coco Gauff, but not her loss yesterday to Madison Keys. So the current top-five tally is 19-16, still comfortably better than her record against the next five, or the next ten after that.

The top five typically does not allow things like this. Since 1984, when my week-by-week ranking data begins, the WTA top five has won 79% of matches. That’s a healthy margin ahead of 69% for players ranked 6-10 and 64% for 11-20.

So, is Bencic alone? We’re looking for players with plenty of meetings against each of the three groups. She has 35 or more against each; let’s set the bar lower, at 20. I found 151 such players. Of those, we want to find those who have a better winning percentage against the top five than against the next five, and a better winning percentage against 6-10 than versus 11-20.

No dice. Belinda is the only one. 18 women managed a better record against the top five than the next five:

Player                    W% v1-5  W% v6-10  
Serena Williams             76.5%     62.7%  
Belinda Bencic              54.5%     48.6%  
Karolina Pliskova           46.0%     39.5%  
Jelena Ostapenko            44.8%     37.0%  
Maria Sakkari               41.2%     39.4%  
Kristina Mladenovic         40.9%     33.3%  
Daria Kasatkina             40.5%     24.2%  
Donna Vekic                 37.5%     20.0%  
Flavia Pennetta             37.2%     28.6%  
Marion Bartoli              30.2%     29.7%  
Samantha Stosur             29.0%     26.4%  
Elise Mertens               25.0%     19.0%  
Iva Majoli                  23.9%     22.6%  
Katarina Srebotnik          23.8%     20.0%  
Barbora Strycova            17.9%      9.7%  
Marianne Werdel Witmeyer    17.4%     13.0%  
Karina Habsudova            17.2%     11.1%  
Raffaella Reggi Concato     17.2%      5.9%

(All of these numbers, including Bencic’s, exclude Indian Wells.)

Comparing records against “next five” and “ten after that” is a bit odd in isolation, so instead, let’s compare top-ten and next-ten records. That’s an even more limited group:

Player               W% v1-10  W% v11-21  
Belinda Bencic          51.4%      35.0%  
Kiki Bertens            47.9%      38.2%  
Anett Kontaveit         40.4%      40.0%  
Kristina Mladenovic     37.0%      34.0%  
Donna Vekic             27.8%      26.8%  
Tsvetana Pironkova      25.0%      17.2%  
Katarina Srebotnik      21.7%      20.8%

Lots of these margins are close; Belinda’s is not. Maybe this explains the recent downward ranking moves of Elena Rybakina and Jasmine Paolini. They fear their colleague from Switzerland, so they’ve fled the top five so as to give her less motivation.

Tallon Griekspoor is no Bencic

Heading to the desert, Tallon Griekspoor held a 0-18 career record against the top five:

Some good fights in there, but a zero is a zero. That changed last Friday, when the Dutchman outlasted Alexander Zverev in a third-set tiebreak. Zverev has given several men a top-five victory in the last few weeks, but it still counts.

We have a few questions, then:

  1. Is Griekspoor’s top-five losing streak the longest ever to start a career?
  2. Is it the longest to be broken?
  3. How does it compare to top-five losing streaks, including those that don’t start a career?

Losing your first 18 matches against top-fivers gets you into the conversation, but Griekspoor stopped five defeats short of the record. These numbers all go back to 1982, the first year for which I have week-by-week ATP rankings. Here’s the all-time list:

Player             Losses  Broken?  
Fabio Fognini          23      Yes  
Jeff Tarango           23       No  
Jarkko Nieminen        23      Yes  
Simone Bolelli         22      Yes  
Diego Schwartzman      22      Yes  
Francisco Clavet       21      Yes  
Potito Starace         20       No  
Tomas Carbonell        20      Yes  
Victor Hanescu         19       No  
Tallon Griekspoor      18      Yes  
Leonardo Mayer         18       No  
Ryan Harrison          18       No  
Alex De Minaur         18      Yes

It’s easy to dunk on Fabio Fognini, but in fairness, he came up at a very difficult time to score a top-five win. Check out the list of opponents for those 23 losses:

And yes, after all that, Fognini ended the string by beating Nadal. On clay. Twice.

