The ATP 250-level tournament in Newport this week is empty of the game’s best players. \u00a0The top seed is John Isner, ranked 46, and the 8th seed is Tobias Kamke, who is barely within the top 100. \u00a0This is no surprise. \u00a0Newport has one of the weakest ATP fields every year, situated as it is the week after Wimbledon, simultaneous with Davis Cup.<\/p>\n
In a little study I did last year, I discovered that at least in 2009, Newport did have the weakest field<\/a> of any ATP 250 event. \u00a0If you click the link, you’ll find a variety of metrics, but I think we can focus on just one: the median rank of main draw players. \u00a0By using median instead of average, the numbers aren’t skewed by a lowly-ranked wild card or qualifier.<\/p>\n In 2009, the players in the Newport draw had a median ranking of 125–that is, half the players in the main draw of an ATP event were ranked above<\/em>\u00a0125. \u00a0Grand slams usually manage about 110 players below the 125 mark, but Newport only got 16–and most of those were closer to 125 than to 1. \u00a0Last year, the median fell to 129.5. \u00a0It may be a small consolation that Johannesburg’s field was equally weak.<\/p>\n A glance at this year’s draw<\/a> can tell you that not much has changed. \u00a0Thanks to many late withdrawals, the cut fell to 218, which is considerably higher than the cut at some challengers. \u00a0For all that, the field quality has improved somewhat, to a median rank of 111. \u00a0That leaves Jo’burg in the dust; the South African event had a median rank of 118.5.<\/p>\n The non-challenger challengers<\/strong><\/p>\n A few tour-level events–Newport, Jo’burg, and perhaps San Jose–obscure the line between the tour and challenger levels. \u00a0In the eyes of the ranking system, they are very different–Newport is worth 250 points to the winner, while no challenger is worth more than 125. \u00a0But for all intents and purposes, Newport and Jo’burg are challengers.<\/p>\n Last year, the May event in Bordeaux attracted a field with a median rank of 128–just above last year’s Newport and Jo’burg numbers. \u00a0This March, the odd 24-man field at Le Gosier had a median rank of 123. \u00a0Already in 2011, six challengers with 32-man fields had median ranks below 150, putting them in the same ballpark as the lowest rungs of the tour.<\/p>\n All of this is another strike against the ranking system, which treats Newport as if it were equivalent to, say, Sydney, where the last direct acceptance this year (#53 Benjamin Becker) was higher-ranked than Newport’s second seed (#60 Grigor Dimitrov). \u00a0Bad news for properly ordering second-tier pros, but good news for Isner, who can take advantage of this week’s cupcake draw to bounce back to as high as #36.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The ATP 250-level tournament in Newport this week is empty of the game’s best players. \u00a0The top seed is John Isner, ranked 46, and the 8th seed is Tobias Kamke, who is barely within the top 100. \u00a0This is no surprise. \u00a0Newport has one of the weakest ATP fields every year, situated as it is … Continue reading The Weak, Weak Newport Field<\/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":[16,96],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-406","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-challengers","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\/406","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=406"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/406\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=406"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=406"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=406"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}