Can Learner Tien Hang With the Big Boys?

Learner Tien at the 2024 US Open. Credit: Hameltion

Learner Tien has done little in 2024 except win. He reeled off a 28-match streak from May to late July, collecting five titles, including his first at the Challenger level. He reached the quarter-finals at the tour event in Winston-Salem. After picking up two more Challenger crowns and another final, the young American opened his NextGen Finals campaign yesterday with a victory over top-50 player Jakub Mensik, 21st on the Elo list.

If you don’t follow prospects, you can be forgiven if you’ve only recently learned the name. Tien is only two weeks removed from his 19th birthday. He opened the year only barely inside the top 500. There were plenty of reasons to expect big things from the young man–a national 18s title at 16, two junior slam finals–but it would have been foolish to predict so much, so soon.

One reason to moderate expectations is simply age. For those not named Alcaraz or Sinner, it takes time to develop into a top player. Only one man under the age of 21–the cutoff for this week’s event in Jeddah–is ranked inside the top 40. Before Tien turned 19 this month, he was the top-ranked 18-year-old in the world, even with a triple-digit number next to his name.

The climb to the top is even more challenging for youngsters who can’t rely on pure power. Mensik, the highest-ranked teenager, is six feet, four inches tall, with weapons that make him seem bigger. Novak Djokovic recently called him “one of the best servers we have in the game.” The Czech has plenty to learn, and he will surely continue to refine his game. But to compete at the top level, he doesn’t have to.

Tien doesn’t have that luxury. He stands five inches shorter than Mensik. While he may have a bit more growth coming, five-eleven is near the bottom edge of what can be managed on the ATP tour. Only 15 members of the top 100 stand less than six feet, and even that list is skewed toward clay-court specialists. Sebastian Baez is the only five-foot-anything ranked above 45th.

The playing styles available to shorter athletes are limited, especially on hard courts. Tien has already demonstrated his mastery of many of those tactics. He can use his left-handedness to swing serve after serve wide, to a righty’s backhand. He is sturdy from the baseline, and you can take that literally: He’s unafraid of claiming territory right up to the line itself, taking advantage of both his quickness and raw speed. Fearless counterpunching has paid dividends for smaller stars from Olivier Rochus to Kei Nishikori to Alex de Minaur. As a lefty, the American has options those men didn’t.

Still, Tien’s transition from the Challenger tour to the big leagues could be rocky. Good defense and well-executed tactics are enough to clean up against top-200 competition. The combination was (just barely) sufficient against Mensik yesterday. But a full-time spot on the ATP tour requires more.

The game plan

For such a middling server, Tien wins a remarkable number of serve points. He ranks among the top quarter of Challenger tour regulars by serve points won, though his number is helped a bit by spending the entire year on hard courts. He does even better–64.6% compared to a tour norm below 62%–when aces and double faults are taken out of the equation. When the returner gets a racket on the ball, only ten players were better on hard courts.

It’s not surprising, then, that Tien excels on return. Among Challenger players with at least ten matches at the level in 2024, only two men–Dalibor Svrcina and his fellow American in Jeddah, Nishesh Basavareddy–topped Learner’s 42.5% clip. Tien is particularly effective converting second-serve return points.

He’s even better–or at least, he has been better this season–with more on the line. His rate of return points won rises to nearly 47% on break point chances, and he’s just as clutch on the other side of the ball. He saved 65.6% of the break points he faced, second at Challenger level to Mikhail Kukushkin. Here, he has already learned how to use the lefty serve, alternately forcing opponents far out wide and sticking them with uncomfortable body serves when he catches them leaning left for the slider.

The overall package is something between those of two other left-handers, Adrian Mannarino and Cam Norrie. Mannarino, also a sub-six-footer, throws the kitchen sink at opponents, keeping them off balance to compensate for his own lack of power. Norrie is considerably taller and has more firepower at his disposal. But he, too, refuses any rhythm to the man across the net. He alternates a loopy forehand with a flat backhand–except when he doesn’t, if you ever think you’ve found a groove.

Tien serves like Mannarino out of necessity. Even if he doesn’t get taller, the American will surely get stronger, so his 90-mile-per-hour first serves from this year’s US Open probably won’t tell the story of his entire career. But at the moment, he relies on angles and variety. Mannarino has overcome his limitations to the tune of a top-20 peak ranking. On the other hand, his playing style (and the comically loose string tension it relies on) is so unique he hardly provides an example to follow.

In the Las Vegas Challenger final back in September, Tien looked particularly like Norrie. Fighting the wind, he spun forehands and zinged backhands, a combination that made it impossible for the bigger-hitting Tristan Boyer to get comfortable. In other settings, though, the youngster is increasingly using his forehand as a (flatter) weapon, building points one sharp angle at a time.

The most instructive element of these comparisons, though, is the way in which the American differs from his fellow lefties. Mannarino reached Tien’s current ranking when he was 21, after more than 250 pro matches. Norrie–who ultimately peaked inside the top ten–played three years of college tennis and didn’t approach the top 100 in the world until he was 22. Tien, by contrast, is clearing all these hurdles on the first try. Deploying a brainy playing style that normally takes years to refine, the American is making it look natural.

The projection

Aside from size and serve speed, Tien’s future looks bright. The 19-year-old has won 61 of 73 matches across all levels this year. Within a few months, he is likely to crack the top 100. At Challenger level, his serve hasn’t held him back: As we’ve seen, he wins more service points than most of his peers, despite gaining fewer free points with the serve itself.

The question, then, is what effect Tien’s attributes have on career trajectory. Everyone wins fewer points at tour level than at Challengers–the competition is better, so it would be weird if it were otherwise. But the ratio isn’t uniform. Mannarino has won about 7% fewer serve points at tour level than he did in hard-court Challenger matches, while Marcos Giron (another sub-six-footer) lost less than 1% in the transition.

These Challenger-to-tour conversions offer some insight into Learner’s future. Since he has played almost all of his pro matches on hard courts, we’re going to calculate something a bit quirky. How do serve and return win rates change from hard-court Challenger matches to all tour-level matches? That’s what we want to know for the 19-year-old: He’ll need to play on all surfaces soon, probably starting in 2025. This transition he’s about to make–how did it go for other players?

The first-pass answer is that pros are able to retain something like their hard-court Challenger serve win percentage, seeing that number drop by 2%. But they lose a lot against tougher competition on return, winning 7.1% fewer return points. The following table shows those numbers (“Conv%”), along with Tien’s career record at hard-court Challengers (“Tien CH”), along with what the conversion factors suggest for his tour-level win rates (“Tien Adj”):

        Conv%  Tien CH  Tien Adj  
Serve   98.0%    63.3%     62.0%  
Return  92.9%    42.3%     39.3%

Those are awfully respectable numbers. 62% serve points is marginal for a tour regular, but combined with 39.3% return points, it’s enough. The combination is about what Francisco Cerundolo managed this year, and he’s ranked 30th in the world.

A word of caution: This type of conversion is not suggesting that Tien’s level is the same as Cerundolo’s now. The calculation involves taking each active player’s career records in tour and Challenger main-draw matches. That probably underestimates Tien’s potential, because most men play the majority of their Challenger matches after their 19th birthday. But a player’s career numbers will include their peak, which typically comes much later. At the very least, these numbers suggest Tien could reach Cerundolo’s level (or better) eventually.

The (other) adjustments

That’s just a first-pass number, because we haven’t gotten to height and handedness. Taking those into account does not help Learner’s case.

Lefties, it turns out, have a rougher transition than right-handers do. Here are the serve and return conversion factors, separated by hand:

        Lefties  Righties  
Serve     97.3%     98.1%  
Return    92.1%     93.0%

Not a huge difference, but hey, the margins in tennis are small. I suspect it is slightly harder for left-handers to move up a level for two reasons. First, the less experienced the opponent, the more valuable it is to be unusual, and lefties are certainly that, making up barely one-tenth of the player pool. At tour level, the novelty is gone: ATP regulars generally know how to handle left-handers.

Second, lefties are more likely to get by with what we might call “crafty” tennis, rather than power. (That’s related to the first reason: They’ve reached Challenger level because they’ve outsmarted inexperienced opponents thus far.) Craftiness might be enough against #180 in the world, but against, say, the Hurkacz serve, all craftiness gets you is a few more tuts of approval in the press box.

Whatever the reason, Tien’s left-handedness means we need to update our tour-level forecast:

    (L) Conv%  Tien CH  Tien Adj  
Serve   97.3%    63.3%     61.6%  
Return  92.1%    42.3%     39.0%

Not a huge hit, but ~0.4% of total points won is roughly equivalent to four places in the rankings. A small number here ultimately translates to much bigger ones when denominated by tour-level prize money.

And then, size. Here are the conversion factors for players in three height categories: under six feet, from six feet to six-foot-three, and above six-foot-three:

        under 6'0  6'0 to 6'3  over 6'3  
Serve       97.0%       97.9%     99.0%  
Return      92.0%       93.4%     92.6%

Again, craftiness doesn’t convert. Players under six feet tall lose the most points between hard-court Challengers and tour level. The tallest players remain almost as effective on serve, while the middle category retains the most of their return effectiveness.

Here’s the Tien update, using the sub-six-feet conversion rates:

        (< 6') Conv%  Tien CH  Tien Adj  
Serve          97.0%    63.3%     61.4%  
Return         92.0%    42.3%     38.9%

Not much of a difference from the left-handed numbers, though we keep going down. This is increasingly the profile of a clay-court specialist, and we might be outside the top 40 now.

Of course, Learner is both left-handed and (relatively) small. My mini-study of active players doesn't give us a big enough pool of data to extrapolate from the small group of small lefties. Instead, a back-of-the-envelope combination of the two factors gives us conversion factors of 96.3% for serve and 91.3% for return:

        (L&Sm) Conv%  Tien CH  Tien Adj  
Serve          96.3%    63.3%     61.0%  
Return         91.3%    42.3%     38.6%

For the first time, the adjusted versions of Tien's Challenger-level stats are underwater, summing to less than 100%. Winning 61% of service points would rate fourth-worst in the current ATP top 50, just ahead of Sebastian Baez. 38.6% on return is respectable, though not enough to consistently challenge for titles when combined with such a mediocre serve.

The exact numbers are not important: For one thing, we don't have enough recent data to know exactly how size and handedness interact. Maybe it's not quite that bad. Suffice it to say that both lefties and undersized players are more likely to struggle in the transition from Challengers to the full tour. A player who fits both categories should not expect a smooth trip up the ladder.

For Tien to beat these projections, all he has to do is improve more than the average pro does. As noted above, he already has something of an edge: He posted most of his excellent Challenger numbers as an 18-year-old. That's Alcaraz territory. At the same age, Mannarino was struggling at Futures level, and future top-tenner Norrie was headed off to college. If for some reason Tien plays a lot of Challenger matches in 2025, his stats will probably look better, and the tour-level predictions would change as well.

As Learner and his team are undoubtedly aware, those improvements need to center on the serve. The youngster probably already has what it takes to break serve once or twice a set on tour. But without a bigger first-strike weapon, he'll struggle to get those opportunities. Yesterday he withstood Jakub Mensik's event-record 24 aces, winning in a fifth-set tiebreak despite losing 14 more total points than Mensik did. The American played brilliant tennis, yet it took luck and brilliant timing to pull out the victory. For a five-foot-eleven left-hander among the giants of the professional game, it's not the last tightrope he'll have to walk.

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The Tensions of Exhibition Tennis

The 2019 Laver Cup. Credit: Sportsfan77777

2024 was a good year for exhibition tennis. The Saudi-banked Six Kings Slam set a new standard for prize money. Rafael Nadal and Carlos Alcaraz took the long tradition of Las Vegas tennis challenges to Netflix. The Ultimate Tennis Showdown made three glitzy stops. Novak Djokovic helped Argentina celebrate Juan Martin del Potro. Even Scandinavia got involved, with a home-and-home duel showcasing Casper Ruud and Holger Rune.

The tennis season is long. Put enough money on the table, though, and it can always get longer.

Exhibitions tend to highlight the gaps between the game’s haves and have-nots. Even the official tours are headed in that direction. The ATP and WTA aim to trim the number of small events to better focus attention on longer, 1000-level tournaments. Rumors persist of a Premier League-style “super tour” that would go even further.

It’s a delicate balance. You can’t hold exhibitions without bona fide stars. You can’t have stars without universally recognized events like Wimbledon. And you can’t have Wimbledon without a thriving ecosystem of tournaments that both identify contenders and allow future champions to develop. The Six Kings Slam was about as far as you could possibly get from an ATP 250 in Santiago, but one relies–however indirectly–on the other.

These tensions are not new. There has always been a scarcity of megastars whose celebrity transcended a couple dozen standard tour stops. Though the ultra-bankable Big Four is fading into history, other trends–exemplified by Saudi money and Netflix-style starmaking–will continue to raise the incentives for exhibition-style tennis. It’s too early to tell whether things will get better or worse, but they’ll almost certainly get different.

