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:

taforecast

 

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:

talater

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.

Lleyton Hewitt and the Elusive Triple-Hundred

Lleyton Hewitt is within a whisker of qualifying for a very elite club–players who have won 100 matches on each of the three major tennis surfaces, hard, clay, and grass. He has 367 on hard, 120 on grass, and 98 on clay. If he manages to reach this milestone, he’ll be the last player to do so for a long time.

Roger Federer, of course, is already a member. Hewitt would become only the seventh, joining Fed, Jimmy Connors, John McEnroe, Boris Becker, John Alexander, and Stan Smith. Arthur Ashe and Stefan Edberg are close: both retired with 99 grass-court wins.

Typically, the grass-court threshold is the most difficult to reach, but that’s not the issue for Hewitt.  In fact, the Aussie is one of only 16 players in ATP history to win 100 or more matches on grass courts.

Federer has 123 career wins on grass, good for second of all time, behind Connors. Hewitt, at 120, is the only other active player even close.  Next on the active list is Andy Murray at 74, followed by Novak Djokovic, Mikhail Youzhny, and Tommy Haas, all tied at 53. Of the 80 players in ATP history who have won at least 50 matches on grass, 73 are retired.

Of the active players with 50 or more grass-court wins, only Hewitt and Murray have won more matches on grass than on clay. That’s all a long-winded way of saying, if someone’s going to reach the 100-win milestone on three surfaces, you wouldn’t expect them to need a few more wins on clay.

No other active players are anywhere near striking distance of the 3×100 mark. While Murray could reach 100 wins on grass with a few more good seasons, his clay win total lags far behind–on that surface, he only recently got to 50.  And as we’ve seen, no other active player has more than 53 career wins on grass. The extended grass-court season, starting next year, will help players like Djokovic, but it’s safe to say that Haas’s window has closed.

In an era that barely rewards grass-court specialists, Hewitt has put himself in position to join this elite group by performing at a very high level on the surface. It’s ironic, then, that he’ll cross into such rarefied territory with a win on red clay.

Statistical Quirks in Munich and Oeiras

From Monday to Sunday last week, the ATP 250s in Munich and Oeiras were filled with statistical quirks.  Here’s a rundown of some of the oddities you might have missed:

  • In both events, the top four seeds in qualifying advanced to the main draw. Since the beginning of the decade, there have been 173 ATP 250s, and these two events were only the 7th and 8th of those in which the four qualifiers were the top four seeds.
  • Not only that, but the four players those qualifiers defeated were the 5th through 8th seeds. Put another way, the eight players in the qualifying round were the top eight seeds.  That hadn’t happened in the 2010s–and it happened in two different tournaments last week.   Of the previous 171 events, seven seeds reached the qualifying round on four occasions, but never eight.
  • In Munich, Tommy Haas won his first two matches as a 36 year old. He wasn’t the first man that old to win a match this year–Marc Gicquel beat him to it in Montpelier–but he’s only the 12th player to do so since 2000.  Still, he has a long way to go to catch Ken Rosewall, who won over 350 tour-level matches after his 36th birthday.
  • In four matches, Fabio Fognini reached the Munich final, but he didn’t play a single direct entrant. After a first round bye, he faced Dustin Brown, a wild card, followed by three qualifiers, Thomaz Bellucci, Jan Lennard Struff, and Martin Klizan. In ATP history, no one has ever played every round of an event without facing another direct entrant.  There have been a few instances when a player faces four non-direct entrants (notably Richard Gasquet‘s 2007 Wimbledon run).  I also found a couple of WTA $10Ks in which a player faced five non-direct entrants, but there are eight qualifying and four wild card spots at that level.
  • Fognini lost to Klizan in the final, a repeat of the final result in 2012 in St. Petersburg. Klizan’s two titles both came against Fognini, making him only the fifth player in ATP history to win his only two finals against the same player.  The Slovak is in good company: The most recent guy on the list is David Ferrer, and before that was Carlos Moya.
  • Back in Portugal, the heavy favorite Tomas Berdych won the first set over Carlos Berlocq by the score of 6-0. That’s rare enough in a tour-level final. Berlocq made it much more unusual, though, when he came back to win.  It was only the 10th time in ATP history that a player won a final after dropping the first set 0-6. The last occurrence was quite recent, when Marcel Granollers came back to win in the Kitzbuhel final last year.
  • Berlocq is known as a fighter, but he had never come back from a 0-6 hole in a tour-level match before. He had done so only once as a pro, in a Challenger match against Marcos Daniel in 2004.
  • Berdych’s record was even more pure, having never lost a professional match after winning the first set 6-0.