I also need to mention Tomas Carbonell. He ended his 20-match losing streak with an upset of 5th-ranked Jonas Bjorkman … and that was it! He finished his career on at least one winning streak.

What about top-five losing streaks, not limited to those at the beginning of a career? Here are the longest runs of top-five futility, again going back to 1982:

Player                 Streak     
Andreas Seppi              32     
Viktor Troicki             28     
Philipp Kohlschreiber      27     
Jeff Tarango               23  *  
Fabio Fognini              23  *  
Jarkko Nieminen            23  *  
Jimmy Connors              23     
Eliot Teltscher            22     
Simone Bolelli             22  *  
Diego Schwartzman          22  *  
Andres Gomez               22     
Marin Cilic                22     
Gilles Muller              22     
Francisco Clavet           21  *

(Starred players are those from the previous list.)

Before we get to Seppi, Teltscher deserves an honorable mention here. His 22-loss streak started in early 1982, right after he upset John McEnroe at the season-ending Masters event. Had he lost that match, the string would have extended to 34, since the McEnroe upset broke a separate 11-loss streak.

Seppi’s long run of frustration would have been hard to predict: He had beaten Lleyton Hewitt and Nadal before he broke into the top 40 himself. But the 2008 victory over Rafa would be his last top-five win for nearly seven years:

As with Fognini, not an easy time to knock out anybody in the top five.

Finally, did you notice Jimmy Connors on the list? He is by far the greatest player to suffer such a long losing streak, and it was all the more notable because it began when he was a top-two player himself. He was responsible for 15 of Teltscher’s losses, but by 1985, things turned south for Jimbo:

Connors was 32 years old when the streak began, so it didn’t entirely come out of the blue. Still, that’s a tough run for a top-ten player.

Defeats of former number ones

Camila Osorio opened her Indian Wells campaign with a straight-set win over Naomi Osaka. It wasn’t exactly a shock, as Osorio is ranked slightly above Osaka. But here’s a different spin on it:

Is this something we’re doing now? I mean, great for Camila and Colombia–I’m always happy to see a tennis non-powerhouse getting attention. But “former number one” spans a fair few players, some of whom have stuck around long after they fell from the top of the list. Victoria Azarenka alone has lost over 100 matches since she first dropped out of the top ten in 2014.

Still, what the hell, let’s play.

Going back to 1984, there have been 27 WTA number ones. I’m going to count wins against the current number one as well–presumably those are at least as noteworthy as beating a former top player. Since the beginning of my week-by-week ranking data, current or former number ones have lost 2,587 matches.

Here are the stars who have handed out the largest number of noteworthy(?) victories. Unlike some loss leaderboards, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Azarenka is a good example: Inclusion here says more about longevity than anything else. So, losses after first reaching the number one ranking:

Player                   Losses  
Venus Williams              219  
Jelena Jankovic             205  
Caroline Wozniacki          192  
Arantxa Sanchez Vicario     168  
Ana Ivanovic                162  
Victoria Azarenka           142  
Karolina Pliskova           131  
Maria Sharapova             130  
Serena Williams             116  
Angelique Kerber            114

Osorio represented Osaka’s 49th such loss. Venus Williams has allowed 108 different women to put “beat a former number one” on their CV, and Osaka is already up to 33.

All told, 369 women have now beaten a current or former number one in the last four decades. They represent 52 different countries, now including Colombia.

It really isn’t that elite of a group. Osorio has better achievements to brag about, including–to bring us full circle–a top-five win, one that took her far fewer than 18 tries to accomplish.

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The Inscrutable Magic of Jessica Pegula

Jessica Pegula playing defense at the 2022 US Open

Alright, alright, alright.

When I started writing these player-themed pieces more than a year ago, Jessica Pegula was at the top of my list. One of my goals is to demystify the factors that cause each player’s success, or lack thereof. Pegula has had plenty of success, but compared to her peers at the top of the game, it is difficult to say exactly why.

