Heavy Topspin – Page 96 – The Tennis Abstract blog

Nick Kyrgios and the First Fifty Matches

When Nick Kyrgios lost the Wimbledon quarterfinal to Milos Raonic yesterday, he was playing his 50th career match at the Challenger level or above. Round numbers invite big-picture analysis, so let’s see how Kyrgios stacks up to the competition at this early milestone.

When Monday’s rankings are released, Nick will debut in the top 100, all way up to #66. Only Rafael Nadal (61), Gael Monfils (65), and Lleyton Hewitt (65) have been ranked higher at the time of their 51th Challenger-or-higher match. Roger Federer was #93, Novak Djokovic was #128, and Jo Wilfried Tsonga was #314. Of the current top 100, only ten players reached a double-digit ranking by their 51st match.

The wealth of ranking points available at Grand Slams have played a big part in Kyrgios’s rise, but they don’t tell the whole story. He has won 36 of his first 50 matches, equal to the best of today’s top 100. Nadal went 36-14, and next on the list is Djokovic and Santiago Giraldo (who played almost all Challengers) at 34-16. Most of Nick’s wins before this week came at Challengers, and he has won four titles at the level.

No other active player won four Challenger titles in his first 50 matches. Eight others, including Djokovic, Tsonga, Stanislas Wawrinka, and David Ferrer, won three. All of them needed more events at the level to win three titles than Kyrgios did to win four.

Nick’s short Challenger career is another indicator of a bright future. He has only played nine Challenger events, and with his ranking in the 60s, he may never have to play one again. As I’ve previously written, the best players tend to race through this level: Federer, Nadal, and Djokovic all played between eight and twelve Challengers. It’s a rare prospect that makes the jump in fewer than 20 events, and when I researched that post two years ago, more than half of the top 100 had played at least 50 Challengers.

One category in which the Australian doesn’t particularly stand out is age. When he plays his 51st match, he’ll a couple of months past his 19th birthday. Roughly one-quarter of the current top 100 reached that match total at an earlier age. Nadal, Richard Gasquet, and Juan Martin del Potro did so before their 18th birthday, while Djokovic, Hewitt, and Bernard Tomic needed only a few more weeks beyond that.

Without knowing how Kyrgios would’ve performed on tour a year or two earlier, it’s tough to draw any conclusions. His 36-14 record at 19 certainly isn’t as impressive as Rafa’s equivalent record at 17.

Cracking the top 100 at 17 or 18 is a much better predictor of future greatness than doing so at 19, but as the tour ages, 19 may be the new 16. Grigor Dimitrov didn’t enter the top 100 until he was three months short of his 20th birthday, while Dominic Thiem and Jiri Vesely were still outside the top 100 on their 20th birthdays. Among his immediate cohort, Kyrgios stands alone: No other teenager is ranked within the top 240.

As predictive measures go, Nick’s Wimbledon performance–built on his poise under pressure–is the best sign of them all. Only seven active players have reached a Grand Slam quarterfinal as a teenager, and four of them–Fed, Rafa, Novak, and Lleyton–went on to reach #1. (The other three are Delpo, Tomic, and Ernests Gulbis.)

For a player with only fifty matches under his belt, that’s excellent company.

Nick Kyrgios, Young Jedi of the Tiebreak

Italian translation at settesei.it

At Wimbledon this year, 19-year-old rising star Nick Kyrgios has shown himself to be impervious to pressure. In his second round upset of Richard Gasquet, he tied a Grand Slam record by surviving nine match points. Against Rafael Nadal, he withstood perhaps the best clutch player in the game. Despite Nadal’s stature as one of the best tiebreak players in the game, the Australian won both of the tiebreaks they contested.

As I’ve shown in other posts, tiebreaks are–for most players–toss-ups. Better players typically win more than 50% of the tiebreaks they play, but that’s because they’re better players, not because they have some tiebreak-specific skill. Only a very few men–Nadal, Roger Federer, and John Isner are virtually alone among active players–win even more tiebreaks than their non-tiebreak performance would indicate.

