{"id":1083,"date":"2013-02-20T12:15:51","date_gmt":"2013-02-20T17:15:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/heavytopspin.com\/?p=1083"},"modified":"2013-02-20T12:15:51","modified_gmt":"2013-02-20T17:15:51","slug":"milos-raonics-almost-unprecedented-three-peat","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/2013\/02\/20\/milos-raonics-almost-unprecedented-three-peat\/","title":{"rendered":"Milos Raonic’s (Almost) Unprecedented Three-peat"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last week, Milos Raonic<\/a> won the SAP Open in San Jose<\/a> without dropping a set. \u00a0Juts like he did last year<\/a> … and the year before<\/a>. \u00a0In fact, Raonic has won every set he has ever played at this event<\/a>.<\/p>\n

That’s not just impressive, it’s only the second time in ATP history that anyone has pulled off such a feat.<\/p>\n

Simply winning an event three times in a row is not easy task, of course, even dropping plenty of sets along the way. \u00a0Raonic was only the 27th player in ATP history to do that, though of course many of his precursors strung together streaks of more than three years, and many three-peated at more than one event. \u00a0Just last month, David Ferrer<\/a> made news by going back-to-back-to-back on hard courts in Auckland<\/a>, having previously three-peated on clay in Acapulco<\/a>. \u00a0(Raonic won’t be joining that club anytime soon.)<\/p>\n

What’s particularly impressive about the group of three-peating champions is how tightly it overlaps with the very best in the game’s history. \u00a018 of the 27 three-peaters reached the #1 ranking during their careers. \u00a0Two more peaked at #2. \u00a0(Honorable mention goes to Balazs Taroczy<\/a>, who never cracked the top 10, but did win Hilversum five<\/em> years running<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

For all the accolades earned by those #1s, though, only one of those players did what Raonic just completed. \u00a0That was John McEnroe<\/a>, who went back-to-back-to-back-to-back<\/em> from 1980 to 1983<\/a> at the Sydney Indoor. \u00a0Had he not returned to the event in 1992, he would have retired with a perfect record at the tournament.<\/p>\n

Johnny Mac had a tougher time of it than did Raonic. \u00a0Milos has only beaten one top-20 player in San Jose, and when he edged by #9 Fernando Verdasco to win his first title, he did so while winning far fewer than half of points, resulting in a pitiful dominance ratio of 0.66. \u00a0(1.0 represents an even match; Raonic’s average in San Jose is 1.71.) \u00a0The Canadian was only broken twice in these three years, but he rarely did much breaking of his own, going to nine tiebreaks.<\/p>\n

McEnroe, by contrast, beat at least three top-20 players (including #4 Vitas Gerulaitis<\/a>) and played only a single tiebreak in his \u00a020-match winning streak. \u00a0He also had to play best-of-five-set matches in three of the four finals.<\/p>\n

To match McEnroe’s mark, either in number of consecutive titles or difficulty of winning them, Raonic will need to start a new streak. The smaller number of ATP-level events now on the circuit, however, make it more difficult to find the perfect blend of conditions and weak opposition to put together such a streak.<\/p>\n

That doesn’t mean McEnroe’s mark is safe, however. \u00a0Rafael Nadal<\/a> is just five matches and one title way from matching at least the straight-set three-peat, sitting on a 10-match win streak in Barcelona. \u00a0In fact, Nadal has only lost one set in Barcelona since 2006<\/a>. \u00a0Had he played in 2010, we might have been talking about a very different record right now.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last week, Milos Raonic won the SAP Open in San Jose without dropping a set. \u00a0Juts like he did last year … and the year before. \u00a0In fact, Raonic has won every set he has ever played at this event. That’s not just impressive, it’s only the second time in ATP history that anyone has … Continue reading Milos Raonic’s (Almost) Unprecedented Three-peat<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[93],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1083","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-records"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1083","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1083"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1083\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1083"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1083"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1083"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}