There’s no obvious calling card that intimidates opponents. Pegula doesn’t serve very hard, ranking in the middle of the pack at least year’s US Open with an average serve speed around 92mph and first serves at 99mph. She doesn’t hit many aces. She ranks just outside the top ten in hold percentage, largely because she cleans up on second serves. That’s her one standout, top-line stat: In the 52 weeks leading up to Indian Wells, she won 51% of second-serve points. Only four women have topped 50%, and only Iga Swiatek wins more.

Pegula’s return numbers are even more anonymous. She ranks 20th among the WTA top 50 in break percentage. Top 20 on both sides of the ball is outstanding and unusual, but again, hardly intimidating. Whether serving or returning, she isn’t particularly effective on break points. Not that she’s bad in that department, but clutch play doesn’t help us understand all the match wins.

But win matches she certainly does. The American has held a place in the top ten since June 2022, much of that time in the top five. She has won seven tour-level titles and reached finals at both the US Open and the year-end championships. Off a title in Austin, she’s on a seven-match winning streak going into today’s match against Elina Svitolina. Elo isn’t quite as excited about her performance, but even that metric places her seventh, only 16 points behind fifth-place Qinwen Zheng.

What, then, is Pegula doing so right? When a player gets better results than her tools seem to suggest, I tend to fall back on difficult-to-quantify assets like movement, anticipation, and the blackest box of all, tennis IQ. Pegula excels in all those categories. But can we do better?

Second thoughts

Let’s start with the second serves. Here’s a generic theory for you: second-serve win percentages are related to success rates on return. Few women have dominant second serves–remember that Pegula is one of only a handful who win more than half of those points–so especially if the returner puts the ball in play, the server is already on defense.

Indeed, there’s something of a relationship, though not a statistically strong one. This plot shows the WTA top 50 in both categories:

jpeg.jpg

Here’s a sentence I didn’t expect to write: Pegula and Sabalenka are almost identical in this pair of metrics. To go a step further, the cluster of players extending from Alexandrova in the lower left, to Sabalenka, then to Swiatek in the upper right, is disproportionately made up of big hitters. (The finesse players, along with the always unpredictable Jelena Ostapenko, are in the lower right.)

Yet by the standards of women’s tennis in the 2020s, Pegula is not a big hitter. It’s natural enough that she would equal Sabalenka’s return results, even if they get there in different ways. But second serves, too?

After watching Pegula’s quick dismissal of Xinyu Wang on Sunday, I thought I had the answer. While her second serves aren’t fast (79mph on average at last year’s US Open), they are precise. She doesn’t tee them up down the middle, and she manages to hit targets close to the service line. Location can be as valuable as raw speed, so that might explain how she gets the results of a bigger server.

Except… I can’t prove that she does any of that on a consistent basis. US Open scorers classify serve depth as “close to the line” or “not close to the line. Pegula merited a “close to the line” designation on 15% of her second serves, compared to a tournament average of 18%. She was slightly below average on first serves, too.

As for serve direction, it’s the same story. The Match Charting Project classifies each serve as one of three directions: wide, body, or down-the-tee. The average server hits one of the corners (wide or tee) with about 80% of their second serves. Pegula’s number is 74%. That’s not in itself bad–Venus Williams sports the same number–but it certainly doesn’t support my theory.

If there’s a quantifiable reason why Pegula wins all those second-serve points, it doesn’t look like we’ll find it in the second serve itself.

The match and the territory

Another eye-test hypothesis about Pegula: She doesn’t wait for the game to come to her. She stands as close to the baseline as she can get away with, both returning serve and in rallies. She doesn’t back up when faced with a deep drive or a high bounce. Depending on the shot, she’ll pick it up on a short hop or reach above her shoulder.

Not everyone is able to do this. For those who can, the advantages are clear. The earlier you hit the ball, the faster it gets back in your opponent’s court–and the less time they have to react. It’s power tennis for women without overwhelming power.