How did we get here?

For nearly as long as there have been tennis champions, there have been promoters trying to put them in front of more fans for more money. In 1926, Suzanne Lenglen, the greatest woman player up to that time, became the first superstar to go pro. Her 40-stop series was more like a modern concert tour than anything in the tennis world. She made $100,000 for three months’ work, the equivalent of nearly $2 million today.

Lenglen soon hung up her racket, but the template had been proven. For the final four decades of the amateur era, a rotating cast of standout players from Bill Tilden to Rod Laver slogged through grueling barnstorming tours. Apart from occasional appearances in New York, London, and Australia, it wasn’t glamorous. But it was a more reliable living than taking under-the-table “expense money” from organizers of amateur events.

It didn’t take long before the business model became clear. A pro tour could support four athletes: Two big names (preferably rivals), plus two more who could play a warm-up match, then later join their colleagues for doubles. The tour did best when one of the headliners was a recent Wimbledon champion. It wasn’t unusual for the newly-minted titlist at the All-England Club to sign a contract within days of collecting his trophy.

Attempts to broaden the base of professional tennis usually failed–or, at least, didn’t become any more than another quickie tour stop. To fill out a proper tournament field, promoters had to invite retired champions and teaching pros. The would-be pro “majors” had an appeal not unlike a senior tour event, giving fans a chance to see, say, Don Budge far past his prime.

Amateur officials, as you might expect, detested this state of affairs. Wimbledon was turned into a glorified qualifying tournament, the winner to receive a six-figure check to never appear at SW19 again. While they could have stopped the exodus by offering prize money, it’s easy to sympathize. The pro tour was a parasite, trading on the fame of stars it did nothing to create.

Won’t get fooled again

The Open era kicked off in 1968, quickly consigning amateur tournaments to also-ran status. A few players began to get rich, and it was possible to make a living as a second-tier tour regular. Within a decade, though, exhibition tennis threatened the burgeoning pro circuit.

The tennis boom of the 1970s created vast numbers of fans, and with the help of television, the era’s stars became more famous than ever before. The 1973 Battle of the Sexes was not just a turning point for women in sport. It proved the potential of a one-off spectacle. Why bother with a whole tournament when you could pit Jimmy Connors against Rod Laver at Caesar’s Palace?

In the early 70s, there wasn’t much tension between the tours and exhibitions, because the unified tours didn’t exist. A national federation might gripe about a big name skipping a circuit stop in favor of a bigger payday elsewhere, but federations were losing their grip on the sport. There was little they could do about it.

Soon, though, battle lines formed. World Team Tennis muscled their way onto the stage in 1974, offering players guaranteed contracts to play up to 60 dates from May to September. WTT was expansive enough to accommodate lesser names alongside the box office draws, but the very nature of the league made the pecking order clear. Superstars demanded six-figure deals and often forced trades so that they could play for a chosen franchise. WTT could be nearly as grueling as the old pro tours, but it beat the procession of smaller events between Wimbledon and the US Open.

By the end of the decade, the ATP and WTA had organized themselves into circuits that resemble what we have today. Stars like Chris Evert and Bjorn Borg were raking in prize money. The problem was, on the exhibition market, they were worth even more. Borg, in particular, would cash in at any opportunity, sometimes playing dozens of exhibition matches in a single season.

The men’s tour eventually responded by requiring that players enter a minimum number of sanctioned events each year, one factor in Borg’s early retirement at the age of 26. But most players were willing to compromise, entering a couple dozen official tournaments, then jetting from Europe to Japan and back to pad their bank accounts.

The compromise

Six Kings aside, we’re still far from the peak era of exhibition tennis, when Borg and Ivan Lendl played one-nighters for well-heeled fans around the globe. The ATP has steadily tweaked its rules–no exhibitions that clash with bigger tour events, for instance–while upping its own prize money.

The tours have also indirectly limited exhibitions by their own natural growth. One of the biggest exho markets in the 70s and 80s was Japan, where an increasingly rich population wanted a taste of what Westerners could enjoy at home. As the tours gave more prominence to sanctioned tournaments in Tokyo, Osaka, and elsewhere, there was less demand for one-off player appearances.

That, in short(?), is how we got here. Stars are able to play non-tour events, but only sometimes. They hardly need to, since an athlete with any kind of box office value is making seven figures in prize money, not to mention endorsements. Most localities that can support a top-tier event have got one, within the framework of the official tours.

However, it wouldn’t take much to render this equilibrium unstable.

Threat models

The biggest immediate danger to the existing structure of pro tennis is Saudi money. The nation’s Public Investment Fund basically blew up golf, poaching stars for a rival tour and leaving the sport fractured.

Fortunately, tennis officials were able to watch and learn. The Saudis have been welcomed as partners, hosting the WTA Finals and the ATP NextGen Finals, as well as sponsoring both tours’ ranking systems. The Six Kings Slam doesn’t seem like so much of a threat in the context of so much collaboration.

If the Saudis decide to make a bigger move, even that will likely be in partnership with the majors–the so-called “super tour” proposal. The resulting circuit would probably have fewer, higher-paying tournaments. By extension, it would support a smaller group of players. Breaking onto the tour would be more lucrative than ever, but many currently-fringe competitors would be stuck on an expanded version of the Challenger tour.

Maybe a super tour is imminent. I have no idea. It would certainly change the face of the sport, though not beyond recognition.

The bigger threat, as I see it, is in the longer term. Sports–not just tennis–have learned to promote their biggest stars, earlier and more persistently than ever before. Think of all the “NextGen” hype tennis fans have been subjected to for more than a decade now, since Grigor Dimitrov was a teenager. Now we’ve entered the “Drive to Survive” era, where every sport wants Netflix to do what it did for Formula 1. To grow the game–the thinking goes–stars need to develop into global icons, thus attracting new fans. Can’t just sit around and wait for the next Federer to manage it himself.

The risk is that by marketing a superstar, the value accrues to the superstar, not the sport. If more people tune into Wimbledon to watch Sinner play Alcaraz, Wimbledon reaps the benefit of the ratings and sponsorships. Yes, Sinner and Alcaraz get paid well, too, and maybe prize money goes up next year. But at what point does Wimbledon have less status than the stars themselves? When Alcaraz has his own Netflix doc and Sinner is the most popular man in Italy, who cares about the strawberries and cream?

Put another way: Imagine that the Saudis were looking to elbow their way into sport in 2008. After the epic Federer-Nadal Wimbledon final, they offered both men a ten-year, billion-dollar contract to tour the globe (with frequent stops in the Gulf), playing head to head in one sold-out arena after another. Is the offer so implausible? Are we sure that Roger and Rafa wouldn’t have taken it?

Sinner and Alcaraz are hardly Federer and Nadal–at least not yet. But their agents, and the tour’s marketing team, and a film studio or three, are trying very hard to raise them to that status. If it isn’t Sinner and Alcaraz, it’s the next generation of superstars after that. Eventually, someone, or some small group of players, will be big enough that they can sell a two-man product. Team sports don’t have to worry about that; even golf would have a hard time selling much match play. But tennis has sold two-player rivalries for a century.

That, to me, is the logical extension of exhibition tennis, the worst-case scenario that guts the sport as we know it.

Events like the Six Kings Slam, Laver Cup, and UTS are fine when there is a deep, thriving tennis ecosystem for 45 weeks a year. (I’d even settle for 35!) We are quite far, I think, from the point where the number of exhibitions threatens the tour itself. But we are closer to the more dangerous point where a small group of superstars don’t need the tour at all. Any athletes who ultimately cash in their celebrity to go it alone will do very well in the deal. But the rest of us will be left with a much less compelling sport.

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Mirra Andreeva’s Many Happy Returns

Mirra Andreeva at the 2024 Paris Olympics.
Credit: Like tears in rain

Mirra Andreeva is the best teenager on the WTA tour, and it isn’t close. She’ll finish 2024 ranked 16th on the official points table, more than one hundred places ahead of her closest teenage competitor, Maya Joint. Andreeva is a year younger than Joint, and she’s two years younger than Ella Seidel, third on the under-20 list.

Players who outpace their fellow teenagers typically go on to notable careers. Here’s the list of top teenagers at the end of each season this century:

Year  Player                    Rank  
2000  Serena Williams              6  
2001  Kim Clijsters                5  
2002  Kim Clijsters                4  
2003  Vera Zvonareva              13  
2004  Maria Sharapova              4  
2005  Maria Sharapova              4  
2006  Maria Sharapova              2  
2007  Nicole Vaidisova            12  
2008  Agnieszka Radwanska         10  
2009  Caroline Wozniacki           4  
2010  Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova    21  
2011  Christina McHale            43  
2012  Sloane Stephens             38  
2013  Eugenie Bouchard            32  
2014  Madison Keys                30  
2015  Belinda Bencic              14  
2016  Daria Kasatkina             26  
2017  Catherine Bellis            46  
2018  Dayana Yastremska           58  
2019  Bianca Andreescu             5  
2020  Iga Swiatek                 17  
2021  Emma Raducanu               19  
2022  Coco Gauff                   7  
2023  Coco Gauff                   3  
2024  Mirra Andreeva              16

There’s no such thing as a can’t-miss prospect in women’s tennis, but showing up on this list gets you pretty close. Andreeva’s case is particularly extreme, because she is still just 17 years old.

In the under-18 category, the young Russian has virtually no competition. Only three other under-18s rank among the top 200, none closer than Alina Korneeva at 176th. No woman so young has finished inside the top 20 in almost two decades, going back to Nicole Vaidisova’s top-ten showing in 2006.

Here’s another way to look at what Andreeva has accomplished. With four victories to reach the Ningbo final in October, she increased her career tour-level main-draw win count to 48. Take a look at the list of all women, post-Vaidisova, to post even 30 such wins before their 18th birthday:

Wins  Player              Last Win as 17yo  
32    Victoria Azarenka         2007-07-30  
47    Caroline Wozniacki        2008-06-23  
42    Tamira Paszek             2008-09-15  
32    Donna Vekic               2014-06-23  
33    Amanda Anisimova          2019-07-29  
64    Coco Gauff                2022-03-07  
48    Mirra Andreeva            2024-10-14

Again, good company, and think of all the stars who aren’t here. You know, everybody (besides Vekic) for a decade. In this entire time span of about 17 years, Andreeva has done more at her age than anyone except Coco Gauff. The Russian might even erase that caveat. She doesn’t turn 18 until the end of April, and this year, she had won 12 matches by that time. 17 wins–enough to surpass Gauff–is hardly out of reach.

Let’s turn now to how Andreeva is achieving so much success, and why she might soon lop a digit off of her age-defying ranking.

Returns first

Forget about all this under-18 and teenager stuff for a minute. Mirra is already one of the best returners in the game. Here are the top dozen WTA tour regulars, ranked by return points won:

This isn’t a perfect measure. For one thing, Andreeva faced one of the weaker schedules of players on this list. Her median opponent was ranked 58th, compared to 30th for Iga and 42nd for Coco. It would take considerably more work to suss out whether Andreeva’s 47.3% of return points won, against her set of opponents, is better or worse than, say, Aryna Sabalenka’s 45.3% against competition nearly as stiff as Swiatek’s.

The quibbles mean that we can’t quite proclaim the Russian a top-three returner. The point, though, is that she’s in the conversation. In fact, if we narrow our view to matches against top-20 players–limiting if not eliminating the influence of each woman’s schedule–Andreeva hangs on to her position:

(We’re not talking about Iga today, but… 47% of return points won against top-20 opponents? My word.)

Where Andreeva shines even brighter is against first serves. She won first-serve return points at a higher clip than any other woman on tour this year:

Player               1st RPW%  
Mirra Andreeva          42.6%  
Coco Gauff              42.1%  
Marketa Vondrousova     40.8%  
Iga Swiatek             40.8%  
Daria Kasatkina         40.7%  
Marta Kostyuk           40.5%  
Elina Avanesyan         40.0%  
Jasmine Paolini         40.0%  
Katerina Siniakova      39.5%  
Karolina Muchova        39.5%

Put that in perspective: Andreeva wins more first-serve return points than Barbora Krejcikova (to pick one name from several) wins all return points.

Again, the Russian’s stats are influenced by her level of competition. Against top-20 opponents, Mirra falls to third place, behind Swiatek and just back of Gauff. But you get the idea. To say, “Well, actually, she’s not quite up to Gauff’s standard” is to say we’re dealing with a special player.

Precocious patience

Andreeva’s serve is good for a 17-year-old, but as we’ve seen, it’s not the side of her game that has put her in the top 20. Her returns, and by extension, her baseline play, are responsible for that.