One more quirk from the week: By winning the Tallahassee Challenger, Robby Ginepri ended an 11-year-long title drought at that level.  (Though he did win several ATP titles in that time.)  Amazingly, that isn’t a record.  Thomas Johansson went 12 years and two months between Challenger titles, and Tommy Robredo, who ended his own nearly 12-year drought when he won Caltanissetta in 2012.

The Madrid Masters has star power, but this year it’s unlikely to produce as many historical oddities as the week it follows.

No One Beats Nicolas Almagro Eleven Times In a Row*

*except David Ferrer

No one seriously thought Nicolas Almagro had a chance to beat Rafael Nadal yesterday. Despite a loss last week, Rafa remains the best player in the world on clay, a fact Nico knows well, having lost to his fellow Spaniard every time they’ve played, including eight meetings on clay, most recently in last year’s Barcelona final.

As dominating as the Big Four have been, head-to-head records this lopsided remain quite rare. While Nadal and Novak Djokovic have butted heads 40 times and Djokovic has played Roger Federer 34 times, it’s unusual for any pair of players to cross paths so often. Any player might draw Rafa in the first or second round, but only a consistently good player reaches enough later rounds to face the top players so often. Seven of the 10 Nadal-Almagro matches, for example, have come in the quarterfinals or later.

An extremely lopsided head-to-head requires two players who win enough matches to repeatedly face each other, including one who is considerably better than the other. Nadal-Almagro fits that description quite well.

As I wrote a few months ago, head-to-head records don’t have the predictive power that many of us imagine they do, though extreme records like this one are a bit more predictive than ATP ranking. When a player faces an opponent that he has beaten ten times in a row, he wins “only” 86% of the time, or about six out of seven matches.

Still, there aren’t very many head-to-heads like this one, so it’s a rare event when a long-suffering underdog finally comes through. Almagro was only the 14th player in ATP history to win a match against someone who was undefeated against him in 10 or more meetings.

Thanks to the gradual fade of Federer and the sudden vincibility of Nadal, many of the previous 13 have occurred recently.  Almagro is the third player to reverse an 0-10 (or worse) against Nadal, following in the footsteps of Fernando Verdasco (2012 Madrid) and Stanislas Wawrinka (2014 Australian Open).

Federer has lost to four players against whom he amassed records of 10-0 or better: Tommy Robredo (2013 US Open), Robin Soderling (2010 Roland Garros), Nikolay Davydenko (2009 Tour Finals), and Fernando Gonzalez (2007 Masters Cup).

Jimmy Connors also did it twice. He won his first eleven matches against Sandy Mayer before falling,  and he won his first 15 against Eliot Teltscher before losing. In a bit of odd trivia, Arthur Ashe is the only man to be on both sides of this coin: He won his first ten Open-era meetings with Roy Emerson before losing, and he beat Rod Laver only after losing his first ten Open-era matches against the Rocket.

There isn’t much of a pattern to these streak-breaking matches. The players who finally lose to their longtime rival tend to be relatively old, but so do their opponents–with rare exceptions, it’s tough to tally ten or more meetings with a player unless both are very good, and when both players are so consistently reaching semifinals and finals, the head-to-head record tends not to be so one-sided.

