Yesterday, the ATP announced that it would make a sizeable donation to the Australian Red Cross:
Several players, including Nick Kyrgios, have made additional pledges of their own that extend across the several tournaments of the Australian summer. (Kyrgios’s pledge started the ball rolling, a rare instance of the tour following the lead of its most controversial star.)
How much?
The ATP offered an estimate of 1,500 aces. This is the first edition of the ATP Cup, not to mention the first men’s tour event in Perth, so we can’t simply check how many aces there were last year. Complicating things even further, we don’t know who will play for each nation in each day of the tournament, or which countries will advance to the knockout stages.
In other words, any ace prediction is going to be approximate.
Start with the basics. The ATP Cup will encompass 129 matches. That’s 43 ties, with two singles rubbers and one doubles rubber each. As in the new Davis Cup finals, many doubles rubbers are likely to be “dead,” so all 43 will probably not be played. In Madrid, 21 of the 25 doubles matches were played*, so let’s say that doubles will be skipped at the same rate in Australia, giving us 36 doubles matches.
* one of the four matches I’ve excluded was a 1-0 retirement, which for the purpose of ace counting–not to mention common sense–is effectively unplayed.
The average ace counts in best-of-three matches across the entire tour last year were 12 per singles match and 7 per doubles match. That gives us 1,284 for the 122 total contests we expect to see over the course of the event.
But we can do better. There are more aces on hard courts by a healthy margin. Over the 2019 season, the average best-of-three hard-court singles match returned 15 aces, while doubles matches featured half as many. That works out to a projected total of 1,542, 20% higher than where we started, and quite close to the ATP’s estimate.
While we don’t have much data on the surface in Perth, we have years worth of results from Brisbane and Sydney. Brisbane was one of the ace-friendliest surfaces on tour, while Sydney was at the other end of the spectrum. The figures have also varied from year to year, even controlling for the changing mix of players. Whether we look at one year or a longer time span, the average ace rates in Brisbane and Sydney combine to something in the neighborhood of the tour-wide rate.
Complicating factors
The record-setting temperatures in Australia are likely to nudge ace rates upwards. But the mix of players makes things considerably more difficult to forecast.
One challenge is the extreme range between the best players in the event (Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic) and the weakest, like Moldova’s 818th-ranked Alexander Cozbinov. Not only are underdogs like Cozbinov likely to see their typical ace rates plummet against higher-quality competition, they will probably struggle to keep matches competitive. The shorter the match, the fewer aces. Ironically, Cozbinov fought Steve Darcis for over three hours on the first day of play, but even at that length, only 2 of his 116 service points went for aces. He and Darcis combined for a below-average total of 10.
Another difficulty is one that would arise in predicting the total aces at any tournament. Overall ace counts depend heavily on who advances to the later rounds. The Spanish team of Nadal, Roberto Bautista Agut, and Pablo Carreno Busta is likely to do well despite relatively few first-serve fireworks. But if Canada reprises its Davis Cup Finals success, the top-line combination of Denis Shapovalov and Felix Auger Aliassime could give us six rounds of stratospheric serving stats. The American duo of John Isner and Taylor Fritz could do the same, though their odds of advancing took a dire turn after a day-one loss to Norway. At least Isner has already done his part, tallying 33 aces in a three-set loss to Casper Ruud.
As I write this, day one is not quite in the books. The first ten completed singles matches worked out to 16 aces each, slightly above the hard-court tour average. Thanks to Isner and Kyrgios, the outliers propped up that number, with 37 and 35 aces in the Isner-Ruud and Kyrgios-Struff matches, respectively. The three completed doubles matches have averaged just over 6 aces each, a bit below tour average.
This is all of long way of saying, surprise! The ATP’s estimate isn’t bad at all. A full simulation of each matchup and the event as a whole would give us more precision, but barring that, 1,500 aces and $150,000 looks like a pretty good bet. Philanthropists should line up behind the big hitting teams from Australia, Canada, and the USA, or at least cheer for an above-average number of free points off the serve of Rafael Nadal.