{"id":2021,"date":"2016-08-27T07:02:53","date_gmt":"2016-08-27T07:02:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/?p=2021"},"modified":"2016-08-27T07:02:53","modified_gmt":"2016-08-27T07:02:53","slug":"andrey-kuznetsov-and-career-highs-of-atp-non-semifinalists","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/2016\/08\/27\/andrey-kuznetsov-and-career-highs-of-atp-non-semifinalists\/","title":{"rendered":"Andrey Kuznetsov and Career Highs of ATP Non-Semifinalists"},"content":{"rendered":"

When following this week’s ATP 250 tournament in Winston-Salem and seeing Andrey Kuznetsov<\/a>\u00a0in the quarterfinals the following question arose: Will he finally make it into the first ATP semifinal of his career? As shown here<\/a>\u00a0Andrey – with a ranking of 42 – is currently (by far) the best-ranked player who has not reached an ATP SF. And it looks as if he will stay on top of this list for some time longer after losing to Pablo Carreno Busta<\/a>\u00a04-6 3-6 on Wednesday.<\/p>\n

With stats of 0-10 in ATP quarterfinals<\/a>,\u00a0he is still pretty far away from Teymuraz Gabashvili<\/a>‘s streak of 0-16<\/a>. Despite having lost six\u00a0more quarterfinals before winning his first QF this January against a retiring Bernard Tomic<\/a>, Teymuraz climbed only to a ranking of 50. Still, we could argue that the QF losing-streak of Teymuraz is not really over after having won against a possibly injured player.<\/p>\n

Running the numbers can answer questions such as “Who could climb up highest in the rankings without having won an ATP quarterfinal?”<\/em> Doing so will put Andrey’s number 42 into perspective and will possibly reveal some other statistical trivia.<\/p>\n

Player                Rank            Date   On\nAndrei Chesnokov        30      1986.11.03    1\nYen Hsun Lu             33      2010.11.01    1\nNick Kyrgios            34      2015.04.06    1\nAdrian Voinea           36      1996.04.15    1\nPaul Haarhuis           36      1990.07.09    1\nJaime Yzaga             40      1986.03.03    1\nAntonio Zugarelli       41      1973.08.23    1\nBernard Tomic           41      2011.11.07    1\nOmar Camporese          41      1989.10.09    1\nWayne Ferreira          41      1991.12.02    1\nAndrey Kuznetsov        42      2016.08.22    0\nDavid Goffin            42      2012.10.29    1\nMischa Zverev           45      2009.06.08    1\nAlexandr Dolgopolov     46      2010.06.07    1\nAndrew Sznajder         46      1989.09.25    1\nLukas Rosol             46      2013.04.08    1\nUlf Stenlund            46      1986.07.07    1\nDominic Thiem           47      2014.07.21    1\nJanko Tipsarevic        47      2007.07.16    1\nPaul Annacone           47      1985.04.08    1\nRenzo Furlan            47      1991.06.17    1\nMike Fishbach           47      1978.01.16    0\nOscar Hernandez         48      2007.10.08    1\nRonald Agenor           48      1985.11.25    1\nGary Donnelly           48      1986.11.10    0\nFrancisco Gonzalez      49      1978.07.12    1\nPaolo Lorenzi           49      2013.03.04    1\nBoris Becker            50      1985.05.06    1\nBrett Steven            50      1993.02.15    1\nDominik Hrbaty          50      1997.05.19    1\nMike Leach              50      1985.02.18    1\nPatrik Kuhnen           50      1988.08.01    1\nTeymuraz Gabashvili     50      2015.07.20    1\nBlaine Willenborg       50      1984.09.10    0<\/pre>\n
The table shows career highs (up until #50) for players before<\/em> they won their first ATP QF. A 0 in the last column indicates that the player can still climb up in this table, because he did not win a QF, yet. There may also be retired players being denoted with a 0, because they never managed to get past a QF during their career.<\/p>\n
I wonder, who had Andrei Chesnokov<\/a> on the radar for this? Before winning his first ATP QF he pushed his ranking as far as 30. He later went on to have a career high of 9. Nick Kyrgios<\/a> could also improve his ranking quickly without the need to go as deep as a SF. His Wimbledon 2014 QF<\/a>, Roland Garros 2015 R32<\/a>, and Australian Open 2015 QF<\/a> runs helped him to get up until #34 without a single win at an ATP QF. Also, I particularly would like to highlight Alexandr Dolgopolov<\/a> who reached #46 before having even played a single QF.<\/p>\n
Looking only at players who are still active and<\/em> able to up their ranking without an ATP SF we get the following picture:<\/p>\n
Player                 Rank            Date\nAndrey Kuznetsov         42      2016.08.22\nRui Machado              59      2011.10.03\nTatsuma Ito              60      2012.10.22\nMatthew Ebden            61      2012.10.01\nKenny De Schepper        62      2014.04.07\nPere Riba                65      2011.05.16\nTim Smyczek              68      2015.04.06\nBlaz Kavcic              68      2012.08.06\nAlejandro Gonzalez       70      2014.06.09<\/pre>\n
Andrey seems to be relatively alone with Rui Machado<\/a> being second in the list having reached his highest ranking already about five years ago. Skimming through the remainder of the table,\u00a0we would be surprised if anyone soon would be able to come close to Andrey’s 42, which doesn’t mean that a sudden unexpected streak of an upcoming player would render this scenario impossible.<\/p>\n
So what practical implications does this give us for analyzing tennis? Hardly any, I am afraid. Still, we can infer that it is possible to get well within the top-50 without winning more than two matches at a single tournament over a duration that can even range over a player’s whole career. Of course it would be interesting to see how long such players can stay in these ranking areas, guaranteeing direct acceptance into ATP tournaments and, hence, a more or less regular income from R32, R16, and QF prize money. Moreover, as the case of 2015-ish\u00a0Nick Kyrgios<\/a> shows, the question arises how one’s ranking points are composed: Performing well at the big stage of Masters or Grand Slams can be enough for a decent ranking while showing poor performance at ATP 250s. On the other hand, are there players whose ATP points breakdown reveals that they are willing to go for easier points at ATP 250s while never having deep runs at Masters or Grand Slams? These are questions which I would like to answer in a future post.<\/p>\n
—<\/p>\n
Peter Wetz<\/a> is a computer scientist interested in racket sports and data analytics based in Vienna, Austria. I would like to thank Jeff for being open-minded and allowing me to post these surface-scratching lines here.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
When following this week’s ATP 250 tournament in Winston-Salem and seeing Andrey Kuznetsov\u00a0in the quarterfinals the following question arose: Will he finally make it into the first ATP semifinal of his career? As shown here\u00a0Andrey – with a ranking of 42 – is currently (by far) the best-ranked player who has not reached an ATP … Continue reading Andrey Kuznetsov and Career Highs of ATP Non-Semifinalists<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","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":[47,79,108,117],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2021","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-guest-posts","category-oddities","category-streaks","category-trivia"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2021","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\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2021"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2021\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2021"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2021"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2021"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}