Almagro’s triumph leaves us with exactly ten remaining undefeated tour-level head-to-heads of ten matches or more.  Federer and Nadal figure heavily here, as well. Roger owns five of the ten, against Mikhail Youzhny (15-0), Ferrer (14-0), Jarkko Nieminen (14-0), Feliciano Lopez (10-0), and Andreas Seppi (10-0). Rafa represents another two: Richard Gasquet (12-0) and Paul Henri Mathieu (10-0). Djokovic is 10-0 against Seppi, and Tomas Berdych is 10-0 against Kevin Anderson.

Almagro, however, remains at the top of this ignominious list, having lost all 15 of his matches with Ferrer. Had his countryman played up to seed this week, Nico might have had a chance to break another streak in the final, but Ferrer lost his opening match to Teymuraz Gabashvili, who wasn’t willing to wait to fall to 0-10. The Russian beat Ferrer in only his third try.

Facts, Figures and Myths About Walkovers

Novak Djokovic advanced to the final of the Miami Masters today when Kei Nishikori withdrew from the event due to injury. Oddly, it was the second match at the Sony Open that Djokovic didn’t have to play, as Florian Mayer pulled out before their scheduled third round match.

It’s a rare occurrence in professional tennis–so rare that it had only happened once since 1968, when several players benefited from multiple walkovers at the French Open. In Miami two years ago, Andy Murray also skipped his third round and semifinal matches, as both Milos Raonic and Rafael Nadal dropped out due to injury.

The fact that it was Djokovic who got the free pass immediately gave rise to all sorts of speculation. Will the lack of match play hurt the Serbian? Does Novak get more walkovers than most? Are opponents more likely to withdraw if they’re facing a top player?

Let’s take these questions in order. I addressed a similar issue a couple of years ago in this post. Walkovers are rare, but the available evidence suggests that there’s no positive or negative effect from winning via withdrawal. A player’s chances of winning his next match are roughly what they would’ve been anyway.

Djokovic does gain from walkovers more often than the average player, but he’s far from the top of the list. Opponents have withdrawn five times in his 695 matches, good for 0.7%, roughly the same rate as opponents of Murray, Nadal, Roger Federer … and Donald Young and Dmitry Tursunov. Jo Wilfried Tsonga has benefited from six walkovers in 432 matches, a 1.3% rate, highest among tour veterans.

Top players win by walkover more often than others–but as we’ll see in a moment, it isn’t because they are top players. It’s intuitive to figure that mildly injured players are more likely to take the court if they think they have a better chance of winning, but the evidence suggests there’s little, if any, effect.

Men ranked in the top five win by walkover 0.6% of the time, while those in the next five get free passes 0.3% of the time, and most of the rest of the pack benefits at the tour average rate of 0.2%–once every 500 matches. (All of these aggregate rates are based on tour-level matches from 1991 through 2014 Indian Wells.)

For the most part, top players get walkovers because they hang around until the late rounds of tournaments. Walkovers occur at the highest rate in the quarterfinals of events, when 1.1% of matches end before they begin. Round-of-16 contests are almost as bad, at 1.0%, and semifinals are also considerably more walkover-prone than average, at 0.6%.

When we take these dangerous middle rounds out of the equation, the number of walkovers shrinks, as does the difference between top players and the rest of the pack. Less than 0.15% of pre-R16 matches end in walkover, and the rate at which top-five players benefit from them falls to 0.4%. That’s still more frequent than the rate for the rest of the field, but keep in mind the tiny numbers we’re dealing with here. It’s 13 walkovers in over 3000 matches. Take away five of those withdrawals–roughly two per decade–and the top five would benefit at the same rate as players ranked 16-20.

It’s not as interesting a narrative, but it appears that players usually withdraw when they are too injured to compete, and that’s most likely to happen midway through a tournament. The highest-ranked players benefit–because of their previous success on the court, not their intimidating influence off of it.

Disorder of Play

Imagine you’re a rabid Chicago Cubs fan (sorry), and you’re looking forward to the season starting in a couple of weeks. You’re thinking of making a road trip to see your favorite team. You go to the Yankees website, and all you can find are some vague references to a big series in St. Louis in May. Nothing more.