This style of play is particularly effective against opponents who aren’t particularly aggressive. Pegula’s losses this year have come against Madison Keys, Olga Danilovic, Ekaterina Alexandrova, and Linda Noskova: a quartet of heavy hitters who end points fast. Pegula lost just two matches on North American hard courts last summer, both to Aryna Sabalenka.

Against less free-swinging foes, the American takes away chances. Pegula doesn’t hit an overwhelming number of winners: 6% of her groundstrokes go untouched, in line with tour average. But her opponents do worse. In the Austin final, McCartney Kessler scored winners on just 2% of her shots from the baseline, half her usual rate. Pegula applied the same pressure to Xinyu Wang Sunday, slashing the Chinese player’s groundstroke-winner rate to 4% from a career average of 7%.

Again, these are stats that invoke parallels with a different style of player. The best way to prevent winners is to hit winners of your own, or at least end the point trying. That’s the Keys/Alexandrova/Ostapenko/etc playbook. Yet by Aggression Score, a metric that puts those ball-bashers on top, Pegula is below average, keeping company with the likes of Emma Navarro and Mirra Andreeva.

Deep research

Maybe you’re convinced that this explains a lot of Pegula’s success. She hugs the baseline, cuts off angles, and takes away opportunities for all but the most aggressive players to find openings of their own.

Still, I’d like more support from the numbers. Positioning is tricky to quantify, so I want to focus on one specific situation. What happens when the American is faced with a very deep service return?

Deep returns essentially erase the server’s advantage, neutralizing the point with one swing. The server usually needs to take a step or two back, and unless it’s a perpetual gambler like Ostapenko, she won’t try anything flashy for at least one more shot. Pegula doesn’t aim to end the point, either, but she’s less likely to concede territory. While that doesn’t allow her to seize the advantage, she’s careful not to hand too much of an edge to the returner.

Yet… nope. The next table shows how the ten players with the most hard-court data since 2022 handle deep second-serve returns: How often they get the next ball back in play (“3rd-inPlay”), how often those balls in play result in points won (“inPlay W%”), and how often they win points against deep returns, even considering the ones they didn’t get back (“vsDeep W%”).

Player            3rd-inPlay  inPlay W%  vsDeep W%  
Iga Swiatek            84.2%      59.8%      50.4%  
Aryna Sabalenka        77.5%      63.5%      49.2%  
Karolina Muchova       84.2%      56.3%      47.4%  
Paula Badosa           84.2%      54.6%      45.9%  
Elena Rybakina         79.5%      57.5%      45.7%  
Daria Kasatkina        85.5%      52.2%      44.6%  
Coco Gauff             83.6%      53.2%      44.5%  
Jasmine Paolini        82.7%      53.7%      44.4%  
Jessica Pegula         81.9%      53.2%      43.6%  
AVERAGE                81.8%      53.0%      43.4%  
Qinwen Zheng           76.5%      52.6%      40.2%

Pegula is almost exactly average, which makes her less effective against deep second-serve returns than most other top players. (The average considers all players, not just those listed, which is why it’s so close to the bottom.) Sticking to the baseline might still be the best solution for her, but it doesn’t win her an unusually high number of points.

This is a lot of negative results for one post. Pegula is close to the best in the business at turning her second serve into points won. But it’s not because she hits her seconds deep, or because she keeps the ball away the returner, or because she handles deep returns unusually well.

So we’re more or less back where we started. The American does a lot of things well, or at least well enough that they are not liabilities. Among top 50 players, she is average or better in nearly every category, close to the top ten in a few. By my groundstroke potency metrics, FHP and BHP, she does even better: She ranks among the top 20 in both, one of the few players to do so.

That, apparently, is good enough for a place in the top five. With better, finer-grained stats, we might be able to isolate how Pegula turns court position into victory. For now, we can appreciate how she holds her own against opponents with more fearsome weapons. Her personal brand of flexible shotmaking is certainly working, whether we understand it or not.

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