Kyrgios is making a very strong case that he should be added to the list. In his career at the ATP, ATP qualifying, and Challenger levels, he’s won 23 of 31 tiebreaks, good for an otherworldly 74% winning percentage. Isner has never posted a single-season mark that high, and Federer has only done so twice.

Nick isn’t playing these matches against weaker opponents, and he isn’t cleaning up in non-tiebreak sets. (Too many scores like 7-6 6-1 might suggest that he shouldn’t have gotten himself to 6-6 in the first place.) Based on Kyrgios’s serve and return points won throughout each match, a tennis-playing robot would have had a 52% chance of winning each tiebreak.

Given those numbers, it’s extremely likely that Kyrgios is one of the outliers, a player who wins many more tiebreaks than expected. There’s only a 1% chance that his excellent winning percentage is purely luck. We can be 95% sure that a tiebreak winning percentage of 58% or better is explained by skill, and 90% sure that his tiebreak skill deserves at least a winning percentage of 62%.

Either one of these more modest figures would still be excellent. Milos Raonic, his quarterfinal opponent and a player who represents an optimistic career path for Kyrgios’s next few years, has posted a 58% tiebreak winning percentage at tour level. Tomorrow’s match won’t be enough to prove which player is better in these high-pressure moments, but given each man’s playing style, it’s almost certain that we’ll see Kyrgios tested in another batch of tiebreaks.

Unbroken Grand Slam Quarterfinalists

Italian translation at settesei.it

Through the first four rounds at Wimbledon, Roger Federer‘s serve has not been broken. In that span, he has faced nine break points, including only four in his last three matches.

Since 1991–the first year for which match stats are available–this is only the 8th time a player reached the quarters of a men’s major without losing serve. Only Federer in 2004 and Ivo Karlovic in 2009 have done so at Wimbledon. Federer and Nadal are the only players to have done so more than once. (Fed was also unbroken through four matches in Melbourne last year, and Rafa accomplished the feat at the 2010 and 2013 US Opens.)

Roger’s nine break points faced are a bit less impressive. More than 5% of the 752 Grand Slam quarterfinalists since 1991 have allowed fewer, including Federer himself on several occasions. He allowed only three break points at Wimbledon in 2007, and only four at three other majors.

Dominant as such a performance is, it’s less clear whether it has any predictive value. A major confounding factor is quality of competition–would anyone expect Paolo Lorenzi or Santiago Giraldo to break Federer on grass? While he built on these superb serving performances and went on to win the title at Wimbledon in 2004 and 2007, he failed to do so at the three majors when he allowed only four break points through this stage of the tournament.

Without accounting for player quality, there is a weak negative correlation between matches won at the event and break points (and breaks) allowed. (For instance, for matches won and break points allowed in the first four matches, r = -0.25. Excluding Roland Garros, r = -0.27.) In other words, if all you know about two players is how many break points they faced in the first four rounds, bet on the guy who faced fewer.

But it’s a weak relationship, and when player quality is taken into account, it vanishes to almost nothing. Eight of the 24 players who were broken one or fewer times in the first four rounds went on to win the title, but I suspect that has more to do with the prevalence of Rafa, Roger, and Pete Sampras–the best players are most likely to go unbroken, and the best players are most likely to go deepest at Slams.

When the best players struggle on serve in early rounds, it’s hardly a death knell for their title chances. Only four times in Fed’s 31 previous hard- and grass-court Slam quarterfinal runs has he been broken more than six times before the quarters, and he won the tournament one two of those four occasions. He’s surely happy to be into the quarterfinals this week with a minimum of fuss, but the fuss level only says so much about how happy he’ll be come Sunday.

Teenagers, Thirty-Somethings, and Americans at Grand Slams

I’ve put together a few reports showing how age distributions and US presence have changed over the years at Grand Slams. Let’s start with player age.

The average age of players in the Wimbledon men’s singles draw is 27.7 years, which is just short of the all-time record, 27.8, set at Roland Garros last month, and equal to last year’s figure at Wimbledon. There are two teens in the draw (up one from last year), and 34 thirty-somethings, which is tied for third-most since 1982.

This report shows the complete year-by-year breakdown for the last 30 years’ worth of men’s slam draws.