Among top players, Mirra is currently most similar to countrywoman Daria Kasatkina. The two Russians, according to Match Charting Project data, post average rally lengths of 4.9 strokes, more than anyone else in the top 40. Both women are effective off both wings; Andreeva’s backhand is the better of the two, while Kasatkina’s forehand scores more points. The teenager is a bit more likely to force the issue: While both rank well below average in Rally Aggression Score, Mirra is closer to the norm.

A key difference shows up in their rally breakdowns. Again based on the subset of matches logged by the Match Charting Project, here are each woman’s percent of points won at various rally length categories:

Player     1-3 W%  4-6 W%  7-9 W%  10+ W%  
Andreeva    49.8%   48.6%   51.8%   53.8%  
Kasatkina   48.0%   45.6%   51.0%   52.5%

The first thing that pops out here is that Andreeva is better in every category, something that reflects both the vagaries of the uneven tennis schedule and the non-random nature of Match Charting Project samples. However you slice it, Mirra won more points, though my Elo rankings agree with the official formula that Kasatkina was the better player.

To get a better idea of what we’re looking at, let’s normalize each woman’s rally-category splits as if they won exactly half of their overall points:

Player     1-3 W%  4-6 W%  7-9 W%  10+ W%  
Andreeva    49.5%   48.3%   51.5%   53.5%  
Kasatkina   49.6%   47.1%   52.7%   54.2%

The teenager holds the edge in the 4-6-stroke category, while Kasatkina looks better in the longer rallies.

That 4-6-shot category tells us more than it lets on. Andreeva’s 48.3% (or the un-normalized 48.6%) doesn’t look very impressive. Points in this group account for one quarter of all the points she plays, and she loses more than half.

But consider her playing style. Medium-short rallies are often determined by the lingering influence of the serve: The returner might withstand a plus-one attack, only to leave a sitter for the server to put away. Or a strong return doesn’t finish the point, but the returner’s next shot–the fourth stroke of the rally–does the job. 4-6-shot rallies go disproportionately to big hitters: Aryna Sabalenka led the category this year.

For someone like Andreeva or Kasatkina, the task is to limit the damage. Get the serve back, try to neutralize the point. Place serves where aggressive returners won’t do too much damage. If a big return comes back, play the same defense that works against the serve. Kasatkina has all of those skills, but there is only so much she can do. Mirra, with her flatter strokes and somewhat bigger weapons, can keep opponents from running away with these medium-short points. She’ll lose sometimes to the likes of Sabalenka, but unless they catch her on an off day, she won’t be blown off the court.

Growth potential

If Andreeva could be characterized as a younger, somewhat more aggressive Kasatkina, that would be a pretty good compliment for a 17-year-old. But the teenager promises to become much more.

One of my favorite bits of counterintuitive tennis wisdom is that return stats rarely improve. Returning is based on a set of skills–anticipation, quickness, speed–that, on net, decline with age. Whatever tactical savvy a player picks up as she ages will, at best, cancel out the age-related decline. This isn’t an iron law, but it’s surprising how often players reach their peak return effectiveness very early in their careers.

The same is not true for the serve. 17-year-olds (or, hey, 23-year-olds) have the capacity to get stronger. Footspeed and reaction time don’t figure into the serve, so with better coaching or targeted practice (think late-career Djokovic), serve stats can improve even as the rest of a player’s game declines. A couple of examples: Maria Sakkari steadily improved her first-serve win rate from the 13th percentile to the 93rd percentile in five years. Simona Halep’s first-serve was in the top quarter of tour regulars in 2014; two years earlier, it had been one of the WTA’s worst.

The implications for Andreeva are clear. We don’t need to wishcast an improvement in her return game: She’s already one of the best returners in the game. Instead, the road to the top ten and beyond goes through her serve. Her results so far are adequate. She won 58.4% of her serve points in 2024, compared to a top-50 average of 58.7%. When we consider how much she played on clay, that number looks a bit better. On hard courts, she won more serve points than average.

Mirra, then, doesn’t face the same uphill struggle that Sakkari and Halep overcame. Her potential trajectory is more like, say, Victoria Azarenka’s. Vika arrived on the scene as a killer returner with a good-enough serve. In 2009 and 2010, she won nearly half of her return points against 58% to 59% of her service points. That combination earned her two top-ten finishes. (She was a few years older than Andreeva at that point, yet another reminder of how unique the Russian’s early success has been.)

Two years later, Azarenka boosted her rate of serve points won to 61%. Combined with the same results on return that had gotten her into the top ten, the bigger serve earned her six titles–including her first major–and the year-end number one ranking. 59% to 61% may not sound like much, but for an elite returner, that’s all it takes.

If Andreeva did the same, lifting her 58.4% serve-point win rate to 61%, she’d be the ninth-best server on tour. Remember how she’s just a tick behind Coco Gauff on return? A Vika-like serve boost would put her ahead of the American in that category, outweighing Coco’s narrow edge on return. Shorter version: She’d be a top-three player, maybe more.

None of this is guaranteed. It may not–it probably won’t!–happen right away. For every Azarenka, there’s a Nicole Vaidisova or, worse, an injury victim like Catherine Bellis. Still, few paths to the top are marked so clearly. For Mirra Andreeva, a modest, achievable set of improvements are all that stand between her and the top.

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How Does Jannik Sinner’s Season Stack Up?

Jannik Sinner, defying gravity

Jannik Sinner just wrapped up a season for the ages. He won both hard-court majors, three Masters 1000s, and the Tour Finals. He led Team Italy to a Davis Cup championship and ended his campaign on a 26-set winning streak.

By November, the Italian was no longer competing against the field: He was gunning for a place in the record books. He went undefeated against players outside the top 20. Not a single player straight-setted him: He won at least one set in each of his 79 matches. Only Roger Federer, in 2005, had ever managed that.

After Sinner won the Australian Open, I wrote that Yes, Jannik Sinner Really Is This Good. Since then, he got even better. In the seven-month span ending in Melbourne, the Italian held 91.1% of his service games, a mark that not only led the tour but put him in the company of some of the greatest servers of all time. For the entire 2024 season, he upped that figure to 91.5%–including thirteen matches on clay.

He also defied the most powerful force in all of sport, regression to the mean. Sinner’s hold percentage was aided by some sterling work saving break points. He won tons of service points, of course, but he was even better facing break point. The average top-50 player is worse: Good returners generate more break points, so it’s a tough trend to defy.

In the 52 weeks ending in Melbourne, Sinner had won three percentage points more break points than overall service points. I wrote then: “I can tell you what usually happens after a season of break-point overperformance: It doesn’t last.” In the Italian’s case, though, it did. In 2024 as a whole, he won 71.1% of service points, and 73.6% of break points. He would have enjoyed a productive season without repeating his break-point overperformance, but those two-and-a-half percentage points explain much of the gap between very good and historically great.

Clubbable

Most players who serve so effectively are middling returners. The Italian has bucked that trend as well.

Late in 2023 I wrote about tennis most exclusive clubs–Alex Gruskin’s method for identifying standout players by their rankings in the hold and break percentage categories. It’s rare for anyone to crack the top ten in both. In 2023, Sinner signaled what was coming by finishing in both top fives. He ranked fifth by hold percentage and fourth by break percentage. Most seasons, that would have been enough for a year-end number one, but Novak Djokovic was even better, finishing in the top three on both sides of the ball.

Sinner, as we’ve seen, served even better this year. His 91.5% hold percentage was well clear of the pack, even with the resurgence of countryman Matteo Berrettini and increased time on tour from rocket men Ben Shelton and Giovanni Mpetshi Perricard. Last season, Djokovic led the tour by holding 88.9% of his service games. That’s impressive, especially for a guy known for other parts of his game, but it wouldn’t have cracked the 2024 top three. The Italian set a new standard.

At the same time, his return barely flagged. He fell out of the the top five by the narrowest of margins, winning nearly as many return games as he did in 2023 but falling to sixth place. Still, a “top-six club” showing is plenty rare. The only players who have posted one since 1991 (when these stats became available) are Djokovic, Nadal, Federer, and Andre Agassi. Federer only managed it once. Sinner has now done it twice.

The Italian’s return skills are even more impressive when we compare him the other season-best servers of the last thirty-plus years. The following table shows the hold-percentage leader for each year, along with his break percentage and his rank (among the ATP top 50) in that category:

Year  Player             Hold%   Brk%  Rank  
1991  Pete Sampras       87.3%  25.4%    40  
1992  Goran Ivanisevic   88.8%  20.4%    48  
1993  Pete Sampras       89.6%  27.7%    19  
1994  Pete Sampras       88.4%  29.3%    19  
1995  Pete Sampras       89.0%  26.0%    25  
1996  Pete Sampras       90.8%  20.8%    43  
1997  Greg Rusedski      91.6%  16.7%    50  
1998  Richard Krajicek   89.2%  21.4%    41  
1999  Pete Sampras       89.7%  21.7%    44  
2000  Pete Sampras       91.7%  18.4%    49  
2001  Andy Roddick       90.4%  19.7%    45  
2002  Greg Rusedski      88.5%  17.6%    48

Year  Player             Hold%   Brk%  Rank    
2003  Andy Roddick       91.5%  20.9%    43  
2004  Joachim Johansson  91.9%  14.5%    48  
2005  Andy Roddick       92.5%  20.8%    45  
2006  Andy Roddick       90.5%  22.4%    43  
2007  Ivo Karlovic       94.5%   9.8%    50  
2008  Andy Roddick       91.2%  19.2%    40  
2009  Ivo Karlovic       92.2%  10.3%    50  
2010  Andy Roddick       91.1%  17.6%    47  
2011  John Isner         90.7%  12.9%    50  
2012  Milos Raonic       92.7%  15.1%    49  
2013  Milos Raonic       91.4%  15.7%    49  
2014  John Isner         93.1%   9.3%    49  

Year  Player             Hold%   Brk%  Rank  
2015  Ivo Karlovic       95.5%   9.6%    50  
2016  John Isner         93.4%  10.9%    49  
2017  John Isner         92.9%   9.6%    50  
2018  John Isner         93.8%   9.4%    50  
2019  John Isner         94.1%   9.7%    49  
2020  Milos Raonic       93.9%  18.0%    44  
2021  John Isner         91.1%   8.8%    50  
2022  Nick Kyrgios       92.9%  19.3%    40  
2023  Novak Djokovic     88.9%  28.8%     3  
2024  Jannik Sinner      91.5%  28.3%     6

If it hadn’t been for Djokovic’s appearance at the top of last year’s list, Sinner’s 2024 campaign would be hardly recognizable. Even Pete Sampras struggled to hold on to a spot in the break-percentage top 20. Circuit-best servers simply aren’t supposed to win so many return games, yet Sinner threatens to make it the new normal.

Carrot yElo

The Italian’s 73 wins, including 18 against the top ten, took his Elo rating to new heights. He began the year with a career-high rating of 2,197, second on the circuit to Djokovic. He quickly took over the top spot, ultimately clearing the 2,300 mark with his victory at the Tour Finals.

Elo is not a perfect measure to compare players from different eras, but in my opinion, it’s the best we’ve got. It’s the basis of my Tennis 128, which Sinner will join as soon as I get around to updating the calculations. 2,300 is rarefied air: In the last half-century, he is only the twelfth player to reach that mark. With three singles victories to secure the Davis Cup, he nudged his rating up to 2,309, surpassing Mats Wilander and establishing the eleventh-highest peak since the formation of the ATP.

A stratospheric Elo is an indication of an outstanding player at the top of his game, but the metric is not designed to rate seasons. The alternative is yElo, a variation I devised for exactly this purpose. yElo works the same way as Elo does, adding or subtracting points based on wins, losses, and the quality of opposition. But unlike the more traditional measure, each player starts the season with a clean slate.

By regular Elo, Sinner holds a 150-point lead over second-place Carlos Alcaraz. By yElo, with its narrower focus, the Italian is even more dominant:

(The won-loss records are a bit different from official figures because my Elo and yElo calculations exclude matches that ended in retirement.)

The two-hundred-point gap between Sinner and Djokovic is one of the largest ever. Again going back to 1973, it ranks fourth. Only 2004 and 2006 Federer (over Lleyton Hewitt and Nadal, respectively) and 1984 John McEnroe (over Wilander) outpaced the competition by such a substantial margin.

