Expected Points, my new short, daily podcast, highlights three numbers to illustrate stats, trends, and interesting trivia around the sport.
Up today: Sinner’s recent first serve numbers indicate untapped potential, Ashleigh Barty is finally facing top-ten opponents again, and Mate Pavic is your new ATP doubles #1.
Scroll down for a transcript.
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Music: Love is the Chase by Admiral Bob (c) copyright 2021. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. Ft: Apoxode
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Rough transcript of today’s episode:
The first number is 7, the number of percentage points separating Jannik Sinner’s first serve winning percentage from his second serve winning percentage in Sunday’s Miami Open final against Hubert Hurkacz. Such a tiny gap indicates either a very good second serve or an ineffectual first, and since the Italian teenager won only 26 of his 47 first-serve points, for a mere 55% success rate, it’s definitely the latter. In the 2021 season as a whole, the Sinner’s gap between 1st-serve and 2nd-serve success is about 14 points—closer to normal, but still small. Tour average is over 20 points, and Daniil Medvedev’s and Andrey Rublev’s marks are each at least 25. While Sinner’s Miami finalist points will move him up to #22 on the ATP ranking list, his first-serve winning percentage of 68% this year lags behind more than three-quarters of his fellow top-50 players. A pessimist would say a guy with such a mediocre first serve is overhyped, while a more practical assessment is that the youngest Masters finalist since Rafael Nadal in 2005 has an enormous amount of room for improvement.
Our second number is 3, the number of fellow top-tenners against whom Ashleigh Barty has a positive head-to-head record. Bianca Andreescu became the third when she was forced to retire from Saturday’s Miami final with an ankle injury in her first meeting against the #1-ranked Australian. Barty successfully defended her title and her ranking points from the 2019 Miami Open, keeping a 1,200-point cushion between her and #2 Naomi Osaka. There’s no question that she and Osaka belong at the top of the list, though the combination of the very deep field and the limited number of playing opportunities since the restart have left many head-to-heads unplayed. Barty has won 14 of her last 17 matches against the top ten, but she hasn’t faced Osaka, Halep, Karolina Pliskova, or Serena Williams since 2019, and before this week, she hadn’t played any top-tenner since Petra Kvitova in the 2020 Australian Open quarter-finals. Her last week, with wins over Aryna Sabalenka, Elina Svitolina, and Andreescu—not to mention the menacing #15, Victoria Azarenka—have only started to set things straight.
Today’s third and final number is 16, the number of ATP doubles ranking positions gained by new #1 Mate Pavic in just six months, since he entered last year’s US Open ranked 17th. Pavic and partner Nikola Mektic plowed through the Miami draw without dropping a set, the final step of Pavic’s ascent to the top of the official table. It has been an incredible half-year for the 27-year-old Croatian, winning his second men’s doubles major in Flushing last fall, reaching the Roland Garros finals a month later, and teaming with a new partner and countryman for a 25-3 start in 2021. Croatia isn’t the first nation that comes to mind when you think of tennis superpowers, but it accounts for three of the ATP doubles top ten, in Pavic, Mektic, and the veteran Ivan Dodig, himself a reigning Australian Open champ. Pavic is in position to ensure that Croatia has elite-level representation for a long time to come—at age 27, he’s the only top-tenner in his 20s, and the youngest man in the top 30.
