{"id":2192,"date":"2017-03-30T15:54:47","date_gmt":"2017-03-30T15:54:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/?p=2192"},"modified":"2017-03-30T15:54:47","modified_gmt":"2017-03-30T15:54:47","slug":"del-potros-draws-and-the-possible-persistence-of-bad-luck","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/2017\/03\/30\/del-potros-draws-and-the-possible-persistence-of-bad-luck\/","title":{"rendered":"Del Potro’s Draws and the Possible Persistence of Bad Luck"},"content":{"rendered":"

Italian translation at settesei.it<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

Tennis’s draw gods have not been kind to Juan Martin del Potro<\/a> this year.<\/p>\n

In Acapulco and Indian Wells, he drew Novak Djokovic<\/a> as his second-match opponent. In Miami, Delpo got a third-rounder with Roger Federer<\/a>. In each of the March Masters events, with 1,000 ranking points at stake, del Potro was handed the most difficult\u00a0opponents for his first round against a fellow seed. Thanks in part to\u00a0the resulting early exits, one of the most dangerous players on tour is still languishing outside of the top 30 in the ATP rankings.<\/p>\n

When I wrote about the Indian Wells quarter of death<\/a>–the section of the draw\u00a0containing del Potro, Djokovic, Federer, Rafael Nadal<\/a>, and Nick Kyrgios<\/a>–I attempted to quantify the effect of the draw on each player’s expected ranking points. Before each player’s name was placed in the bracket, my model predicted that Delpo would earn about 150 ranking points–the weighted average of his likelihood of reaching the third round, the fourth round, and so on–and after the draw was conducted, his higher probability of a clash with Djokovic knocked that number down to just over 100. That negative effect\u00a0was one of\u00a0the worst of any player in the tournament.<\/p>\n

The story in Miami is similar, if less extreme. Pre-draw, Delpo’s expected points were 183. Post draw: 155. In the four tournaments he has entered this year, he has\u00a0been uniformly unlucky:<\/p>\n

Tournament    Pre-Draw  Post-Draw  Effect  \nDelray Beach      89.3       74.0  -17.1%  \nAcapulco         121.5       97.1  -20.1%  \nIndian Wells     154.6      102.5  -33.7%  \nMiami            182.9      155.4  -15.0%  \nTOTAL            548.2      429.0  -21.7%<\/pre>\n
*The numbers above for Indian Wells are slightly different than what I published in the Indian Wells article, since the simulations I ran for this post consider the entire 96-player field, not just the 64-player second round.<\/em><\/p>\n
The good news, as we’ll see, is that it’s virtually impossible for this degree of misfortune to continue. The bad news is that those 119 points are gone forever, and at Delpo’s current position in the ranking table, that disadvantage will affect his tournament seeds, which in turn will result in worse draws (earlier meetings with higher-ranked players, independent of luck) for at least another few weeks.<\/p>\n
Before we go any further, let me review the methodology I’m using here. (If you’re not interested, skip this paragraph.) For “post-draw” expected points, I’m taking jrank<\/a>-based forecasts<\/a>–like the ones<\/a> on the front page of Tennis Abstract–and using each player’s probability of each round to calculate a weighted average of expected points. “Pre-draw” forecasts are much more computationally demanding. In Miami, for instance, Delpo could’ve faced any of the 64 unseeded players in the second round and been slated to meet any of the top eight seeds in the third round. For each tournament, I ran a Monte Carlo simulation with the tournament seeds, generating a new draw\u00a0and simulating the tournament–100,000 times, then summing all those outcomes. So in the pre-draw forecast, Delpo had a one-eighth chance of getting Fed in the third round, a one-eighth chance of getting Kei Nishikori<\/a> there, and so on.<\/p>\n
It seems clear that a 22%, 119-point rankings hit over the course of four tournaments is some seriously bad luck. Last year, there were about 750 instances of a player being seeded at an ATP tournament, and in fewer than 60 of those, the draw resulted in an effect of -22% or\u00a0worse on the player’s expected ranking points. And that’s just one tournament! The odds that Delpo would get such a rough deal in all four<\/em> of his 2017 tournaments are 1 in more than 20,000.<\/p>\n
Over the course of a full season, draw luck mostly<\/em> evens out. It’s rare to see an effect of more than 10% in either direction. Last year, Thiemo de Bakker<\/a> saw a painful difference of\u00a018% between his pre-draw and post-draw expected points in 12 ATP events, but everyone else with at least that many tournaments fell between -11% and +11%, with three-quarters of players between -5% and +5%. Even when draw luck\u00a0doesn’t balance itself out, the effect isn’t as bad as what Delpo has seen in 2017.<\/p>\n
Del Potro’s own experience in 2016 is a case in point. His most memorable event of the season was the Olympics, where he drew Djokovic in the first round, so it’s easy to recall his year as being equally riddled with bad luck. But in his 12 other ATP events, the draw aided him in six–including a +34% boost at the US Open–and hurt him at the other six. Altogether, his 2016 ATP draws gave him a 5.9% advantage over his “pre-draw” expected points–a bonus of 17 ranking points. (I didn’t include the Olympics, since no ranking points were awarded there.)<\/p>\n
Taken together, Delpo’s 2016-17 draws have deprived him of about 100 ranking points, which would move him three spots up the ranking table. So even with a short stretch of extreme\u00a0misfortune, draw luck hasn’t affected him that much. Last year’s most extreme case among elite players, Richard Gasquet<\/a>, suffered a similar effect: His draws knocked down his expected take by 9%, or 237 points, a difference that would bump him up from #22 to #19 in this week’s ranking list.<\/p>\n
There are many reasons to believe that del Potro is a much better player than his current ranking suggests, such as\u00a0his Elo rating<\/a>, which stands at No. 7. But his ATP ranking reflects his limited schedule and modest start last year\u00a0much more than it does the vagaries of each week’s brackets. The chances are near zero that he will continue to draw the toughest player in each tournament’s field in the earliest possible round, so we’ll soon have a better idea of what exactly he is capable of, and where exactly he should stand in the rankings.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Italian translation at settesei.it Tennis’s draw gods have not been kind to Juan Martin del Potro this year. In Acapulco and Indian Wells, he drew Novak Djokovic as his second-match opponent. In Miami, Delpo got a third-rounder with Roger Federer. In each of the March Masters events, with 1,000 ranking points at stake, del Potro … Continue reading Del Potro’s Draws and the Possible Persistence of Bad Luck<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"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":[40,96],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2192","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-forecasting","category-research"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2192","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=2192"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2192\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2192"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2192"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2192"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}