Italian translation at settesei.it
The best-of-five-sets format used in Grand Slam men’s singles favors the mentally and physically strong. It also gives better players the edge, as it reduces the number of fluky results.
However, simple best-of-five records aren’t always our most useful guide. A player who consistently goes deep in slams faces difficult opponents far more frequently than he would at ATP 250 or 500 events. We would expect that many players would have worse records in best-of-five matches not because of any tendency, but because of consistently tough draws.
If we accounted for all that–opponent quality and the structural bias toward favorites in best-of-fives–who would come out strongest? Which players outperform expectations the most in Grand Slams?
Let’s start with a few names you might not expect, before we narrow the search down to players with the longest resumes:
- Of players with 100 career tour-level matches, the man who has outperformed the most at Slams is Bernard Tomic. In 35 matches at majors, he has won 20 despite his rankings suggesting he would win only 11–82% better than expected. Outside of slams, he has precisely played to his ranking. Modest as Bernie’s track record is, no other active player comes close to this gap.
- Bump the threshold to 200 career matches, and your man is … Denis Istomin? His 21-21 record at Slams doesn’t seem so impressive until you consider that he has never been seeded. His rankings would imply he should have won only 16 matches.
- The parade of underdogs continues when we up the standard to 300 career matches. Victor Hanescu has outperformed best-of-five expectations by a solid 20%, going 28-32 while his lowly rankings would suggest he should have won only 23 matches.
Let’s move on to the big dogs. I meant to limit this study to active players, but when you go far enough back to cover the careers of guys like Radek Stepanek and Tommy Haas, you end up getting a lot of notable former stars. And here, Marat Safin stands out.
Safin’s career mark in slams was 95-41, excellent by any standard. His winning percentage of about 70% was about 14% higher than the combination of his rankings and his opponents would have predicted. While he exceeded expectations in Slams, he underwhelmed in other events. He won almost 10% fewer best-of-three matches than would have been expected over the course of his career.
No current top-ten player displays as big a gap between best-of-five and best-of-three performance than Safin did, but Jo Wilfried Tsonga comes the closest. In this table, I’ve shown each player’s career record at majors, how that compares to the number of wins they should have expected, then the same pair of numbers for non-slams. (I’ve excluded all Davis Cup matches.) Finally, the “ExpRat” column shows how much better each guy played at majors than at non-majors–the ratio of how much more the player exceeded expectations at Slams than elsewhere.
Player Bo5 W% Bo5 Exp Bo3 W% Bo3 Exp ExpRat Jo Wilfried Tsonga 76.6% 1.17 66.6% 0.98 1.19 Tomas Berdych 69.3% 1.06 63.1% 0.95 1.12 Stanislas Wawrinka 67.0% 1.17 58.6% 1.08 1.08 Novak Djokovic 85.3% 1.06 79.2% 0.99 1.07 Rafael Nadal 88.3% 1.07 82.1% 1.01 1.06 Andy Murray 79.6% 1.05 73.7% 1.03 1.02 Roger Federer 84.4% 1.01 79.2% 1.00 1.01 David Ferrer 70.6% 0.95 65.6% 0.96 0.99 Richard Gasquet 64.0% 1.04 63.5% 1.09 0.95 Juan Martin Del Potro 72.9% 1.13 72.5% 1.24 0.91
It’s inevitable that the Big Four make up the middle of the pack. When you are as good as they have been for as long as they have been, you can only exceed expectations so much. Most impressive of the group is Rafael Nadal, who has been better at majors than non-majors despite vastly preferring clay courts. Many of the journeyman players who do the worst by this metric are clay specialists–guys like Filippo Volandri and Potito Starace who are virtually guaranteed first-round exits at three slams each year.
While Juan Martin del Potro‘s appearance at the bottom of this list seems particularly timely after last night’s upset, it may be no more than a statistical fluke stemming from his long absence and long comeback in 2010 and 2011. His ranking lagged behind his skill level for a long time, which explains why he has managed to exceed expectations both at Slams (+13%) and at non-majors (+24%). The loss to Roberto Bautista Agut won’t help his numbers, but it may take several more slams before we can be more confident about Delpo’s best-of-five tendencies.
When Tsonga and Roger Federer clashed in last year’s Melbourne quarterfinals, Federer escaped in five sets. If, as expected, they face off this year as well, these numbers represent one reason why Fed might not be so lucky again.
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For further reading, check out Colin Davy’s similar study.