You check out MLB.com and find a story about the matchup between the Cubs and White Sox, but it’s mostly about last year. Finally you start checking the websites for other MLB stadiums, and you discover that the Cubs are scheduled to play in Milwaukee for three days in June. You consider checking another couple dozen sites and finally give up.

Baseball fans know just how ridiculous that is–you can find a Cubs schedule in any of hundreds of places, with clickable links to every other MLB team’s slate for the season. You can see a list of every Opening Day matchup or, if you want, every game scheduled for the 5th of September.

Yet this fictional scenario of fruitless schedule-hunting is exactly what tennis fans face every week of the season. It’s easy to find out where tournaments will be held, but often impossible–and always irritating–to establish who will be playing. If you want to know what the next few weeks look like for your favorite player (especially if your favorite player isn’t named Roger, Rafa, Novak, or Andy), good luck. Patience is a virtue, I guess.

Unlisted lists

Players formally commit to tour events several weeks ahead of time. Each tournament has an entry deadline (top-tier events are six weeks in advance, Challengers three weeks), and once entries are in, we have what is called–you guessed it–an entry list. You can see the list for the ATP Houston event here, since the tournament organizers chose to publish it. Not all events do.

And even when they do, they rarely keep them up to date. Throughout the several weeks between the initial list and the beginning of qualifying rounds, players withdraw and alternates enter the mix. Especially at the 250 level, it’s not uncommon for 10 or more alternates to find their way into the main draw.  But with an old list (if there is a list at all), how to know whether Tim Smyczek or Dominic Thiem or Dudi Sela or Somdev Devvarman is going to be there?

Making matters worse, Wild Card entries–players who are chosen in part to increase fan interest at an event–are often published elsewhere, for instance in a press release. 18 days from the opening of the tournament, Houston hasn’t said anything about who any of those players will be. (Though if I were a betting man, here’s where I’d put my money.)

Usually, if you’re willing to put in some effort and you want to know a specific fact–Is Bernard Tomic going to play Monte Carlo? Is Tommy Robredo going to defend his title in Casablanca?–you can find it. But is that really the best the ATP can do? Again, think of the scenario in which it takes a super sleuth to find out where the Cubs will be playing in a month.

Help us become bigger fans

Sporting organizations thrive on big fans, the ones who travel to events (paying for lots of tickets), pony up for year-long subscriptions to streaming services, and stock up on branded merchandise. These fans want to know what’s going on all the time, and they care about more than just the two players who might appear on the front page of the newspaper.

It would be so simple to make available an actual schedule, like other sports started doing back in the 19th century. In fact, before the ATP password-protected their entry lists, I did just that. Here’s a simple page that shows everyone who was on an entry list in a six-week period, along with links to the lists for each event.

That information is out there. It’s an insult to fans to hide it. We want to get excited about our favorite players–both the ones who are guaranteed a seed and the ones who are holding out hope of a spot in the main draw. We deserve better.

Uncontrolled Aggression

Italian translation at settesei.it

Listen to tennis commentary–or a broadcast of any sport, really–and wait for the first mention of “consistency.” You won’t have to wait for long.

“Consistent” is good, and “inconsistent” is bad. Or so we’re told. At first blush, it makes sense. Consistency is a good thing when it comes to following through on your forehand or brushing your teeth every day. But unless you’re the very best player in the world, consistency doesn’t win you Grand Slam titles.

Think of it this way: Every player has an “average” level they are capable of playing. If average Rafael Nadal plays average anybody else on clay, average Nadal wins. If average Richard Gasquet plays average anybody-outside-the-top-fifty, average Gasquet wins. These situations, for the likes of Nadal and Gasquet, are when consistency is actually a good thing. Sure, Rafa might be able to raise him game to previously unheard-of heights, but what’s the point? It’s a matter of winning 6-1 6-0 instead of 6-3 6-2. Nadal’s main concern is avoiding an off day.

Consider the same example from the perspective of Rafa’s opponent. If you’re Tomas Berdych and you play at your usual level against Nadal, you’ll lose. That’s what consistency gets you: thirteen straight losses.