By raw yElo, Sinner’s 2024 isn’t quite so historic. It’s the 26th best of the last half-century: An impressive feat, but not as close to the top of the list as some of the other trivia suggests. Here’s the list:

Year  Player              W-L  yElo  
1979  Bjorn Borg         84-5  2499  
1984  John McEnroe       82-3  2476  
2015  Novak Djokovic     82-6  2458  
1985  Ivan Lendl         82-7  2440  
2016  Andy Murray        78-9  2416  
2013  Novak Djokovic     74-9  2408  
1976  Jimmy Connors      97-7  2406  
1977  Bjorn Borg         78-6  2403  
1977  Guillermo Vilas  133-13  2401  
2006  Roger Federer      91-5  2399  
1980  Bjorn Borg         70-5  2395  
1981  Ivan Lendl        96-12  2383  
1987  Ivan Lendl         73-7  2381  
1982  Ivan Lendl        105-9  2380  
1978  Jimmy Connors      66-5  2379  

Year  Player              W-L  yElo  
2013  Rafael Nadal       74-7  2373  
1986  Ivan Lendl         74-6  2369  
2011  Novak Djokovic     63-4  2367  
2005  Roger Federer      80-4  2364  
2014  Novak Djokovic     61-8  2363  
2012  Novak Djokovic    73-12  2360  
1978  Bjorn Borg         79-6  2359  
2008  Rafael Nadal      81-10  2352  
1986  Boris Becker      69-13  2347  
1982  John McEnroe       71-9  2341  
2024  Jannik Sinner      72-6  2339  
1983  Mats Wilander     80-11  2338  
1974  Jimmy Connors      94-5  2332  
1989  Boris Becker       64-8  2329  
2015  Roger Federer     62-11  2329

One factor holding back Jannik’s 2024 is the number of matches played. Elo, in part, reflects the confidence we have in a rating. Winning 90% of 100 matches (or almost 150, in the case of Vilas) gives us more confidence in an assessment than 90% of 80 matches.

Another issue is that Elo has opinions about strong and weak eras. Going 70-5 in 1980 doesn’t look much different than 72-6 today, but Elo considers Bjorn Borg’s peers to have been stronger than Sinner’s. If Sinner and Alcaraz continue to improve and a couple of their peers emerge as superstars in their own right, then a 72-6 season might rank much higher.

The asphalt jungle

A couple of months ago, pundits started mulling where Sinner’s 2024 stood among the greatest hard-court seasons of all time. Since then, he piled on so many more wins that the qualifier wasn’t needed. Yet it remains a valid question.

The Italian’s highlights came almost entirely on hard courts. He won 53 of 56 matches, 42 of them in straight sets. He’s plenty skilled on natural surfaces, but given a predictable bounce and conditions that emphasize his power and penetration, opponents don’t stand a chance.

I don’t publish surface-specific yElo ratings, because they have limited usefulness for much of the year. For our purposes, though, hard-court yElo–same algorithm, limited to matches on one surface–is just the ticket. By this measure, Sinner’s 2024 is the eighth-best of all time:

Year  Player          Hard W-L  Hard yElo  
2015  Novak Djokovic      59-5       2426  
2013  Novak Djokovic      53-5       2413  
2012  Novak Djokovic      48-5       2377  
2005  Roger Federer       49-1       2374  
2006  Roger Federer       59-2       2373  
1995  Andre Agassi        52-3       2370  
2016  Andy Murray         48-6       2363  
2024  Jannik Sinner       52-3       2353  
2010  Roger Federer       45-7       2338  
2014  Novak Djokovic      40-6       2334 

Year  Player          Hard W-L  Hard yElo   
2014  Roger Federer       56-7       2333  
1985  Ivan Lendl          29-3       2332  
1987  Ivan Lendl          33-2       2325  
1996  Pete Sampras        46-4       2319  
2015  Roger Federer       38-6       2318  
1981  Ivan Lendl          41-3       2317  
2011  Roger Federer       45-7       2314  
2009  Novak Djokovic     53-10       2309  
1985  John McEnroe        25-1       2309  
1986  Ivan Lendl          30-2       2298

So, um, peak Djokovic was pretty good, huh?

Even though Elo doesn’t hold the rest of the 2024 field in particularly high regard, Sinner’s season was so dominant that he does well by this measure. A year that would rate as Djokovic’s fourth-best, Federer’s third, or Agassi’s second, is truly something worth celebrating.

The Italian still has some ground to cover before he challenges Novak, Roger, and the rest for all-time hard-court dominance. But he has already upped the standard for the 2020s and posted one of the most remarkable two-year spans in the game’s history. Sinner has built an enormous gap between himself and the field, and it is increasingly difficult to see how his peers will close it.

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Jasmine Paolini’s High-Wire Act

Jasmine Paolini at the 2022 Transylvania Open. Credit: Nuta Lucian

There are unorthodox aging curves, and then there’s whatever the hell Jasmine Paolini is doing right now. The best women tennis players tend to make their presence known in their late teens. I wrote earlier this year about the “improbable rise” of 22-year-old Emma Navarro.

Paolini is 28.

When Paolini was the age that Coco Gauff is now, she was ranked just inside the top 300, fresh off a first-round loss at an ITF $25K in Bulgaria. When she was the age that Iga Swiatek is now, she had finally cracked the top 150, about to head to Wimbledon qualifying. (She lost in the first round there, too.) When she was the age that Aryna Sabalenka is now, she had just stumbled through a four-match losing streak to the likes of Jil Teichmann and Irina-Camelia Begu that knocked her out of the top 50.

Just 16 months ago, Paolini was once again outside the top 50. For a five-foot, four-inch counterpuncher with no obvious weapons, she had achieved a great deal. There was little reason, though, to think she could climb much higher. Her peers were getting bigger, the game was becoming ever more aggressive, and she was reaching the age at which WTA stars begin to think about what else life might hold for them.

Then she started winning.

Since leaving Wimbledon last year, the Italian has won 66 of 99 matches, including two major semi-finals and five top-ten scalps. She picked up her first 1000-level title and made four other finals. Yesterday, she led Team Italy to a Billie Jean King Cup crown, starring in both singles and doubles en route to the championship. Her ranking is up to an astonishing 4th in the world. As if that weren’t enough, she’s in the top ten in doubles.

None of this was supposed to happen. Paolini’s late-2023 surge to the top 30 was one thing; what has happened since simply defies belief. How has she managed it? Is it a fluke, or will we see the Italian at the 2025 year-end championships as well?

Opportunistic effects

First, a bit of a caveat. Paolini, like Taylor Fritz, has played the official ranking system like a Stradivarius. She reached only three finals in 2024, yet two of them were slams. The other was a 1000. She earned huge chunks of points for a semi-final defeat of Mirra Andreeva at Roland Garros, a semi-final squeaker against Donna Vekic at Wimbledon, and a Dubai title that didn’t require her to face a top-ten opponent.

None of this is meant to take away from Paolini’s accomplishment. She beat the players in front of her, and in the case of Andreeva, she did so in emphatic fashion. The point is that her top-four finish has more to do with good timing than consistently dominant play.

My Elo ratings offer a second opinion, using an algorithm based on the quality of her opponents, rather than the venue and round of each match. By Elo, she stands in 9th place, just ahead of Madison Keys and Diana Shnaider, well back of Jessica Pegula and Elena Rybakina. Still a very good season, if a bit less astounding.

Even more revisionist is the total-points-won leaderboard. Going into the BJK Cup Finals, Paolini had won 51.8% of her total points this season. That’s a respectable rate, especially for someone who hovered in the 50% range for most of her tour-level career. But it is not typically top-five, or even top-ten material:

By this metric, the Italian stands in 19th place among the WTA top 50, behind a handful of players who didn’t even crack the official top 20. That doesn’t really mean she’s the 19th best player on tour: She faced one of the toughest schedules of anyone. Much as I love both Yulia Putintseva and counterintuitive arguments, I’m not going to try to convince you that Putintseva had the better season.

Still, Paolini’s position on the TPW list tells us something about how she won her matches. She didn’t lose many blowouts, but she didn’t win many, either. (She certainly didn’t get in the habit of spanking opponents like Swiatek and Sabalenka do.) Ten of her wins required a third set. Two victories–including the Wimbledon semi-final–came despite losing more points than she won.

The margins were not so narrow that we can ascribe the Italian’s breakout to luck. (Though the Vekic match could have gone either way, to say the least.) But this is the high-wire act that took Paolini to the top. She doesn’t have the tools to bludgeon her opponents. She has done a lot of things right to win 42 matches this year. To keep winning at a two-of-three clip, she’ll need to continue executing the new game plan to near-perfection.

The new game plan

It’s a bit tricky to isolate the key changes in Paolini’s approach, because–like Qinwen Zheng–she’s doing almost everything better than she did before the surge. That said, a few things stand out.

Check out the Italian’s breakdown of points won by rally length (in Match Charting Project-logged matches) before this season, compared with her performance this year:

Span     1-3 W%  4-6 W%  7-9 W%  10+ W%  
2016-23   49.1%   46.5%   51.0%   49.4%  
2024      49.8%   54.3%   56.6%   49.1%

Paolini’s improvement in 7- to 9-stroke rallies is significant, and her gain in the 4- to 6-shot category is enormous. In very short points and very long ones, little has changed.

Especially in the categories of shorter points, we need to keep in mind what these win rates measure. It’s tempting to think of a prototypical short point, then imagine Paolini, instead of her opponent, winning it. But the length of a given point is not handed down to us by God. When someone like Paolini starts winning more shorter points, it’s because she is ending them before they become long points, and/or she is preventing her opponents from ending points quickly.

The Italian can hardly stack up one-shot points (unreturned serves), and she can’t even reliably put away plus-ones–though she is doing that more than she used to. Instead, like the expert doubles player she has become, she can structure points that inch closer and closer to a point-ending opportunity. Call it plus-two tennis, aggressive point construction for undersized counterpunchers.

The plus-two forehand

Tactics are one thing; Paolini is a top-ten player because she has executed them so well. Her forehand is a big reason why.

She is ending points with her forehand at a much better clip than she did before the calendar flipped to 2024, and her inside-out forehand has seen particular improvement:

Span     FH Wnr%  DTL Wnr%  IO Wnr%  FHP/100  
2016-23    11.7%     17.7%     6.2%      2.9  
2024       17.5%     25.2%    13.3%     10.2

Here, “winners” refer to both clean winners and shots that induce forced errors. Through 2023, Paolini’s forehand winner/forced error rate of less than 12% put her in the bottom quarter of tour regulars. 17.5% moves her to the top third, not far behind Swiatek and Keys. The same stat for inside-out forehands (IO Wnr%) doesn’t put her in quite the same company, but it is an even better reflection of the tactical shift. Before, the Italian rarely used that shot as an offensive weapon; now it is a regular part of the arsenal.

The bottom line is reflected in the Forehand Potency (FHP/100) numbers. The number of points Paolini earns with her forehand more than tripled from previous seasons to 2024. That doesn’t quite account for the entire shift from a top-50 player to a top-fiver, but it explains a whole lot.

And the no-fearhand

One side effect of the Italian’s forehand-centered strategy is that she is less afraid of other players’ forehands.

Again, Paolini is doing just about everything better. For instance, 22% of her first serves went unreturned in 2024, compared with 20% in the past. Nice little boost, but not something you would notice by watching a couple of matches. A bigger shift is where she puts the first serves:

Span     1st Unret%  <=3 W%  RiP W%  D Wide%  A Wide%  
2016-23       20.2%   28.1%   48.3%    25.0%    45.7%  
2024          21.8%   34.8%   53.4%    37.4%    44.8%

Check out the rate at which she is hitting deuce-court first serves wide (D Wide%). 25% to 37% is a massive change, and one that would be dangerous for a different sort of player. In the deuce court, the down-the-tee serve is the conservative one: It goes to the backhand of a right-handed returner, and since it lands in the middle of the court, the returner doesn't have any sharp angles to exploit. The wide serve is the opposite, feeding forehands to opponents like Sabalenka, Rybakina, or Zheng along with the angles necessary to turn them into winners.

What Paolini knows--again, like a savvy doubles player--is that most players will fail to convert the majority of those opportunities, even if they occasionally smack a highlight-reel return winner. The Italian didn't crack the top five by running the table against the elite. Most of her 42 wins came against the next rung of competitors, women who are often held back by inconsistency. Paolini pushed them off the court, giving the choice of either going big (and frequently missing), or sending back a shot that she could handle with her own (improved!) forehand.

All those deuce-court wide serves explain how Paolini picked up so many more plus-one winners (the <=3 W% column) and converted so many in-play returns overall (RiP W%). Every individual wide serve is a gamble, but the Italian has discovered that, on net, they pay off.

The way forward

I'm a bit surprised to find myself concluding that, yes, Paolini might just maintain this level. The odds are heavily against another top-five finish. That was a quirk of her draws and well-timed (probably accidental!) peaks. But 52% of total points? A single-digit year-end ranking? Maybe!

Once I began thinking of the Italian's singles play in terms of doubles strategy, it all clicked. Her anticipation is outstanding--and like everything else, it is better than it was last year. She often wins points without working particularly hard. She's in the right place to end the point on the fifth or sixth shot of the rally. (That place is increasingly at the net. She came to net more in 2024, and she won more of those points than before, too.) Anticipation isn't a skill that will deteriorate with age, nor is it one that opponents can neutralize.