The average age in the Wimbledon women’s draw is also very high by historical standards. At 25.2 years, it’s tied with this year’s French Open and 2012 Wimbledon for the highest ever. 43-year-old Kimiko Date Krumm moves the needle all by herself; without her, the average would be 25.0, still considerably higher than any other pre-2010 slam.

There are ten teenagers in the draw, which is very low for the WTA, but safely above the all-time low of 7, set at Wimbledon two years ago. The total of 16 players aged 30 or over is good for third-most of all time, behind this year’s and last year’s French Opens.

Here’s the WTA report showing these numbers for each slam in the last 30 years.

(All of the figures above for 2014 Wimbledon could change slightly if more lucky losers are added to the draw.)

I also put together a couple of reports showing the number of Americans in each slam draw, broken down by direct entrants, qualifiers, lucky losers, and wild cards, along with the top seed, the number of seeds (and top 16 seeds), plus the number of Americans in each round:

Enjoy!

The Effect of 32 Seeds

Italian translation at settesei.it

In the middle of 2001, the Grand Slams doubled the number of seeds in the draw from 16 to 32, a change “designed to protect star players and satisfy clay and grass specialists.”

The intended beneficiaries of the change were, of course, all seeded players. Those in the top 16 no longer had to worry about facing a fellow top-32 player until the third round. Those ranked from 17-32, who before the change may have faced a top 16 player in the first round, now received the same protection.

The costs of the 32-seed system are borne by two groups: unseeded players, who are now more likely to face a top-ranked player early; and first-week fans, who would like to see more “compelling” early-round matches. While it’s easy to point to shock upsets like Serena Williams’s exit today as a counterpoint, the first two rounds at Slams often feel like warm-up matches for the biggest stars, with fringe players as their hapless foils.

On the other hand, it’s tough to get an intuitive sense of just how much is at stake here. It may not be as much as you think. From 1989 to 2000, men’s seeds were upset 263 times in the first two rounds of slams. Only 51 of those losses were to players in the top 32. In other words, more than 80% of those upsets would have occurred even with a 32-seed format, and presumably, some of the remaining 51 matches would still have resulted in upsets.

From the perspective of the top 16 seeds, there may not be that much difference between opponents ranked in the next 16 and those ranked lower still. To cherry-pick just one example, there are many seeded players Stanislas Wawrinka would have rather faced this week than Guillermo Garcia Lopez.

For top-four women, it hasn’t made a difference at all. In the twelve years before the switch, they reached the third round in 176 of 190 attempts. In the twelve years after the format change, women seeded 1-4 no longer risked facing a top-32 player in the first two rounds, and reached the third round in 178 of 191 attempts.

In fact, for top-16 women’s seeds in general, the 32-seed format has not helped. From 1989-2000, women’s seeds reached the third round 77.6% of the time, the fourth round 63.5% of the time, and the quarterfinals 40.8% of the time. From 2002-13, with lower-ranked early-round opponents, the corresponding numbers were 78.2%, 60.1%, and 37.1%.

It’s likely that some of the differences have to do with the increasing depth of the women’s game, but it’s hardly the case that the 32-seed format has drastically changed the nature of the majors, at least for the players who have been seeded all along. Men’s top-16 seeds have benefited, reaching the third, fourth, and quarterfinal rounds about 10% more often since the switch to 32 seeds, but even here, we’re not seeing radically different second weeks.

The real change, as you might suspect, appears when we consider the balance of power between the new seeds (17-32) and the rest of the field. From 1989-2000, when there were only 16 seeds and those two groups were treated the same way, men’s players ranked 17-32 reached the third round about twice as often (35% to 17%) as their lower-ranked competitors. Women in the 17-32 range held a wider advantage of 39% to 15%.

Now that there are 32 seeds and the 17-32 group is protected, those gaps have substantially grown. From 2002-13, men seeded outside the top 16 have reached the third round 53% of the time, compared to 12% for unseeded players. Seeded women in the 17-32 range have reached the third round 49% of the time, while unseeded women have equaled their male counterparts at 12%.

These differences, big as they are, aren’t going to affect most fans’ enjoyment of the majors. The format change means that Rafael Nadal faces a player ranked 60th in the world in the second round and a player ranked 30th in the third round. He’ll almost always win both matches, so the end result is the same. A surprise run to the quarterfinals isn’t much different if it’s made by world #25 than by #50.

