{"id":2332,"date":"2017-06-16T10:54:45","date_gmt":"2017-06-16T10:54:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/?p=2332"},"modified":"2017-06-16T10:54:45","modified_gmt":"2017-06-16T10:54:45","slug":"just-how-aggressive-is-jelena-ostapenko","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/2017\/06\/16\/just-how-aggressive-is-jelena-ostapenko\/","title":{"rendered":"Just How Aggressive is Jelena Ostapenko?"},"content":{"rendered":"

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

If you picked up only two stats about surprise Roland Garros champion Jelena Ostapenko<\/a>, you probably heard that, first, her average forehand is faster than Andy Murray<\/a>\u2019s, and second, she hit 299 winners in her seven French Open matches. I’m not yet sure how much emphasis we should put on shot speed, and I instinctively distrust raw totals, but even with those caveats, it’s hard not to be impressed.<\/p>\n

Compared to the likes of Simona Halep<\/a>, Timea Bacsinszky<\/a>, and Caroline Wozniacki<\/a>, the last three women she upset en route to her maiden title, Ostapenko was practically playing a different game. Her style is more reminiscent of fellow Slam winners Petra Kvitova<\/a> and Maria Sharapova<\/a>, who don’t construct points so much as they destruct them. What I’d like to know, then, is how Ostapenko stacks up against the most aggressive players on the WTA tour.<\/p>\n

Thankfully we already have a metric for this: Aggression Score<\/a>, which I’ll abbreviate as AGG. This stat requires that we know three things about every point: How many shots were hit, who won it, and how. With that data, we figure out what percentage of a player’s shots resulted in winners, unforced errors, or her opponent’s forced errors. (Technically, the denominator is “shot opportunities,” which includes shots a player didn’t manage to hit after her opponent hit a winner. That doesn’t affect the results too much.) For today’s purposes, I’m calculating AGG\u00a0without<\/em> a player’s serves–both aces and forced return errors–so we’re capturing only rally aggression.<\/p>\n

The typical range of this version AGG is between 0.1–very passive–and 0.3–extremely aggressive. Based on the nearly 1,600 women’s matches in the Match Charting Project\u00a0<\/a>dataset, Kvitova and Julia Goerges<\/a> represent the aggressive end, with average AGGs around .275. We only have four Samantha Crawford<\/a> matches in the database, but early signs suggest she could outpace even those women, as her average is at .312. At the other end of the spectrum, Madison Brengle<\/a> is at 0.11, with Wozniacki and Sara Errani<\/a> at 0.12. In the Match Charting data, there are single-day performances that rise as high as 0.44 (Serena Williams<\/a> over Errani at the 2013 French Open<\/a>) and fall as low as 0.06. In the final against Ostapenko, Halep’s aggression score was 0.08, half of her average of 0.16.<\/p>\n

Context established, let’s see where Ostapenko fits in, starting with the Roland Garros final. Against Halep, her AGG was a whopping .327. That’s third highest of any player in a major final, behind Kvitova at Wimbledon in 2014<\/a> (.344) and Serena at the 2007 Australian Open<\/a> (.328). (We have data for every Grand Slam final back to 1999, and most of them before that.) Using data from IBM Pointstream, which encompasses almost all matches at Roland Garros this year, Ostapenko’s aggression in the final<\/a> was 7th-highest of any match in the tournament–out of 188 player-matches with the necessary data–behind two showings from Bethanie Mattek Sands<\/a>, one each from Goerges, Madison Keys<\/a>, and Mirjana Lucic<\/a> … and Ostapenko’s first-round win against Louisa Chirico<\/a>. It was also the third-highest recorded against Halep out of more than 200 Simona matches<\/a> in the Match Charting dataset.<\/p>\n

You get the picture: The French Open final was a serious display of aggression, at least from one side of the court. That level of ball-bashing was nothing new for the Latvian, either. We have charting data for her last three matches<\/a> at Roland Garros, along with two matches from Charleston and one from Prague this clay season. Of those six performances, Ostapenko’s\u00a0lowest<\/em> AGG was .275, against Wozniacki in the Paris quarters. Her average across the six was .303.<\/p>\n