Paolini's new point-shortening, forehand-smacking, deuce-court-serving tactics aren't going to earn her many big upsets, just as they haven't so far. The strongest players--not coincidentally, often the ones with the most fearsome forehands--are the ones in the best position to take advantage the wide deuce-court serves and force the Italian both to move off the baseline and rely more on the backhand.

But a top-ten season doesn't require a pile of top-ten victories. Paolini was 3-6 against that group this year, and that included one win against a fading Ons Jabeur and another in Riyadh against a rusty Rybakina. The Italian's finish owed much more to her 38-15 record against everyone else. Despite the improbability of a top-ten debut at age 28, Paolini has built a game capable of repeating the feat in 2025.

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The Riddle of the Ruud-Rublev Reversal

Andrey Rublev and Casper Ruud

The story of the the 2024 ATP Tour Finals was the dominance of Jannik Sinner. I’ll refer you to what I wrote after the Australian Open: Yes, Jannik Sinner Really Is This Good. He just passed the 2,300 Elo threshold, becoming only the 12th man since Rod Laver to do so. When I update the Tennis 128 in a few weeks, he’ll be on it.

For all that, I’m preoccupied with something else. On the final day of round robin play, Casper Ruud beat Andrey Rublev to secure a place in the semi-finals. It was their eighth meeting and the Norwegian’s third victory:

Notice anything odd? Take away the unfinished Australian Open tilt, and the head-to-head breaks down precisely on surface lines. Rublev has won all four encounters on clay, while Ruud has run the table on hard courts. Not just any hard courts: indoors, at the Tour Finals.

We can look to external factors to explain some of the individual results. Casper had more at stake on Friday than the Russian did, with a chance to qualify for the final four. Rublev is older and broke through correspondingly earlier, so he was the natural favorite in their early meetings. Injuries and illness may have influenced another outcome or two, even aside from the retirement in Melbourne.

Still: 0-3 in completed matches for the ball-basher on hard courts, and 0-4 for the Roland Garros finalist on clay. Something’s going on here.

Not so fast

Rublev, to be fair, is hardly a fast-court specialist. His first tour-level title came on dirt in Umag, and he picked up a Masters crown last year in Monte Carlo, on one of the circuit’s slowest surfaces. The Russian’s forehand is a weapon in any conditions, and slow courts can disguise some of his weaknesses.

On the other hand, however much Rublev likes the dirt, Ruud likes it more. Earlier this year, I quantified the notion of “surface sensitivity,” the degree to which a player’s results are influenced by court speed. Rublev scored at -2.2, indicating that he does better on slower surfaces, a bit more so than the typical tour regular. Casper was considerably further down the list, at -5.0. The rating tells us that he’s more receptive to slow courts than Pablo Carreno Busta or Jaume Munar. He’s grades about the same as Diego Schwartzman.

Maybe the oddball head-to-head is a quirk of when the pair have met? Not all hard courts play fast, and not all clay behaves like the crushed brick at Roland Garros. Here are the venues for the seven completed meetings, along with my ace-based surface speed rating for each. Ratings above 1 are faster than average, below 1 are slower:

Year  Tournament   Winner  Speed  
2024  Tour Finals  Ruud     1.36  
2023  Bastad       Rublev   0.86  
2022  Tour Finals  Ruud     1.50  
2021  Tour Finals  Ruud     1.51  
2021  Monte Carlo  Rublev   0.54  
2020  Hamburg      Rublev   0.52  
2019  Hamburg      Rublev   0.74

Hypothesis denied! The 2021 and 2022 Tour Finals were the fastest conditions of their respective years, while Monte Carlo was the slowest of the entire 2021 season. Last year’s Bastad surface was fairly neutral for a clay court, but the rest of the Ruud-Rublev showdowns took place on fast hard courts or slow clay.

We could always mark down a string of seven surface-confounding results to luck, especially when both players are capable in all conditions. But it would be far more satisfying to find an explanation that tells us something about the players and their particular skills.

Stoppable

We don’t have to look far. Here are Casper’s win rates on first and second serve points against Rublev, separated by surface:

Surface  1st W%  2nd W%  
Clay      56.8%   48.4%  
Hard      72.7%   50.7%

Everybody wins fewer first serve points on clay than on hard courts, but not like this. The average gap for top-50 players in 2024 is four percentage points–not sixteen. At tour level against the entire field, Ruud has shown an even smaller difference, winning 73.1% of hard-court first-serve points against 71.2% of those on clay.

Rublev is not a brilliant returner. He’s a serviceable one with tactics to match. He often struggles to get first serves back in play. On second serve, he’s unafraid to unleash his weapons, accepting some errors in exchange for tilting other points in his favor. On clay, he’s able to turn a few more first serves into rally openers. In 2024, his gap between clay and hard-court first-serve return points won was bigger than average. But not nearly as wide as it is against Casper.

When it works…

Ruud, like many men who have developed into strong clay-courters, doesn’t have a monster serve. He can place it, he can disguise it, and he knows how to play behind it. On a fast hard court, those skills–combined with a bit more risk-taking–can result in numbers that look more like those of a big server. Against Rublev last week, he won just shy of 80% of his serve points, supported by 15 aces.

When the Norwegian is hitting corners and the ball is skimming off a court like the speedy one in Turin, Rublev is helpless. Over his career, according to the nearly 200 matches logged by the Match Charting Project, he puts 58% of first serves back in play. Against Casper on Friday, he didn’t manage 50%–a repeat of his performance on the same court two years earlier.

Rublev’s first-serve-return struggles on hard court contrast with how he feasts on Ruud’s serve on clay. The next table shows the rate at which the Russian puts Casper’s first serves in play, as well as his win percentage when he does so:

Match                Result  1st: RiP%  RiP W%  
2024 Tour Finals RR       L      46.9%   43.3%  
2023 Bastad F             W      64.6%   61.3%  
2022 Tour Finals SF       L      45.7%   50.0%  
2021 Tour Finals RR       L      67.5%   51.9%  
2021 Monte Carlo SF       W      84.4%   59.3%  
2020 Hamburg SF           W      91.4%   59.4%

The exception to the rule here is the 2021 Tour Finals match, which ended in a third-set tiebreak. It was the closest either man has come to securing one of the matches he “should” have won. Rublev won 52.9% of total points, but Ruud served his way out of just enough jams to come through.

On the very slow Monte Carlo and Hamburg courts, Rublev’s ability to handle the Norwegian’s first serve meant that Ruud was left with no edge whatsoever. Casper might be the superior baseliner, but he started too many points at a disadvantage. The picture might look different if they played on slow clay today, since Ruud is stronger and tactically savvier on serve. But I imagine it would still be a struggle, one in which few of Casper’s service games would sail by quickly.

Pundits like to say that tennis is a game of matchups. They often overstate their case: The better player (by ranking, or Elo rating, or whatever) usually wins. When they don’t, it isn’t always because of some quirk in the head-to-head. With Rublev and Ruud, though, such a quirk dictates the results. Few men are able to erase Rublev’s advantage on a hard court as much as the Norwegian can. Casper’s first serve is rarely so ineffectual as when the Russian is waiting for it on dirt. Ruud is set for another big European clay swing next year–so long as his buddy Andrey lands in the other half of the draw.

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The Newly Opportunistic Taylor Fritz

Taylor Fritz at the 2023 US Open. Credit: Andy M. Wang

Taylor Fritz has been remarkably consistent over the last three seasons. He ended the 2022 campaign ranked 9th, finished last year 10th, and enters this week’s Tour Finals in 5th place, with a chance to overtake Daniil Medvedev for a spot in the top four.

Take a look at his top-line statistics for 2022, 2023, and 2024. They’re sorted by total points won (TPW). Can you tell which one belongs to his career-best current season?

Year   Win%   1st%   2nd%    RPW    TPW  
???   68.8%  78.4%  54.3%  37.7%  53.0%  
???   70.4%  78.3%  55.8%  36.2%  52.8%  
???   69.1%  76.4%  52.6%  38.2%  52.4%

You might be tempted to go with the first row, since he won the most points then. But the margin is small, and he won matches at a better clip in the second. Wait, though: He snagged the most return points in the third season, and more breaks of serve are particularly crucial for a player hovering in the 36% to 38% range.

I won’t leave you hanging. The second line belongs to 2024. Here are the three stat lines, now sorted by season:

Year   Win%   1st%   2nd%    RPW    TPW  
2024  70.4%  78.3%  55.8%  36.2%  52.8%  
2023  68.8%  78.4%  54.3%  37.7%  53.0%  
2022  69.1%  76.4%  52.6%  38.2%  52.4%

The 27-year-old American is clearly doing something right that isn’t captured by the usual stats. 10th to 5th is a major move. Last year he didn’t even qualify for the Tour Finals. After beating Medvedev yesterday, he’s one win away from a probable berth in the semis. What’s going on here?

All the right matches

The official ranking system ensures that tournaments and matches are very much unequal. When Fritz beat Frances Tiafoe in the Acapulco quarter-finals last year, he gained an additional 90 points for his semi-final showing. When he slipped past Tiafoe in this year’s US Open for a place in the championship match, he earned a whopping 480 points.

I could just about stop here. 480 points is the difference between Fritz’s current point total and 8th place. A slightly bigger difference of 560 points would knock him down to 10th, and he’d be hanging around Turin this week as an alternate. His stats would barely change, but the story of his season would be very different.

It’s not just the Tiafoe match; it’s more than the US Open final. 2024 was the first year that Fritz lived up to expectations at the slams in general. Here are his grand-slam win totals back to 2018:

Year  Wins                  
2024    17                  
2023     8                  
2022     8                  
2021     6                  
2020     6  * no Wimbledon  
2019     4                  
2018     4

No top tenner would be happy with just eight wins at majors. Simply reaching the fourth round at each slam adds up to 12. In 2022, Fritz lost five-setters to Stefanos Tsitsipas and Rafael Nadal, then fell to a streaking Brandon Holt in Flushing. Last year, he suffered two second-round exits. Both five-setters, the losses came against Alexei Popyrin in Australia and Mikael Ymer at Wimbledon.

When the 2024 season kicked off, Fritz had just two major quarter-finals to his name. His career record in five-setters was 8-10.

Since then, the American has reached three more quarters (including the US Open final run). He won four five-setters against just one defeat. He avenged the Melbourne loss to Tsitsipas and twice upset Alexander Zverev, a player who had beaten him in five of eight previous meetings.

The re-balancing

The odd thing about Fritz’s season is that his slam success has been offset by weaker results elsewhere. Returning to the observation I started with: He won nine more matches at majors in 2024 than in 2023, but his winning percentage barely budged. Instead of losing to Ymer or Holt on a big stage, he fell to Matteo Arnaldi in Acapulco, Thiago Seyboth Wild in Miami, Alex Michelsen in Geneva, and more.

It was a smart trade, though it was surely not a premeditated one. You can train with the majors in mind, but you can hardly punt an early-round match at a 250 with any kind of hope that it will result in a quarter-final victory at the next slam.

There’s another category, though, in which Fritz may have used stronger tactics to get better “luck.” Here are the American’s tiebreak records since 2021:

Year  TB W-L    TB%  
2024   21-11  65.6%  
2023   25-17  59.5%  
2022   24-20  54.5%  
2021   20-15  57.1%

The 2023 mark of 59% is about where Fritz should be, based on the rate at which he normally wins serve and return points, combined with the matches in which he finds himself in tiebreaks. 2024 was the first season he beat tiebreak expectations by a non-negligible margin.

This could be luck. Tiebreak records fluctuate, and very few players sustain records above or below expectations for long. Still, the American might have figured something out. In the sample of 2024 matches logged by the Match Charting Project (plus several others from grand slams), Fritz is serving way better in tiebreaks than he has in the past:

Year  TB SPW  
2024   80.3%  
2023   65.6%  
2022   70.9%  
2021   65.0%

80% is Isner territory. In the improbable event that Fritz can sustain these kinds of numbers, coupled with a solid return-points-won rate around 38%, he should be winning even more tiebreaks than he already does.

I don’t want to overemphasize tiebreaks: After all, his 21-11 record is only one or two tiebreaks better than it “should” be. On the other hand, it’s easy to scan through Fritz’s career results–including those at majors–and see how one or two tiebreaks could change the story. He took a first-set tiebreak from Tsitsipas in Melbourne this year. He split two against Zverev at Wimbledon, then took two of two from the German in New York. Take one of those away–just one!–and again, he might be watching the Tour Finals from the sidelines.

Zverev tolerance

Regardless of whether tiebreak luck played a role, Fritz’s two major victories over Zverev helped to define his season. Neither pre-match betting odds nor my Elo ratings predicted an American victory on either occasion.

Both Fritz and Zverev are tall guys with big serves; either one can put away a service game with four quick strikes. One key difference between them is that Zverev is more patient, comfortable playing long points from the baseline. This isn’t necessarily an asset: It isn’t always in the German’s interest to let matches go that way. But if you’re going to pick one of these two guys to play points from the baseline, it’s pretty clearly Zverev.

