In the men’s professional game, serving at 0-40 isn’t a death sentence, but it isn’t a good place to be. An average player wins about 65% of service points, and at that rate, his chance of coming back from 0-40 is just a little better than one in five.<\/p>\n
Some players are better than others at executing this sort of comeback. Tommy Robredo<\/a>, for instance, has come back from 0-40 nearly 60% more often than we’d expect, while Sam Querrey<\/a> digs out of the 0-40 hole one-third less often than we would predict.<\/p>\n Measuring a player’s success rate in these scenarios isn’t simply a matter of counting up 0-40 games. That’s what we saw on the ATP official site<\/a> last week, and it’s woefully inadequate. That article marvels at Ivo Karlovic<\/a>‘s “clutch” accomplishments from 0-40 and 15-40, when we could easily have guessed that Ivo would lead just about any serving category. Big serving isn’t clutch if it’s what you always do.<\/p>\n Statistics are only valuable in context, and that is particularly true in tennis. Simply counting 0-40 games and reporting the results hides a huge amount of potential insight. Whether a player wins or loses (a game, a set, a match, or a stretch of matches) is only the first question. To deliver any kind of meaningful analysis, we need to adjust those results for the competition and consider what we already know about the players we’re studying.<\/p>\n Rather than tear apart that article, though, let’s do the analysis correctly.<\/p>\n The number of times a player comes back from 0-40 or 15-40 isn’t what’s important. As we’ve seen, big servers will dominate those categories. That doesn’t tell us who is particularly effective (or, dare we say, “clutch”) in such a situation, it only identifies the best servers. What matters is how often players come back compared to how often we would expect them to, taking into consideration their serving ability.<\/p>\n Karlovic is an instructive example. Over the last few years–the time span available in this dataset<\/a> of point-by-point match records–Ivo has gone down 0-40 56 times, holding 17 of those games, a rate of 30.4%. That’s third-best on tour, behind John Isner<\/a> and Samuel Groth<\/a>. But compared to how well we would\u00a0expect<\/em>\u00a0Karlovic to serve, he’s\u00a0only 7% better than neutral, right in the middle of the ATP pack.<\/p>\n Before diving into the results, a few more notes on methodology. For each 0-40 or 15-40 game, I calculated the server’s rate of service points won in that match. Since we would expect 0-40 games to occur more often in matches with good returners, in-match rates seem more accurate than season-long aggregates. Given the in-match rate of serve points won, I then determined the odds<\/a> that the server would come back from the 0-40 or 15-40 score. For each game, then, we have a result (came back or didn’t come back) and an estimate of the comeback’s likelihood. Combining both numbers for all of a player’s service games tells us how effective he was at these scores.<\/p>\n For 30 of the players best represented in the dataset, here are their results at 0-40, showing the number of games, the number of successful comebacks, the rate of successful comebacks, and the degree to which the player exceeded expectations from 0-40:<\/p>\n As I mentioned above, Robredo has been incredibly effective in these situations, coming back from 0-40 30 times instead of the 19 times we would have expected. Some big servers, such as Isner and Kevin Anderson<\/a>, are even better than their well-known weapons would leads us to expect, while others, such as Karlovic and Milos Raonic<\/a>,\u00a0aren’t noticeably more effective at 0-40 than they are in general.<\/p>\n Many of these extremes don’t hold up when we turn to the results from 15-40. Quite a few more games reach 15-40 than 0-40, so the more limited variation at 15-40 suggests that many of the extreme results from 0-40 can be ascribed to an inadequate sample. For instance, Robredo–our 0-40 hero–falls to neutral at 15-40. Here is the complete list:<\/p>\n The big servers are better represented at the top of this ranking. Even though Isner is expected to come back from 15-40 nearly 40% of the time–better than almost anyone on tour–he exceeds that expectation by one-third, far more than anyone else considered here.<\/p>\n Finally, let’s look at comebacks from 0-30:<\/p>\n Isner still stands at the top of the leaderboard, while Bernard Tomic<\/a> and Grigor Dimitrov<\/a> give us a mild surprise by filling out the top three. Again, as the sample size increases, the variation decreases even further, illustrating that, over the long term, players tend to serve about as well at one score as they do at any other.