However, the 32-seed format does amplify the gap between tennis’s haves and have-nots. Yes, he Grand Slams have massively increased prize money in the last few years for all main-draw competitors–first-round losers in Paris earn more than $32,000 for their efforts. But players who reach the third round are able to triple that money.

As we’ve seen, the format change has made it much more likely that #32 reaches the third round (and takes home a nearly six-figure purse) at the expense of everyone ranked lower–despite having little effect on the makeup of the field in the fourth round and beyond. Plus, the ranking points on offer at Slams mean that third-rounders are that much more likely to earn a seed at the next major, starting the next round of the same cycle.

Seeding 32 players instead of 16 doesn’t have much of an effect on the fates of top players, especially on the women’s side. It can, however, lessen interest in the first several days of play, and it certainly supports an arbitrary middle tier of players at the expense of the rest of the field.

If the 32-seed era were to end here, there’s little reason for tennis fans to miss it.

Erratic Results and the Fate of Jerzy Janowicz

When Jerzy Janowicz defeated Victor Estrella in the first round at Roland Garros on Sunday, it was the Pole’s first win since Februrary, breaking a string of nine consecutive losses. Janowicz’s results have been rather pedestrian ever since his semifinal run at Wimbledon last year, yet the 720 points he earned for that single performance have kept his ranking in the top 25 and given him a seed at the Grand Slams.

As we’ve discussed many times on this site, occasional greatness trumps consistent mediocrity, at least as far as ranking points are concerned. The system rewards players who bunch wins together–Janowicz current holds about 1500 points, barely double what he earned from that single event last year.

In the short term, bunching wins is a good thing, as Janowicz has learned. But from an analytical perspective, how should we view players with recent histories like his? Does the Wimbledon semifinal bode well for the future? Does the mediocre rest of his record outweigh a single excellent result? Does it all come out in the wash?

It’s a question that doesn’t pertain only to Janowicz. While 48% of Jerzy’s points come from Wimbledon, 49% of Andy Murray‘s current ranking point total comes from winning Wimbledon. Another reigning Slam champion, Stanislas Wawrinka, owes 34% of his point total to a single event. By contrast, for the average player in the top 50, that figure is only 21%. Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic are among the most consistent on tour, at 16% and 10%, respectively.

Since 2010, there has only been one top-40 player who earned more than half of his year-end ranking points from a single event: Ivan Ljubicic, whose 1,000 points for winning Indian Wells dominated his 1,965 point total. His top-16 ranking at the end of that year didn’t last. He didn’t defend his Indian Wells points or make up the difference elsewhere, falling out of the top 30 for most of 2011. Of course, he was in his 30s at that point, so we shouldn’t draw any conclusions from this extreme anecdote.

When we crunch the numbers, it emerges that there has been no relationship between “bunched” ranking points and success the following year. I collected several data points for every top-40 players from the 2010, 2011, and 2012 seasons: their year-end ranking, the percentage of ranking points from their top one, two, and three events, and the year-end ranking the following year. If bunching were a signal of an inflated ranking–that is, if you suspect Janowicz’s abilities don’t jibe with his current ranking–we would see following-year rankings drop for players who fit that profile.

Take Jerzy’s 2012, for example. He earned 46% of his points from his top event (the Paris Masters final), 53% from his top two, and 57% from his top three. (Corresponding top-40 averages are 21%, 34%, and 44%.) He ended the year with 1,299 ranking points. At the end of 2013, his ranking no longer reflected his 600 points from Paris. But unlike Ljubicic in 2010, Janowicz boosted his ranking, improving 24% to 1,615 points.

The overall picture is just as cloudy as the juxtaposition of Ljubicic and Janowicz. There is no correlation between the percentage of points represented by a player’s top event (or top two, or top three) and his ranking point change the following year.

For the most extreme players–the ten most “bunched” ranking point totals in this dataset–there’s a small indication that the following season might disappoint. Only three of the ten (including Janowicz in 2012-13) improved their ranking, while three others saw their point total decrease by more than 40%. On average, the following-year decrease of the ten most extreme player-seasons was approximately 20%. But that’s a small, noisy subset, and we should take the overall results as a stronger indication of what to expect from players who fit this profile.