In the US Open quarter-final, though, 39 points went ten strokes or longer. Fritz won 20 of them. In the fourth-set tiebreak, three and half hours into the battle, the American won two of two: a 24-stroke grinder that Fritz finished at the net, then a 12-shotter on match point that Zverev squandered with a unforced forehand error.

Two lessons jump out. First, the American can hold his own from the backcourt with one of the best baseliners in the game, at least on a hard court. Second, that skill doesn’t seem to fade with fatigue, something that might have caused Fritz’s five-set struggles in the past.

A third takeaway may be even more important. Instead of the numerator–20 points won–consider the denominator: 39 points played. The first time Fritz and Zverev met at a major, at Wimbledon back in 2018, barely half as many points lasted so long, even though the match itself was longer. Yes, the surface kept that number down, but not by a factor of two. At Washington early in Fritz’s career, on a surface more like that in Flushing, the two men played an entire match with just one rally that reached ten strokes.

In that 2018 Wimbledon meeting, Fritz held his own in the long rallies, winning 9 of 21. The problem was his rush to avoid them. He committed 56 unforced errors to the German’s 36.

Zverev keeps his unforced error rates down because he is willing to wait. He forces opponents to take risks unless they want to spend all day grinding out baseline battles. Most players in the Fritz mold–including Fritz himself, in the past–opt to take their chances. They usually lose, which is why Zverev is ranked second in the world. The American has steadily improved his groundstrokes and his fitness to the point that he doesn’t need to take low-percentage big swings. It’s no guarantee of victory–after all, Fritz won just 50.9% of points in the Flushing four-setter–but it’s a better bet than the alternative.

Let’s play ten

There’s a wider lesson here, and not just for Taylor Fritz. We tend to think of long-rally proficiency as a clear-cut skill. Yes, some players are better at it than others, but not by a wide margin.

Here are the long-rally (10+ shots) winning percentages for the ATP top ten, based on Match Charting Project data for the last 52 weeks:

Player            10+ W%  
Alex de Minaur     57.4%  
Carlos Alcaraz     57.1%  
Jannik Sinner      55.8%  
Daniil Medvedev    55.0%  
Grigor Dimitrov    54.2%  
Novak Djokovic     52.8%  
Andrey Rublev      51.8%  
Casper Ruud        50.2%  
Alexander Zverev   50.2%  
Taylor Fritz       46.8%

Before I studied this, I would’ve expected considerably more dispersion. While every edge counts, this one is not as crucial as it gets credit for. Fewer than one in ten points reach the long-rally threshold, so even the most extreme gaps–like that between Fritz and de Minaur here–would determine the outcome of only the closest matches.

More important, I suspect, is willingness to play these points. Fritz is never going to crack the top half of a list like this. He has–to his credit–maxed out the rally tolerance that his size and physical gifts will grant him. Still, a 47% chance of winning a protracted point is better than his odds after belting a low-percentage salvo to avoid the battle altogether.

Players who serve as effectively as Fritz does tend to be considerably less sturdy from the baseline. Pros with his (adequate if not world-beating) groundstrokes are often less inclined to rely on them. One-dimensional big servers almost never reach the top five. Yet Fritz, combining his primary weapon with a tactical savvy that allows him to maximize the rest of his assets, has done exactly that.

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Qinwen Zheng’s Rising Tide

Qinwen Zheng at the 2024 US Open

Since a first-round exit to Lulu Sun at Wimbledon this year, Qinwen Zheng has transformed herself from a rising prospect to a force at the top of the women’s game. The 22-year-old has won 30 of 35 matches, picking up three titles including an Olympic gold. In her first appearance at the tour finals this week, she has defeated two top-five players and earned a place in the semi-finals.

Zheng currently sits at 7th in the official rankings, equal to her career best. Her performance in Riyadh will move her up to at least sixth. Elo, a leading indicator as usual, already considers her the third-best player in the world, behind only Aryna Sabalenka and Iga Swiatek. The Chinese player is riding an astonishing 30-2 streak against everyone not named Sabalenka, so it’s hard to argue.

What has changed? Zheng has long been ticketed for big things. Her January run to the the Australian Open final indicated that she was reaching her potential. But she made only two quarter-finals in the next ten events, losing both. There were clear weaknesses in her game then. Has Qinwen 2.0 plugged those gaps?

Lifting all metrics

When I last wrote about Zheng, I referred to her serve as “under construction.” Her first serves were (and are) among the very best in the game. But she missed often, and her second serve was below average for a top-50 player.

I proposed an admittedly theoretical solution, that she could play somewhat more conservatively on the first serve, still winning plenty of points. Then she could go (relatively) bigger on seconds, trading a few more double faults for better results. The bottom line, at least according to the algorithm, was that the shift would increase her serve points won from a good 60.1% to a great 61.7%.

She hasn’t done any of that. Yet since leaving Wimbledon, she has won 63.3% of service points. That’s better than the full-season mark of anyone except Swiatek.

Qinwen found a blunter solution: She just got better at everything. Here’s an overview of her serve and return results for the two halves of 2024–up to and after Wimbledon–as well as her hard court results in 2023:

Time Span        W-L  1stIn%  1stW%  2ndW%    SPW    RPW  
2023 Hard      26-12   51.9%  74.3%  45.7%  60.5%  43.6%  
2024 1st half  19-12   51.5%  74.9%  45.5%  60.6%  42.9%  
2024 2nd half   30-5   53.8%  76.5%  47.9%  63.3%  45.9%

First serves in? Up two percentage points. First serves won? Two points. Second serves won? Two points. Return points won? Three points from the first half of 2024 to the second, even though the average surface is faster.

These are enormous shifts. 54% of first serves in still leaves her near the bottom of the table, but moving from 60.6% to 63.3% serve points won is the difference between the edge of the top ten and, as noted, number two. Key to the move is the rate of second serves won, which improved from the bottom third of tour players to the top half. On return, 42.9% to 45.9% is a jump from the bottom quartile of tour regulars to the top.

In short, Zheng went from having weaknesses to not having weaknesses. It’s never easy to divvy up the credit between player and coach, but if Pere Riba doesn’t win coach of the year, we might as well quit giving out the award.

Ratioing the tour

One of the goals of my research is to help us be more specific when we analyze players. Zheng’s various points-won rates give us a clearer view than just going goggle-eyed at a 30-5 record. But it’s tough to pinpoint a player’s improvement when she suddenly does everything better.

Qinwen’s rates of winners and unforced errors leave us in the same conundrum: She’s just gotten better by every conceivable metric. Still, I have to share. Sometimes it’s worth going goggle-eyed.

I have winner and unforced error stats for a limited subset of matches–77, in Zheng’s case–from a combination of grand slam data and the Match Charting Project. For the 58 matches through the loss at Wimbledon, she hit winners on 16.9% of points, versus UFEs on 19.2%. That works out to a ratio of 0.88, which is quite good. Commentators like to point to a 1:1 ratio as a goal, but that’s relatively rare on the women’s tour. 0.85 is usually sufficient to win a match.

Since July, the Chinese player’s W/UFE rates have basically flipped. In 18 matches worth of data, she’s hit winners on 19.3% of points, against a 17.0% unforced error rate. Those numbers are good for a ratio of 1.14. Here’s a complete list of the women who have posted better ratios this year:

1. Aryna Sabalenka

That’s it. With more complete data, it’s possible that Zheng would outscore Sabalenka, too. We have W/UFE for four of Qinwen’s five second-half losses, but only 14 of 30 wins. The sample is probably a bit biased against her.

The backhand complement

When I wrote about Zheng in January, her forehand–assessed by my Forehand Potency (FHP) metric–already ranked in the top ten among tour regulars. Her backhand remained a question mark.

If there are any specifics we can glean about the 22-year-old’s improvement, it is here. Until the beginning of this season, her backhand was, more or less, a neutral shot. The Backhand Potency (BHP) stat measures how often a shot ends the point for or against the player, as well as how often it sets up a point-ending shot shortly thereafter. In 2024, Qinwen’s backhand has been five times more effective that it was before:

Time Span  BHP/100  Negative Matches  
2021-23        1.2          13 of 32  
2024           6.3           6 of 34

In the past, the Zheng backhand cost her points–that is, it rated a negative BHP–nearly half the time, in 13 of 32 charted matches. This year, it has rarely done so. While BHP per 100 backhands (BHP/100) can’t be directly converted to a number of points per match, it’s safe to estimate that her backhand is now worth at least two or three points per match that she wasn’t winning before.

A few points per contest are enough to separate a good player from a great one. The backhand alone accounts for a big chunk of the gap between early Qinwen and the current unbeatable model.

We can even see the connection between BHP and return points won. This year, Zheng has gotten more returns in play: about one percentage point more, despite the fact that she has played Sabalenka so many times. Often, pros increase that metric by playing more conservatively. They send more balls back but do so weakly, losing most of those points. The Chinese woman, on the other hand, has also improved her win rate when she puts the return in play. That number–at least in the sample of charted matches–has risen from 53.8% to 56.8%.

Return stats aren’t all about the backhand, but when someone has as dangerous of a forehand as Zheng does, opponents make the return as much about the backhand as they can. No longer anything resembling a servebot, Qinwen threatens in more and more return games. Last year, she earned a break point in 43% of (charted) return games; this year, she is up to 49%.

Up and to the right

At the risk of repeating myself: Every trendline for the 22-year-old is headed in the right direction.

Zheng has never beaten Sabalenka, but after losing 6-1, 6-2 at the US Open, she pushed the Belarusian to three tough sets in Wuhan. She had lost five straight to Swiatek, then straight-setted her on the Parisian clay at the Olympics. Last fall, Qinwen salvaged just three games against Elena Rybakina in Beijing. This week she beat her. Zheng needed three sets to get past Jasmine Paolini last month; yesterday she allowed the Italian a measly 37 points.

The only player left in the Riyadh field that the Chinese woman hasn’t defeated is Coco Gauff. They’ve met just once, in Rome this season. Zheng won just 44% of points that day, landing an abysmal 41% of first serves. Should the pair meet to decide the season-ending championship, Gauff may still have enough of an edge to come out on top. But if we’ve learned anything from Qinwen’s four-month surge, it’s that she’s going to play a whole lot better this time.

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Aryna Sabalenka, Drop Shot Queen

Aryna Sabalenka, watching another poor woman hopelessly run around

In May this year, Aryna Sabalenka unleashed a new weapon: a drop shot she was willing to use far more than ever. After winning six of six drop-shot points in a Rome first-rounder against Katie Volynets, Sabalenka inflicted 28 droppers on Elina Svitolina. That match went to a third-set tiebreak, and her 15 outright drop-shot winners represented more than the margin of victory.

In her career up to that point, Sabalenka’s drop shots represented 1.1% of her (non-serve) strokes–about half the tour average of 2.2%. That rate nearly quadrupled, to 4.1%, for her eleven matches in Rome and Paris. On faster courts since, it has fallen, but not all the way back. Her drop-shot rate since June has been 1.9%. As we will see, the weapon has continued to give her more value even as she uses it less often.

The tactic makes perfect sense for a player with Sabalenka’s skills. She hits hard from the baseline, so opponents are usually positioned defensively, on the back foot. She’s capable in the forecourt (former doubles #1!), so not only does she have the touch to pull off the deception, she has the ability to deal with the rapid-fire net play that can ensue when someone runs a drop shot down.

The only question–had we thought to make the suggestion, say, a year ago–was whether the idea appealed to her. Not everyone is Carlos Alcaraz, ready to throw the tennis equivalent of a curveball into any point. Sabalenka was doing fine bashing groundstrokes into submission; why change? Now we know she’s comfortable with the tactic, even if 4% is probably reserved for the slowest courts.

How, then, does Aryna’s drop shot stack up against those of her peers, in terms of frequency, success rate, and value? I wrote two articles in March that outlined various ways of analyzing drop shot tactics. Those pieces looked at Alcaraz, Alexander Bublik, and the men’s game in general. The same approach can shed light on Sabalenka and the women’s tour, as well.

Getting the drop

All the data in this piece is based on the shot-by-shot logs from the Match Charting Project. I’ve limited the scope to the last decade. Nearly every tour-level Sabalenka match is charted, but for many other players, coverage is more limited. It’s also not necessarily random, so these numbers are approximate.

It’s also important to define “drop shot.” For the purposes of this piece, I’m looking only at the first drop shot in each point. “Re-drops” are a skill of their own, and probably a very different one. They are also tough to study because they are so much rarer than the already-uncommon standard drop shot. So we skip them for now.