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In the men’s professional game, serving at 0-40 isn’t a death sentence, but it isn’t a good place to be. An average player wins about 65% of service points, and at that rate, his chance of coming back from 0-40 is just a little better than one in five. Some players are better than others … Continue reading Digging Out of the Holes of 0-40 and 15-40<\/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":[18,96,105],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1883","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-clutch","category-research","category-serve-statistics"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1883","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=1883"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1883\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1883"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1883"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1883"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Player 0-40 0-40 W 0-40 W% W\/Exp \nTommy Robredo 110 30 27.3% 1.59 \nDenis Istomin 114 26 22.8% 1.36 \nJohn Isner 87 31 35.6% 1.34 \nGuillermo Garcia-Lopez 161 29 18.0% 1.32 \nKevin Anderson 130 38 29.2% 1.28 \nBernard Tomic 110 24 21.8% 1.25 \nFernando Verdasco 141 30 21.3% 1.17 \nRafael Nadal 140 32 22.9% 1.15 \nKei Nishikori 122 23 18.9% 1.15 \nMarin Cilic 125 26 20.8% 1.14 \n \nPlayer 0-40 0-40 W 0-40 W% W\/Exp \nJo-Wilfried Tsonga 124 29 23.4% 1.14 \nNovak Djokovic 124 34 27.4% 1.12 \nAndreas Seppi 145 24 16.6% 1.09 \nGrigor Dimitrov 115 22 19.1% 1.08 \nPhilipp Kohlschreiber 146 28 19.2% 1.08 \nRoger Federer 107 26 24.3% 1.07 \nIvo Karlovic 56 17 30.4% 1.07 \nSantiago Giraldo 113 18 15.9% 1.06 \nAlexandr Dolgopolov 141 25 17.7% 1.03 \nMilos Raonic 82 23 28.0% 1.01 \n \nPlayer 0-40 0-40 W 0-40 W% W\/Exp \nTomas Berdych 149 30 20.1% 1.01 \nJeremy Chardy 122 21 17.2% 0.98 \nFeliciano Lopez 136 26 19.1% 0.97 \nFabio Fognini 211 24 11.4% 0.97 \nMikhail Youzhny 155 18 11.6% 0.92 \nDavid Ferrer 203 32 15.8% 0.89 \nRichard Gasquet 152 25 16.4% 0.87 \nAndy Murray 164 24 14.6% 0.80 \nGilles Simon 158 16 10.1% 0.72 \nSam Querrey 84 12 14.3% 0.68<\/pre>\n
Player 15-40 15-40 W 15-40 W% W\/Exp \nJohn Isner 238 122 51.3% 1.33 \nMilos Raonic 215 98 45.6% 1.18 \nFeliciano Lopez 304 108 35.5% 1.17 \nJo-Wilfried Tsonga 301 119 39.5% 1.17 \nDenis Istomin 304 101 33.2% 1.17 \nRafael Nadal 320 118 36.9% 1.16 \nIvo Karlovic 148 68 45.9% 1.15 \nKevin Anderson 338 132 39.1% 1.15 \nGuillermo Garcia-Lopez 405 106 26.2% 1.14 \nAndreas Seppi 396 113 28.5% 1.12 \n \nPlayer 15-40 15-40 W 15-40 W% W\/Exp \nBernard Tomic 273 86 31.5% 1.12 \nKei Nishikori 298 96 32.2% 1.10 \nNovak Djokovic 348 132 37.9% 1.07 \nRichard Gasquet 325 106 32.6% 1.07 \nRoger Federer 281 109 38.8% 1.07 \nFernando Verdasco 306 94 30.7% 1.06 \nPhilipp Kohlschreiber 352 110 31.3% 1.06 \nAndy Murray 431 135 31.3% 1.06 \nSantiago Giraldo 331 86 26.0% 1.05 \nTomas Berdych 398 131 32.9% 1.05 \n \nPlayer 15-40 15-40 W 15-40 W% W\/Exp \nMarin Cilic 357 109 30.5% 1.05 \nSam Querrey 244 78 32.0% 1.04 \nJeremy Chardy 300 91 30.3% 1.04 \nFabio Fognini 422 98 23.2% 1.03 \nTommy Robredo 285 78 27.4% 0.99 \nGrigor Dimitrov 307 89 29.0% 0.99 \nDavid Ferrer 498 138 27.7% 0.98 \nAlexandr Dolgopolov 299 77 25.8% 0.95 \nMikhail Youzhny 339 77 22.7% 0.94 \nGilles Simon 426 93 21.8% 0.91<\/pre>\n
Player 0-30 0-30 W 0-30 W% W\/Exp \nJohn Isner 338 229 67.8% 1.19 \nBernard Tomic 299 146 48.8% 1.15 \nGrigor Dimitrov 342 166 48.5% 1.11 \nNovak Djokovic 409 235 57.5% 1.10 \nSantiago Giraldo 344 142 41.3% 1.10 \nFernando Verdasco 373 175 46.9% 1.10 \nRafael Nadal 376 194 51.6% 1.09 \nTomas Berdych 492 262 53.3% 1.09 \nTommy Robredo 296 132 44.6% 1.08 \nRoger Federer 344 193 56.1% 1.08 \n \nPlayer 0-30 0-30 W 0-30 W% W\/Exp \nFeliciano Lopez 326 161 49.4% 1.07 \nAlexandr Dolgopolov 347 154 44.4% 1.07 \nMarin Cilic 378 179 47.4% 1.06 \nJo-Wilfried Tsonga 357 185 51.8% 1.06 \nGuillermo Garcia-Lopez 380 146 38.4% 1.06 \nIvo Karlovic 186 118 63.4% 1.04 \nPhilipp Kohlschreiber 395 185 46.8% 1.03 \nDenis Istomin 314 135 43.0% 1.03 \nKei Nishikori 341 145 42.5% 1.03 \nDavid Ferrer 529 227 42.9% 1.02 \n \nPlayer 0-30 0-30 W 0-30 W% W\/Exp \nKevin Anderson 361 181 50.1% 1.02 \nMikhail Youzhny 390 142 36.4% 1.00 \nAndy Murray 419 185 44.2% 1.00 \nAndreas Seppi 418 164 39.2% 0.99 \nJeremy Chardy 316 132 41.8% 0.99 \nMilos Raonic 246 139 56.5% 0.99 \nFabio Fognini 478 153 32.0% 0.99 \nSam Querrey 292 131 44.9% 0.97 \nGilles Simon 442 155 35.1% 0.96 \nRichard Gasquet 370 159 43.0% 0.95<\/pre>\n