There’s still a case to be made that Jerzy is heading for a fall. He hasn’t racked up many victories so far this year that would offset the upcoming loss of his Wimbledon points. And his Wimbledon success was particularly lucky, as he faced unseeded players in both the fourth round and the quarterfinals. Even if he is particularly effective on grass, it’s unlikely the draw will so heavily favor him again.

But however a player earns his disproportionately large point total, the points themselves are no harbinger of doom. On that score, anyway, Janowicz fans can expect another year in the top 25.

Custom Filters and Head-to-Heads on TennisAbstract.com

There are a couple of cool new features on TennisAbstract.com that I’d like to share with you. I’ve added another way to search for player head-to-head records, and I’ve also added even more filtering functionality to WTA pages.

Let’s start with the H2H. There have always been a variety of ways to find head-to-head records on the site, and now I’ve made it easier than ever, right on the front page:

Start typing, and you’ll get a drop-down menu of possible players. Choose one, select another player in the field to the right, and you’ll go straight to a list of career matches between the pair.

For quite some time, there have been other ways of getting H2H results, and sometimes those methods are quicker still. First, for any upcoming match at a current tournament:

The record shown for each matchup is the career H2H record. Click on it for the list of matches.

Next, there’s a one-click route from player pages. For any listed match on a player page, the “d.” (for “defeated”) is a link. Click on that link and you get the career head-to-head record of the two players involved in that match:

Finally, you can use the “Head-to-Head” filter in the left-hand column.

It takes a few more keystrokes than the other methods outlined here, but it’s a quick way to get any H2H with a particular player. Also, for power users, you can use that filter to generate a list of matches with multiple opponents:

Custom filters

Also new today is the addition of custom date and rank filters for WTA pages. These custom filters have been available on ATP pages for several months, though I suspect many of you have yet to discover them. They work exactly the same way for men’s and women’s pages.

Let’s say, for instance, you wanted to look at Serena Williams‘s record and results since she returned to the #1 ranking last February. Click on “Time Span” in the left hand column. You’ll see a long list of years. At the bottom of the list, click on “Custom” and use the drop-down menus to select specific start and end dates:

As an added bonus, the URL changes every time you use one of these custom filters, so once you’ve generated your list showing Serena’s 89-6 record since her return to the #1 spot, you can easily share it.

You can also get custom results for opponent ranking (the “vs Rank” filter). Let’s say you wanted to know Tomas Berdych’s record in the last year against players ranked inside the top 50, but outside the top 10:

Enjoy!

Projected Matchups on TennisAbstract.com Tourney Pages

I’ve been tinkering around with the tournament pages on Tennis Abstract (for example, this week’s WTA event in Strasbourg), and I want to share the latest improvement with you.

If you are unfamiliar with TA’s tournament pages, it may take a moment to adjust to the method of presentation. But I’ve found that it’s a much more efficient way of presenting a lot more data than a traditional draw diagram–without the hassle of loading a PDF and zooming in and out.

In the left-hand column, you’ll find all upcoming matches, along with the career head-to-head record for each one. Click on the player links to go to their TA player page, or on the H2H record to see a list of H2H matches. Further down, you’ll find all results from the event (including qualifying rounds), most recent first. Take a close look at the “d.” in the middle of each completed match, and you’ll find that some of them are links. Click on those links to get the career H2H results for that pair of players.

In the right-hand column is a tournament forecast. The default view shows each player’s chances of reaching each round of the tournament. ATP forecasts are based on tournament simulations, which use jrank player ratings. WTA forecasts are based on official WTA rankings.

You’ll find today’s new addition here:

You can click on the links in the top row, “Archived,” to see what the forecast looked like at earlier stages of the tournament.

New today, click on links in the “Probable matchups” row to see the most likely development of the tournament, including H2H records for likely later-round matches:

I imagine that this will be particularly helpful at the beginning of the week for tournaments with larger draws, when you want to get a quick glance at, for instance, quarterfinal or semifinal pairings worth looking forward to.