Let’s start with the most prolific WTA drop-shotters since 2015. Remember that tour average is 2.2%–one dropper per 45 shots or so. Here are the thirteen women who have equaled or exceeded clay-Aryna’s 4.1% for their entire (charted) careers:

Player                Drop%  
Yulia Putintseva       8.6%  
Ons Jabeur             8.2%  
Laura Siegemund        7.6%  
Anastasija Sevastova   6.6%  
Marketa Vondrousova    6.3%  
Petra Martic           5.6%  
Kristina Mladenovic    5.2%  
Su Wei Hsieh           4.5%  
Agnieszka Radwanska    4.2%  
Karolina Muchova       4.2%  
Kiki Bertens           4.1%  
Viktorija Golubic      4.1%

Everything checks out so far. Putintseva dropshots to drive you nuts, Jabeur hits them to show off, and Aga did it just because she could.

The other end of the list has its amusements as well. In over 50 charted matches, spanning over 7,000 points, Camila Giorgi hit five drop shots. Yes, five. Two of them went for winners, and she lost the other three.

More important than frequency is points won. Here are the 14 women whose career drop-shot win rates surpass Sabalenka’s recent clip of 55.6%:

Player                 Drop%  Point W%  
Dominika Cibulkova      2.5%     61.4%  
Qinwen Zheng            2.0%     60.7%  
Sara Sorribes Tormo     2.3%     60.4%  
Ashleigh Barty          1.7%     59.5%  
Barbora Krejcikova      1.8%     59.0%  
Marketa Vondrousova     6.3%     58.7%  
Emma Raducanu           1.6%     58.3%  
Liudmila Samsonova      1.3%     58.2%  
Bianca Andreescu        3.2%     58.1%  
Anett Kontaveit         1.1%     57.4%  
Sofia Kenin             4.1%     57.4%  
Aliaksandra Sasnovich   3.3%     56.6%  
Sorana Cirstea          1.9%     56.3%  
Kiki Bertens            4.1%     56.1%  
…                                       
Average                 2.2%     52.6%  
…                                       
Aryna 2017-Apr '24      1.1%     53.2%  
Aryna 2024 Rome/RG      4.1%     61.9%  
Aryna 2024 2nd half     1.9%     55.6%

There is virtually no correlation between frequency and success rate, so players like Vondrousova and Kenin (and slow-clay Sabalenka) really stand out.

Here’s the same dataset, with more players, in visual form:

Most women cluster in the 1-2% frequency range, regardless of their drop-shot skills. Vondrousova and Putintseva really stand out for their combination of frequent attempts and consistent success.

Chasing down value

As much as youngsters dream of someday showing up on a leaderboard on this blog, what really matters is winning points. You can do that by hitting tons of drop shots and winning those points at a decent rate (like Putintseva), or by choosing moments carefully and executing well (like Qinwen Zheng).

Assume for the time being that the typical drop shot is hit from a perfectly neutral position, one in which each player has a 50% chance of winning the point. Combine the two metrics we’ve seen so far–multiply frequency by the difference between winning percentage and 50%–and we have the value added by a player’s drop shots. I’ve multiplied the results by 1,000 so all the zeroes don’t make our eyes hurt.

Player                 Drop%  Point W%  Drop Pts/1000  
Marketa Vondrousova     6.3%     58.7%            5.4  
(Aryna 2024 Rome/RG)    4.1%     61.9%            4.9  
Yulia Putintseva        8.6%     55.1%            4.4  
Sofia Kenin             4.1%     57.4%            3.0  
Dominika Cibulkova      2.5%     61.4%            2.9  
Kiki Bertens            4.1%     56.1%            2.5  
Bianca Andreescu        3.2%     58.1%            2.5  
Sara Sorribes Tormo     2.3%     60.4%            2.4  
Petra Martic            5.6%     54.2%            2.3  
Aliaksandra Sasnovich   3.3%     56.6%            2.2  
Qinwen Zheng            2.0%     60.7%            2.1  
Su Wei Hsieh            4.5%     54.5%            2.0  
Karolina Muchova        4.2%     54.8%            2.0  
...                                                   
(Aryna 2024 2nd half)   1.9%     55.6%            1.1  
Average                 2.2%     52.6%            0.6  
(Aryna 2017-Apr '24)    1.1%     53.2%            0.4  
...                                                    
Elise Mertens           1.9%     46.1%           -0.7  
Sloane Stephens         1.1%     42.2%           -0.8  
Amanda Anisimova        2.0%     45.8%           -0.9  
Kristina Mladenovic     5.2%     47.1%           -1.5  
Laura Siegemund         7.6%     47.7%           -1.7  
Ons Jabeur              8.2%     47.3%           -2.2

Clay may be particularly drop-shot friendly, but still, how about clay-Aryna!

At the other end of the spectrum… is Jabeur actually bad at drop shots? We need more context before we could establish any such conclusion. Perhaps the Tunisian hits droppers at particularly desperate times. Still, it’s jarring to see the star’s name at the bottom of the list.

Did someone say context?

The most common situation for a Sabalenka drop shot is when she makes a first serve and the ball comes back to her backhand. Over her entire career, when she hits a dropper with her second shot, she wins 51.1% of points. If she doesn’t go for the drop, she wins 51.8%.

Without camera-tracking data, that (and the dozen-plus analogous categories) is as far as we can drill down. Maybe the returns to the backhand that she dropshots are different from the ones she doesn’t. Match Charting Project data can’t tell us that.

Adjusting for context remains valuable even with those limitations. We can classify each drop shot by whether the player who hit it was the server or returner, whether it was a first or second serve point, whether it was a forehand or backhand-side drop shot, and how far into the rally it occurred. When Aryna waits one more shot on a first-serve point, her drop is much deadlier. Instead of the 47% of points she wins on a third shot from her backhand side with something other than a drop shot, she wins 55%.

The list looks quite a bit different when we take these additional factors into consideration. I tallied each player’s results in each of those categories, so we can compare their drop shot winning percentages with how they fared in the same mix of situations. “DSWOE” is Drop Shot Wins Over Expectation, the ratio between the two numbers:

Player               Drop W%  Exp W%  DSWOE  
Dominika Cibulkova     63.5%   50.1%   1.27  
Petra Martic           54.2%   42.9%   1.26  
Sara Sorribes Tormo    60.4%   47.9%   1.26  
Martina Trevisan       59.5%   48.7%   1.22  
Marketa Vondrousova    58.7%   48.1%   1.22  
Danka Kovinic          56.0%   46.1%   1.21  
Sorana Cirstea         56.8%   46.8%   1.21  
Kaja Juvan             58.5%   48.4%   1.21  
Ashleigh Barty         59.1%   49.3%   1.20  
Kiki Bertens           56.2%   47.2%   1.19
...  
Average                51.3%   49.2%   1.04
...  
Ons Jabeur             47.3%   47.8%   0.99  
Agnieszka Radwanska    48.9%   49.9%   0.98  
Maria Sakkari          48.6%   49.9%   0.97  
Jelena Ostapenko       49.7%   52.9%   0.94  
Caroline Wozniacki     50.0%   53.3%   0.94  
Elise Mertens          46.1%   50.2%   0.92  
Serena Williams        45.5%   49.8%   0.91  
Amanda Anisimova       45.8%   50.4%   0.91  
Sloane Stephens        44.1%   48.8%   0.90  
Iga Swiatek            49.6%   56.2%   0.88

(The winning percentages here are very slightly different from the ones above because some of the data wasn’t detailed enough to be used for this calculation.)

The average rate of 1.04 seems plausible. Players generally know what they’re doing; they wouldn’t hit drop shots if they didn’t have reason to think it would improve their odds. Jabeur does indeed look better in context. She still finds herself in the bottom ten, but a DSWOE of 0.99 means that if she is costing herself anything with all the droppers, it isn’t much. It’s possible that even this more granular approach is missing some details that would explain why Ons makes the decisions she does.

I must also acknowledge the oddity of finding Swiatek at the bottom of the list–or any list. Her 49.6% drop shot win rate isn’t that bad: It’s what she does the rest of the time that is such an outlier. She isn’t known for her drop shot, and she doesn’t hit many. So as with Jabeur, it’s possible that these categories don’t capture how hopeless the situations are when she tries to drag her opponent up to the net.

This metric confirms our story about Sabalenka. Her drop shots were fine–if rare–before May, became devilishly effective on the clay, then settled back to a more modest level on faster surfaces:

Player       Drop W%  Exp W%  DSWOE  
2017-April     53.3%   51.2%   1.04  
May            61.9%   51.4%   1.20  
Second Half    55.6%   52.4%   1.06

Buried in the details of Aryna’s respectable 1.06 ratio since June is a particularly encouraging trend. Remember those plus-one backhands that she shouldn’t have been dropshotting? Since June, she basically stopped. Out of 108 total drop shots, those have represented only five.

Drop and roll

For someone who hits as hard as Sabalenka does, throwing in a drop shot can be about more than just winning a point. Once an opponent realizes that they might have to chase down a dropper, they are that much less focused on defending against deep groundstrokes.

That’s the idea, anyway. When I wrote about drop shots in the men’s game, I was surprised to discover that drop shots didn’t influence the outcome of subsequent points in the way I expected. The majority of drop shots are hit by servers, but after they hit one, servers are less likely to win points later in the same game. If there is any discernable pattern in the ATP data, it is that once a drop shot is played–whichever player makes the move–the returner has an edge for the rest of the game. This probably isn’t a causal relationship: Perhaps drop shots are more likely to come into play when the server is struggling to control the action.

The data for women’s tennis tells a different story. On the point after a drop shot–win or lose!–the drop-shotting player wins 51.1% of the time. Two points later, there’s still an advantage, and the edge stays in place for the remainder of the game:

Situation          Win%  
Next point        51.1%  
Two points later  50.7%  
Same game         50.7%  
All others        49.9%

That advantage is not the same for every player. The following list shows the point winning percentages for players who get the biggest post-drop-shot bang for the buck, along with those who–like servers in the men’s game–see their post-drop fortunes dip.

Player                Same game  All others   Diff  
Jasmine Paolini           56.5%       50.4%   6.2%  
Marta Kostyuk             55.9%       50.1%   5.8%  
Sloane Stephens           55.0%       49.9%   5.1%  
Beatriz Haddad Maia       53.0%       48.7%   4.3%  
Qinwen Zheng              54.5%       50.7%   3.8%  
Naomi Osaka               54.5%       50.8%   3.7%  
Anastasija Sevastova      53.3%       49.7%   3.7%  
Maria Sakkari             53.1%       49.7%   3.3%  
Angelique Kerber          53.8%       50.5%   3.3%  
Su Wei Hsieh              50.9%       47.9%   3.1%  
Karolina Pliskova         54.0%       51.0%   3.1%  
Danielle Collins          53.7%       50.7%   2.9%  
Marketa Vondrousova       52.8%       50.0%   2.8%  
Agnieszka Radwanska       54.0%       51.4%   2.5%  
Garbine Muguruza          53.4%       50.9%   2.5%  
Aryna Sabalenka           55.0%       52.5%   2.5%  
…                                                   
Average                   50.7%       49.9%   0.7%  
…                                                   
Ons Jabeur                50.2%       50.3%   0.0%  
…                                                   
Emma Raducanu             49.6%       51.1%  -1.5%  
Ashleigh Barty            51.5%       53.0%  -1.5%  
Eugenie Bouchard          48.9%       50.6%  -1.7%  
Svetlana Kuznetsova       47.8%       49.8%  -2.0%  
Karolina Muchova          48.6%       50.7%  -2.1%  
Monica Niculescu          46.9%       49.1%  -2.2%  
Barbora Krejcikova        47.4%       50.1%  -2.7%  
Jessica Pegula            47.6%       50.6%  -2.9%  
Lesia Tsurenko            44.5%       47.5%  -3.0%  
Caroline Garcia           44.9%       49.6%  -4.7%

Jasmine Paolini! It’s tough to pinpoint exactly what she does that has caused her improvement in 2024. Her post-drop-shot success rate is too niche a skill to account for much of it, but it’s fascinating to consider.

I added Jabeur to this list because she illustrates one of the factors that makes analyzing drop shots so complicated. As noted, the theory is that once a player hits a drop, her opponent has to start thinking about it. But against Jabeur, opponents have to think about it from the moment they step on court! One more drop shot from the wizard isn’t going to change that.

That’s just one reason why the relationships between frequency, success rate, and post-drop-shot success rate are unpredictable. Some players, like Stephens and Osaka, play droppers rarely. They don’t win much when they do. But the after-effect might make up for it. At the other end, Muchova has a great drop shot that she deploys often, and for whatever reason, her results on subsequent points suffer.

Back to Sabalenka one last time. I snuck her into the table above because, even before she hit lots of drop shots, she saw a post-drop boost. You will not be surprised to learn that those numbers have gotten better in the last six months:

Span            Same game  All others  Diff  
2017 - Apr '24      54.3%       52.3%  1.9%  
2024 Rome/RG        60.2%       53.7%  6.5%  
2024 2nd half       58.9%       54.2%  4.8%

Clay-Sabalenka got the best of both worlds. She won more points by playing the drop, and she won more points because of the tactic’s lingering effect. Perhaps because of her growing reputation as a drop shot queen, the effect has persisted since June, even when she doesn’t go to the well so often.