Uncontrolled aggression

Very aggressive players tend to get a bad rap. The guys who always go for their shots–think Lukas Rosol or Nikolay Davydenko–rack up huge winner and unforced error counts. Sometimes it works and often it doesn’t. When it doesn’t, the conventional wisdom always seems to be that these players need to rein in their aggression. They need to be more consistent.

But they don’t. If Rosol stopped unleashing huge shots in every direction, he’d make fewer unforced errors, but he’d hit far fewer winners. He might still hover around #50 in the world, but more likely, he’d still be lurking in the Challenger ranks, looking for the breakthrough that such a passive style might never earn for him. As it is, Rosol’s go-for-broke approach got him that career-defining upset over Nadal, not to mention an ATP title in Bucharest last spring, when he beat three higher-ranked players.

Rather than the pundit’s favored phrase of “controlled aggression,” players score big upsets and major breakthroughs with uncontrolled aggression. (It only looks controlled because it’s working that day.) If you rein in an aggressive player, he may win more of the matches he’s supposed to win, but he’s much less likely to score an upset.

The balance myth

The game of tennis has so much variety–surfaces, climates, playing styles–and so much alternation–deuce/ad, serve/return–that pundits are constantly endorsing balance. Andy Murray needs to get better on clay, they say. Jerzy Janowicz needs to improve his return game. Monica Niculescu needs to learn how to hit a forehand.

It’s a tempting argument to make, because the best players in the game do have that balance. Nadal and Djokovic and Serena and Li have a wide variety of devastating shots and tactics that are effective on every surface. If you want to play like them and reap the same rewards, you need to have that same balance.

Except that, for the vast majority of players–even top-tenners–that just isn’t going to happen. I don’t care if David Ferrer hires a coaching team of Pete Sampras and Mark Philippoussis, he’ll never be much more effective on serve. John Isner could work all offseason with Andre Agassi and remain among the game’s weakest returners.

What’s keeping these players from climbing any higher in the rankings isn’t the fact that they aren’t more balanced. It’s the simple fact that they aren’t better. By definition, most people will never be a once-in-a-generation talent.

Most players are not balanced. And that’s fine. Rather than chasing the impossible dream of out-Novaking Novak, they need to take more risks to outplay their betters in one or two areas. When it doesn’t work, it doesn’t matter–they would’ve lost anyway.

The cluster principle

Tennis rewards the streaky. If you only win four return points in a set, it’s much better to win them consecutively than to spread them out. It’s better to win five matches in one week and go winless for the next four weeks than win one match per week.

Whether it’s points, games, sets, matches, or even titles, it’s better to cluster your triumphs.

If you strive for a balanced game, the best players simply won’t let you go on a streak. Fabio Fognini or Sabine Lisicki might give you a few gifts, but Nadal never will. The only way to cluster your victories over Rafa is to play such aggressive tennis that even he can’t neutralize it. It usually won’t work, but for most players, it’s their only hope. There’s a reason the hyper-aggressive Davydenko is the only active player with a winning record against him.

Stan’s untold narrative

Stanislas Wawrinka probably wouldn’t have beaten a healthy Nadal over five sets on Sunday. But he was winning when Rafa’s back acted up, and he did so by unleashing every weapon in his arsenal.

Whatever the rankings say this week, Wawrinka isn’t one of the best three tennis players in the world. At least “average Stan” isn’t. But that’s the whole point. Tennis doesn’t reward players with ranking points and prize money for consistency. Consistency got Berdych into the top ten and has kept him there for so long … but it has prevented him from spending much time in the top five.

Wawrinka won’t always beat Nadal or Djokovic, and he’ll continue to suffer his share of defeats at the hands of the players ranked below him. The high-risk style of play that earned him a place in the history books won’t always pay off. That’s all part of the package. Stan didn’t get this far by being consistent.

A Glimmer of Hope for Stan Wawrinka

Stanislas Wawrinka has played 26 sets of tennis against Rafael Nadal, and lost them all. That doesn’t bode well for Stan’s chances in his first Grand Slam final.