You can always click “Current” in the top row to return to the real-time forecast.

More TennisAbstract news:

Draws and forecasts are available for French Open qualifying:

I’ll add main draw forecasts as soon as those draws are set, as well. You can find links to those on the front page of TennisAbstract.com. They’ll be updated hourly throughout the tournament.

If you’ve been wondering about some weird numbers on the ATP stats leaderboard, it’s because 2014 matches weren’t included. (Yes, I know it’s May. Ugh.) If you haven’t checked out that page, I hope you will. There are dozens of stats and hundreds of ways to filter results and generate rankings for the last two-and-a-half seasons. For instance, here are the leaders in 2014 return points won on clay.

Finally, we’ve hit a cool milestone with the Match Charting Project. Thanks to the hard work of Deb Decker, there are 50 Rafael Nadal matches in the database, including nearly every match from this year. You’ll also find at least one match for each of 90 players in the current ATP top 100 and 43 of the current WTA top 50. I hope you’ll consider contributing to this growing resource.

Entry Lists are Back!

I’ve finally been able to bring back one of my favorite features on TennisAbstract.com: ATP entry lists and player schedules!

You’ll find these in the lower right corner of the front page at tennisabstract.com.

Tour-level main draw entry lists are available about six weeks ahead of time. Challenger, Grand Slam qualifying, and Masters qualifying lists are out three weeks ahead of time. The lists on the site are updated every few hours. For example, here’s the list for the Roland Garros main draw.

The best part of this is that I can compile upcoming player schedules in one place. As I complained not too long ago, it’s outrageous that this information isn’t more readily available. My schedules aren’t perfect–for one thing, they don’t include wild cards as they are awarded–but they go a long way to addressing the problem. On that one page, you can see where your favorite player is scheduled to appear over the next several weeks.

Dominic Thiem’s Qualifying Marathon

When Dominic Thiem beat Marinko Matosevic in Madrid qualifying this week, it was the seventh time this year he fought his way into a tour-level main draw. Seven is an awful lot for one season–and it’s early May. Last season, Santiago Giraldo qualified more than any other player, doing so only six times.

In fact, Thiem could easily set the all-time record. Only 46 players have ever qualified for seven or more tour-level events in a season, and 29 of those have stopped at seven. 10 players have qualified eight times, including Flavio Cipolla in 2011, Teymuraz Gabashvili in 2007, and Alejandro Falla in 2007 and 2009. An even smaller group of seven players have reached nine main draws through qualifying, most recently Kevin Anderson in 2010.

No one has ever reached double digits, and Thiem has almost six months in which to close the gap.

Perhaps the most impressive thing about Thiem’s run is that he has failed to qualify only once this year, in Acapulco. At most ATP events, qualifying requires winning two matches, and twice this year he’s needed to win three. It’s a level of consistency almost unheard of among young players, or players of any age at his level in the rankings. It’s comparable to reaching the quarterfinals or better at seven of eight consecutive particularly strong Challengers.

If the Austrian fails to set a new record, it probably won’t be because he’s not good enough–it’s more likely to end up that way because he’s too good. His ranking started the year at #139, and after his win over Stanislas Wawrinka yesterday, he’ll ascend to almost #60 next Monday. That isn’t good enough to make the main draw cut at most Masters 1000 events, but it will earn him direct entry into anything else.

Thiem has climbed so high not just because of his success in qualifying, but also because of his performance after qualifying. In six of the seven main draws he has reached the hard way, he won at least one match, including three against seeded players. That sets him apart from other recent qualifying warriors. For instance, in 2009 Falla qualified for eight main draws and won only two matches. In 2010 Anderson won five main draw matches in nine main draws as a qualifier.

While qualifying records are impressive and entertaining, it is Thiem’s consistency and his quality play in main draws that bode well for his future as a top player on tour. Guys like Cipolla and Falla have qualified so much because they manage to stick around in a certain tier of the rankings without ever advancing any higher, not because they were ever on the brink of stardom.

That’s why, if Thiem does qualify for ten main draws this year, it will likely be the last qualifying-related record he sets. Falla leads active players with 37 successful trips through qualifying in his career, and that’s a mark the Austrian will never threaten.