The Aryna Sabalenka path to drop shot success won’t help everybody. But no matter how we slice up the numbers, it sure has worked for her.

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Does Mpetshi Perricard’s Backhand Even Matter?

Giovanni Mpetshi Perricard in Basel, playing a longer rally than usual.
Credit: Skyscraper2010

The story of last week’s tournament in Basel was the blistering service performance of Giovanni Mpetshi Perricard. The six-foot, eight-inch Frenchman racked up 109 aces in five matches, including more than one-third of his service points in Sunday’s final against Ben Shelton.

Mpetshi Perricard is a big server straight out of central casting. He can nail the corners at 150 miles per hour; on Sunday he hit one second serve at 146. He puts plenty of mustard on his groundstrokes as well. He often plays a high-risk brand of baseline tennis, recognizing that with a serve like his, he only needs to break once or twice–or just pick off a couple of return points in the tiebreak.

The Frenchman’s rapid rise through the ranks also fits his style. For a big server, wins can come in batches, when conditions–or, simply, tiebreak luck–are on his side. After an unexpected breakthrough on clay in Lyon, Mpetshi Perricard upset Sebastian Korda (in four tiebreaks!) and reached the second week at Wimbledon. Basel played faster than any tour event this year, and he took advantage. In between, he suffered through a 1-7 stretch in which he lost five straight tiebreaks and saw his double-fault rate balloon into double digits.

Much of Mpetshi Perricard’s future success will depend on his ability to handle these ups and downs. So far, he has struggled a bit to avoid the bad patches that spell doom for one-dimensional players. In his limited tour-level action, he has won more service points (70.2%) than anyone except Jannik Sinner. Yet five men hold more reliably than the Frenchman does, even after an unbroken week in Basel. The successes of Milos Raonic and John Isner–and even Shelton last year–come from playing better than usual under pressure, something Mpetshi Perricard has yet to consistently demonstrate.

I do love talking about servebots serving service aces. But while everybody raves about the GMP serve, I keep thinking about the backhand.

On the one hand

Mpetshi Perricard is now the fourth-highest ranked man with a one-handed backhand. His shot is nothing like the graceful, big-backswing, Federer- and Gasquet-inspired strokes of Grigor Dimitrov and Lorenzo Musetti. He often does little more than set up the racket to block the ball back. Strong as he is, the resulting flat shot can be much more than a mere defensive maneuver.

A few generations ago, it was standard to see big servers with one-handers. Think Richard Krajicek or Greg Rusedski; you might even put Pete Sampras in that category. More recently, Ivo Karlovic sported a one-handed backhand, though he mostly hit slices. Christopher Eubanks fits a broadly similar mold. Now, though, one-handers are dying breed, with just nine representatives in the top 100 of the ATP rankings.

Unlike Musetti or Stefanos Tsitsipas, Mpetshi Perricard isn’t likely to inspire the next generation of one-handed stars. No one is going to call this guy a throwback. On a good serving day, the Frenchman’s highlight reel features barely any groundstrokes at all.

What, then, do the numbers say? Is the Mpetshi Perricard backhand any good? Would he be better off with a two-hander like Raonic’s, Isner’s, or Reilly Opelka’s? Or, to return to the question I started with: For someone who specializes in ending rallies before they begin, does his backhand even matter?

Safely hidden

When the Frenchman’s game plan is working, his backhand is tucked away, out of sight. No backhands are necessary when the serve doesn’t come back, and when he controls the point, he prefers the forehand. Setting aside service returns, few players avoid their backhands as scrupulously as Mpetshi Perricard does.

The average ATPer hits 44% of their groundstrokes from the backhand side. Here are the most backhand-shy men with at least 15 matches in the Match Charting Project database, along with some other big servers of note:

Player                      BH/GS  
Ivo Karlovic                30.1%  
Jack Draper                 32.5%  
Ryan Harrison               35.2%  
Thiago Monteiro             35.5%  
Giovanni Mpetshi Perricard  35.5%  
Jaume Munar                 36.1%  
Vasek Pospisil              36.4%  
Alejandro Tabilo            37.1%  
Alexei Popyrin              37.3%  
Guido Pella                 37.4%  
Ben Shelton                 37.6%  
Maxime Cressy               37.9%  
…                                  
Christopher Eubanks         38.9%  
Matteo Berrettini           41.1%  
Milos Raonic                42.9%  
-- Average                  44.0%  
John Isner                  44.3%  
Reilly Opelka               45.6%  
Greg Rusedski               46.2%  
Nick Kyrgios                46.8%  
Pete Sampras                47.7%  
Richard Krajicek            48.3%  
Goran Ivanisevic            51.1%  
Mark Philippoussis          52.1%

Backhands per groundstroke is not the easiest stat to parse, because it is the product of so many different factors. Nearly everyone would like to keep their number low, so it’s partly a function of footwork and anticipation. (And sheer willingness to hit forehands from outlandish positions.) But it is also influenced by opponents, who will work more or less hard to find the backhand. Mpetshi Perricard’s place on this list, then, could be telling us various things. He hits his forehand when he can, and his movement is good enough to make it happen. Opponents might not be trying as hard as they could to force a backhand.

Yet another factor is how comfortable the player is with their slice. GMP hits his quite a bit, meaning that he unleashes the flat one-hander that much more rarely. The typical tour player hits their flat or top-spin backhand on 35% of groundstrokes. The Frenchman comes in at 25%, not as often as his most extreme peers, but in line with other big servers:

Player                      not-slice-BH/GS  
Ivo Karlovic                           6.1%  
Daniel Evans                          11.6%  
Milos Raonic                          20.2%  
Maxime Cressy                         20.4%  
Matteo Berrettini                     21.3%  
Grigor Dimitrov                       22.7%  
Corentin Moutet                       23.3%  
Christopher Eubanks                   23.6%  
Giovanni Mpetshi Perricard            25.2%  
Alexei Popyrin                        26.3%  
...
Bernard Tomic                         27.9%  
John Isner                            28.0%  
Ben Shelton                           28.5%  
Reilly Opelka                         31.5%  
-- Average                            34.7%

All of this is to say: Mpetshi Perricard hardly leans on the flat backhand. His serve keeps point short, and his preferences are for other shots. In the 138 points of the Basel final, he hit only 28 flat backhands, six of them on service returns.

Backhand impact

When the Frenchman is forced to hit a backhand (or chooses to–anything’s possible, I guess), the results aren’t great. When he goes for the flat backhand, he wins 43% of points, compared to a tour average of 49%. He takes more risks than his peers, but not overwhelmingly so: 9% of his one-handers end in a winner or forced error, while 12% are unforced errors. (Tour norms are 8% and 9%, respectively.)

These outcomes aren’t as extreme as his preferences. Of about 200 players with as many non-slice backhands in the MCP database, Mpetshi Perricard’s 43% comes in 21st from the bottom. Compared to other big servers, that win rate is positively respectable:

Player                      W/FE%   UFE%  inPointsWon%  
John Isner                   6.9%  12.8%         35.8%  
Milos Raonic                 7.3%  12.5%         40.4%  
Matteo Berrettini            4.8%  10.4%         42.5%  
Andy Roddick                 5.5%   7.8%         42.6%  
Felix Auger-Aliassime        6.0%   9.9%         43.4%  
Giovanni Mpetshi Perricard   8.9%  12.6%         43.5%  
Ben Shelton                  6.2%  11.1%         43.8%  
Nick Kyrgios                 7.9%  10.7%         43.9%  
Kevin Anderson               7.6%  11.0%         44.1%  
Hubert Hurkacz               6.2%  10.0%         45.6%  
-- Average                   7.3%   9.0%         48.6%  
Jack Draper                  6.5%   5.7%         49.1%

Against this group, the Frenchman’s winner (and forced error) rate really stands out. Given the outcomes when he doesn’t go for it, it’s possible he should be even more aggressive than he already is. Master tactician Milos Raonic took a similar tack, piling up as many unforced errors as GMP does, but without quite as many winners.

The picture is less rosy when we look at slice backhands. As noted, Mpetshi Perricard hits a lot of them–close to one-third of his groundstrokes from that wing. When he does, he wins 33% of points, compared to 42% for his peers. Only a handful of players have posted such low slice-backhand win rates, and they are mostly the names you would expect:

Player                      W/FE%   UFE%  inPointsWon%  
John Isner                   1.5%  11.1%         27.3%  
Christopher Eubanks          1.6%  10.7%         30.2%  
Kevin Anderson               3.2%   6.5%         31.4%  
Nicolas Jarry                4.0%  13.2%         32.7%  
Ivo Karlovic                 3.5%  12.0%         32.8%  
Giovanni Mpetshi Perricard   3.1%   3.9%         33.1%  
Ben Shelton                  2.0%   7.1%         33.3%  
...
Nick Kyrgios                 4.2%   6.1%         35.6%  
Felix Auger-Aliassime        3.6%   8.2%         38.1%  
Hubert Hurkacz               2.7%   3.9%         38.1%  
Milos Raonic                 4.7%   9.4%         40.3%  
Matteo Berrettini            2.8%   9.0%         41.5%  
-- Average                   3.3%   5.4%         41.6%

The Frenchman doesn’t miss much. Why just keep the ball in play, though, if you’re likely to lose the point anyway? By hitting so many slices, Mpetshi Perricard makes his flat-backhand numbers look better, but he probably doesn’t pick up any points by making the trade. Prolonging the point is a good strategy if you’re Casper Ruud–or, really, about 80% of the guys on tour. But if you play like GMP, it’s better to go big.

This is one way in which the one-hander may cost him. The two-handed backhand is particularly valuable in its ability to block overpowering shots without retreating to a fully defensive mode. While players with one-handers try to achieve the same thing with a slice, the stats tell us that it’s a poor imitation. The Frenchman’s in particular isn’t doing him any favors.

So, does it even matter?

Mpetshi Perricard doesn’t hit that many backhands, and he isn’t that much worse than average when he does. But, the margins in tennis are small, and the margins for big servers are smaller still. In 26 tour-level matches this year through the Basel final, GMP won exactly 50% of his points. (Not 50.1%, not 49.9%–50% on the dot.) Five players in the top 20 win 50.8% or less. That’s how close the Frenchman is to an even bigger breakthrough.

My backhand potency (BHP) stat quantifies the impact that each player’s (non-slice) backhands have on their broader results. The stat measures how often a shot ends the point in either direction, as well as what happens on the shot after that. Based on the matches we’ve charted this year, GMP’s BHP per 100 backhands stands at -4.3, one of the lower numbers on tour for players with at least 10 charted matches from the last 52 weeks:

Player                      BHP/100  
Nicolas Jarry                  -6.9  
Felix Auger Aliassime          -4.6  
Tallon Griekspoor              -4.6  
Flavio Cobolli                 -4.3  
Giovanni Mpetshi Perricard     -4.3  
Alexei Popyrin                 -4.2  
Dominic Thiem                  -4.1  
Botic Van De Zandschulp        -3.5  
Matteo Berrettini              -3.1  
Ben Shelton                    -2.4  
Stefanos Tsitsipas             -2.4

What does this mean for the bottom line? -4.3 BHP is equivalent to about -3 points per 100 backhands. Since he doesn’t hit many backhands, that’s about -1.1 per 100 points.

My best estimate, then, is that if we magically replaced the Frenchman’s backhand with a neutral one–say, that of Arthur Fils–he’d pick up 1.1 more points per 100. Instead of winning 50% of points at tour level, he’d win 51.1%. That isn’t good enough to crack the top 10, but it would probably get him into the top 20.

Quantifying the impact of slices is tougher, because the more conservative shot is less likely to end the point immediately, or even on the next shot. If we figure that Mpetshi Perricard’s slice is roughly the same distance below average as his flat backhand, that’s another 0.5 or 0.6 points per 100 he could gain by acquiring a tour-average shot. Daniil Medvedev has hung in the top five in the ATP rankings while winning 51.9% of points. Stringing all of these assumptions together, we can start to see how a capably-backhanded GMP could reach that level.

The bad news for the Frenchman is that climbing the ranks is hard. Mpetshi Perricard is the worst returner in the top 50, and it isn’t even close. He breaks in about 10% of his return games; no one else is below 14%. Earlier this year, I wrote about the similar challenges facing Ben Shelton: Historically, a lot of players have arrived on tour with big serves, huge potential, and tons of hype. Few of them have been able to shore up their weak points enough to crack the top ten, let alone achieve greater feats.

The good news: There is so much room for improvement. Even without polishing the strokes themselves, it’s possible that a more aggressive set of tactics could win him a few more points on return. In yesterday’s loss to Karen Khachanov, the Frenchman won the first set despite picking off just two of 37 return points. One-dimensional servebot or not, he can learn to do better than that.

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