As Novak Djokovic can tell you, though, Wawrinka has improved. He has long been a threat to top-ten players, and even before beating Djokovic in the quarterfinals, he had taken the Serb to five sets twice in twelve months.

One of the hidden signs of Stan’s rise comes from his last match with Rafa, at the London Tour Finals last November. Wawrinka lost that match in straight sets–as he has done, of course, every time he’s played Nadal–but it was the tightest match they’d played in four years, going to a pair of tiebreaks.

If we look beyond the scoreline, last fall’s contest was even closer than the pair’s previous two-tiebreak match at the 2009 Miami Masters. This time, Wawrinka won more points than Nadal did–83 to 80, good for 51% of the total. While it isn’t unheard of for the player who wins more points to lose the match, the player who wins more points does end up triumphant in more than 95% of tour-level matches. In their eleven previous meetings, Stan had never won as many as 48% of the total points played.

The quality of Wawrinka’s performance is even more striking when we turn to Dominance Ratio (DR), the ratio of the winner’s rate return points won to the loser’s rate return points won. In 93.5% of matches, the winner of the match is the man who won the higher rate of return points. By expressing this as a ratio, we can get an idea of the winning player’s dominance. 1.0 is a dead heat, and the higher than number, the more dominant the winning player.

In the match last November, Nadal’s DR was 0.86. Rafa won 31.1% of return points while Stan won 36.0%. If you look at 100 straight-sets matches with those stats, you’ll rarely find even one in which the 31.1% RPW player comes out the winner.

In fact, since 1991, there have been fewer than 150 matches in which a player had a DR less than or equal to 0.9 and still won in straight sets. (Matches that go the distance more commonly have this sort of profile, when the winner takes two [or three] tight sets but loses a blowout set, with a score like 7-6 1-6 7-6.)  Only about 50 of these were more extreme than the Nadal-Wawrinka match.

Based on the evidence of this last matchup, we can conclude that Wawrinka has the skills to challenge Nadal. Yet despite coming much closer than in any of their eleven previous meetings–Rafa’s lowest DR in any of them was 1.13–the Swiss didn’t win. Why not?

Let’s recognize the core issue: Stan may have won more points, but he won them at the wrong times. (Or, he didn’t win quite enough of them at the right times.) He held serve more convincingly than his opponent did but didn’t play as well in the tiebreaks. Any explanation has to address this “wrong time” issue. Here are a few:

  1. Nadal raised his game in the important moments. There’s some evidence for this–he outperforms expectations in tiebreaks, and he also wins more break points than non-break points. Some of the break point advantage comes from being left-handed (and taking proper advantage of it), though his break point advantage seems to be even bigger than his lefty advantage.
  2. Wawrinka faltered in the important moments. From the stat sheet of a single match, it would be tough to distinguish this from the first explanation. But perhaps he was overwhelmed by the opportunity he had generated for himself.
  3. Luck. Randomness in tennis isn’t limited to net cords, bad calls, and mishits. If you put two tennis-playing robots out on the court and had them play five consecutive matches, the result wouldn’t be the same every time. Wawrinka misses shots sometimes, and according to the stat sheets (though I’ve never seen it myself), Nadal does too. Just because one of those errors comes at a key moment doesn’t mean the man who committed it is a mental midget.

As much as we like to assign narratives to every possible nook and cranny of a tennis match, I suspect the truth of the matter is a hefty dose of #3 with a bit of #1 thrown in. When the outcome of a match comes down to two seven-point tiebreaks, it’s anybody’s game. It just wasn’t Stan’s that day.

If I’m right, there just might be hope for Wawrinka today. In his last two sets against Nadal, he held his own, which is more than just about everybody else on tour can say for themselves.

Unfortunately for Stan, one meeting doesn’t outweigh eleven, and a bit of momentum won’t erase Rafa’s well-earned status as the world #1. Perhaps worst of all, Wawrinka has proven himself Nadal’s almost-equal in two sets. Today, he’ll have to win three.