{"id":710,"date":"2012-03-26T10:12:23","date_gmt":"2012-03-26T14:12:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/heavytopspin.com\/?p=710"},"modified":"2012-03-26T10:12:23","modified_gmt":"2012-03-26T14:12:23","slug":"the-unaceables","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/2012\/03\/26\/the-unaceables\/","title":{"rendered":"The Unaceables"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last night, Florian Mayer<\/a> solved the John Isner<\/a> serve, breaking the American three times en route to a straight-set victory. \u00a0Mayer is known as a tricky opponent, but not as a particularly good returner. \u00a0He had never played Isner before, though he beat Ivo Karlovic<\/a> in Miami last year.<\/p>\n

One element of his success is that he got his racquet on the Isner serve. \u00a0Over the last 52 weeks, Isner has amassed a 17.1% ace rate, meaning that about one in six of his serves are untouchable. \u00a0Last night, he barely managed 10%, as Mayer allowed him only six aces.<\/p>\n

We might wonder: Is this is a skill of Mayer’s that we’ve failed to notice before? \u00a0At first glance, it doesn’t appear to be. \u00a0While Mayer often holds his opponents to low ace numbers, he’s had some horrible performances in that department, allowing Feliciano Lopez<\/a> a 20.4% ace rate in Shanghai last year, Thomaz Bellucci<\/a> 15.5% in Madrid on clay, and while playing injured, he ignominiously allowed Ivo Karlovic a 50% ace rate at last year’s Cincinnati Masters.<\/p>\n

We can answer this question not just for Mayer, but for every regular on the ATP tour. \u00a0While some servers hit far more aces than others, ace rate is influenced by both the server and the returner. \u00a0Mayer himself is a good example. \u00a0In the last 52 weeks, he’s had eight matches in which at least one in ten serves went for an ace. \u00a0But in five other matches, he didn’t hit a single one! \u00a0Some of the variation is due to good and bad serving performances, but a substantial part can be explained by the man on the other side of the net.<\/p>\n

As \u00a0it turns out, last night was an aberration for the German. \u00a0Mayer is below-average at ace prevention, allowing 8% more aces than an average player, ranking 80th among the 139 active players whose results I analyzed.<\/p>\n

I looked at every 2011 and 2012 match, using only those matches in which both players racked up 10 matches in the last fifteen months. \u00a0After calculating each player’s ace rate, I generated an “expected” number of aces for each returner. \u00a0Simply tallying how many aces a player allowed isn’t good enough–this way, we adjust for the quality of the server.<\/p>\n

Mayer, for instance, played 70 matches in that span against opponents who also played at least 10 matches. \u00a0(I excluded guys who played fewer than 10 because their ace rate in such a small number of matches may say more about their opponents than themselves.) \u00a0In his 4812 return points, he allowed 345 aces. \u00a0But based on the serving abilities of his opponents, he should have allowed only 321. \u00a0Those numbers will look a little better after last night, but not enough to move him up very much in the rankings.<\/p>\n

By contrast, the best returners get their racquets on just about everything. \u00a0Atop the list is Gael Monfils<\/a>, who allows barely\u00a0half<\/em> the aces that we would expect him to. \u00a0The top eight returners all reduce expected ace rates by at least a third.<\/p>\n

In the table below, I’ve shown these stats for the ten players who appear to be the best at avoiding aces, along with 20 other players of interest.<\/p>\n

Player                 Rank  Matches  vAce%  expAce%    Diff  \nGael Monfils              1       62   3.5%     6.8%    -48%  \nBenoit Paire              2       23   3.8%     6.3%    -40%  \nAndy Murray               3       81   4.4%     7.3%    -39%  \nStanislas Wawrinka        4       61   4.2%     7.0%    -39%  \nCedrik Marcel Stebe       5       12   3.2%     5.2%    -38%  \nViktor Troicki            6       70   4.3%     7.0%    -38%  \nGilles Simon              7       77   4.7%     7.3%    -36%  \nDavid Ferrer              8       90   5.1%     7.8%    -35%  \nCarlos Berlocq            9       53   4.7%     7.0%    -32%  \nMardy Fish               10       71   5.7%     8.3%    -31%  \n\nJo Wilfried Tsonga       14       89   5.7%     7.9%    -28%  \nRoger Federer            20       92   6.0%     7.9%    -24%  \nNovak Djokovic           22       89   6.4%     8.4%    -24%  \nKei Nishikori            32       63   5.8%     7.0%    -17%  \nRafael Nadal             34       91   7.4%     8.8%    -16%  \nNikolay Davydenko        38       60   5.8%     6.7%    -14%  \nSam Querrey              39       35   6.7%     7.8%    -14%  \nMilos Raonic             40       60   6.7%     7.6%    -12%  \nKevin Anderson           53       74   7.5%     8.0%     -6%  \nJohn Isner               59       68   7.6%     7.8%     -2%  \n\nRadek Stepanek           73       62   8.6%     8.0%      6%  \nLukasz Kubot             74       44   8.5%     8.0%      7%  \nIvo Karlovic             78       45   7.9%     7.3%      7%  \nJuan Martin Del Potro    81       84   8.8%     8.1%      9%  \nTomas Berdych            91       87   8.5%     7.6%     12%  \nDavid Nalbandian        102       43   9.4%     7.9%     20%  \nArnaud Clement          120       17   9.3%     7.2%     29%  \nAndy Roddick            130       55  11.8%     8.3%     42%  \nBernard Tomic           135       38  12.8%     8.5%     50%  \nOlivier Rochus          139       36  14.7%     7.2%    103%<\/pre>\n
Before we go anointing Monfils and Benoit Paire<\/a> the greatest returners in the game, it’s important to remember the serious limitations of the ace stat. \u00a0Much more important is getting the return in play. \u00a0But except for Grand Slam matches, we don’t have those numbers. In the meantime, we can use ace rate and return points won as proxies for return skills.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Last night, Florian Mayer solved the John Isner serve, breaking the American three times en route to a straight-set victory. \u00a0Mayer is known as a tricky opponent, but not as a particularly good returner. \u00a0He had never played Isner before, though he beat Ivo Karlovic in Miami last year. One element of his success is … Continue reading The Unaceables<\/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":[96,97],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-710","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-research","category-return-stats"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/710","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=710"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/710\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=710"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=710"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=710"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}