If those recent matches indicate what we’ll see from her in the future, she will likely score as the most aggressive rallying player on the WTA tour. Because she played less aggressively in her earlier matches on tour, her career average still trails those of Kvitova and Goerges, but not by much–and probably not for long. It’s scary to consider what might happen as she gets stronger; we’ll have to wait and see how her tactics evolve, as well.<\/p>\n

—<\/p>\n

The Match Charting Project contains at least 15 matches on 62 different players–here is the rally-only aggression score for all of them:<\/p>\n

PLAYER                    MATCHES  RALLY AGG  \nJulia Goerges                  15      0.277  \nPetra Kvitova                  57      0.277  \nJelena Ostapenko               17      0.271  \nMadison Keys                   35      0.261  \nCamila Giorgi                  17      0.257  \nSabine Lisicki                 19      0.246  \nCaroline Garcia                15      0.242  \nCoco Vandeweghe                17      0.238  \nSerena Williams               108      0.237  \nLaura Siegemund                19      0.235  \nAnastasia Pavlyuchenkova       17      0.230  \nDanka Kovinic                  15      0.223  \nKristina Mladenovic            28      0.222  \nNa Li                          15      0.218  \nMaria Sharapova                73      0.217  \n                                              \nPLAYER                    MATCHES  RALLY AGG  \nEugenie Bouchard               52      0.214  \nAna Ivanovic                   46      0.211  \nGarbine Muguruza               57      0.210  \nLucie Safarova                 29      0.209  \nKarolina Pliskova              42      0.207  \nElena Vesnina                  20      0.207  \nVenus Williams                 46      0.205  \nJohanna Konta                  31      0.205  \nMonica Puig                    15      0.203  \nDominika Cibulkova             38      0.198  \nMartina Navratilova            25      0.197  \nSteffi Graf                    39      0.196  \nAnastasija Sevastova           17      0.194  \nSamantha Stosur                19      0.193  \nSloane Stephens                15      0.190  \n                                              \nPLAYER                    MATCHES  RALLY AGG  \nEkaterina Makarova             23      0.189  \nLauren Davis                   16      0.186  \nHeather Watson                 16      0.185  \nDaria Gavrilova                20      0.183  \nJustine Henin                  28      0.183  \nKiki Bertens                   15      0.181  \nMonica Seles                   18      0.179  \nSvetlana Kuznetsova            28      0.174  \nTimea Bacsinszky               28      0.174  \nVictoria Azarenka              55      0.170  \nAndrea Petkovic                24      0.166  \nRoberta Vinci                  23      0.164  \nBarbora Strycova               16      0.163  \nBelinda Bencic                 31      0.163  \nJelena Jankovic                24      0.162  \n                                              \nPLAYER                    MATCHES  RALLY AGG  \nAlison Riske                   15      0.161  \nAngelique Kerber               83      0.161  \nFlavia Pennetta                23      0.160  \nSimona Halep                  218      0.160  \nCarla Suarez Navarro           31      0.159  \nMartina Hingis                 15      0.157  \nChris Evert                    20      0.152  \nDarya Kasatkina                18      0.148  \nElina Svitolina                46      0.141  \nYulia Putintseva               15      0.137  \nAlize Cornet                   18      0.136  \nAgnieszka Radwanska            90      0.130  \nAnnika Beck                    16      0.126  \nMonica Niculescu               25      0.124  \nCaroline Wozniacki             62      0.122  \nSara Errani                    23      0.121<\/pre>\n
(A few of the match counts differ slightly from what you’ll find on the MCP home page. I’ve thrown out a few matches with too much missing data or in formats that didn’t play nice with the script I wrote to calculate aggression score.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Italian translation at settesei.it If you picked up only two stats about surprise Roland Garros champion Jelena Ostapenko, you probably heard that, first, her average forehand is faster than Andy Murray\u2019s, and second, she hit 299 winners in her seven French Open matches. I’m not yet sure how much emphasis we should put on shot … Continue reading Just How Aggressive is Jelena Ostapenko?<\/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":[41,65,106,110],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2332","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-french-open","category-match-charting","category-shot-by-shot-stats","category-tactics"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2332","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=2332"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2332\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2332"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2332"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2332"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}