In the men’s professional game, serving at 0-40 isn’t a death sentence, but it isn’t a good place to be. An average player wins about 65% of service points, and at that rate, his chance of coming back from 0-40 is just a little better than one in five.
Some players are better than others at executing this sort of comeback. Tommy Robredo, for instance, has come back from 0-40 nearly 60% more often than we’d expect, while Sam Querrey digs out of the 0-40 hole one-third less often than we would predict.
Measuring a player’s success rate in these scenarios isn’t simply a matter of counting up 0-40 games. That’s what we saw on the ATP official site last week, and it’s woefully inadequate. That article marvels at Ivo Karlovic‘s “clutch” accomplishments from 0-40 and 15-40, when we could easily have guessed that Ivo would lead just about any serving category. Big serving isn’t clutch if it’s what you always do.
Statistics are only valuable in context, and that is particularly true in tennis. Simply counting 0-40 games and reporting the results hides a huge amount of potential insight. Whether a player wins or loses (a game, a set, a match, or a stretch of matches) is only the first question. To deliver any kind of meaningful analysis, we need to adjust those results for the competition and consider what we already know about the players we’re studying.
Rather than tear apart that article, though, let’s do the analysis correctly.
The number of times a player comes back from 0-40 or 15-40 isn’t what’s important. As we’ve seen, big servers will dominate those categories. That doesn’t tell us who is particularly effective (or, dare we say, “clutch”) in such a situation, it only identifies the best servers. What matters is how often players come back compared to how often we would expect them to, taking into consideration their serving ability.
Karlovic is an instructive example. Over the last few years–the time span available in this dataset of point-by-point match records–Ivo has gone down 0-40 56 times, holding 17 of those games, a rate of 30.4%. That’s third-best on tour, behind John Isner and Samuel Groth. But compared to how well we would expect Karlovic to serve, he’s only 7% better than neutral, right in the middle of the ATP pack.
Before diving into the results, a few more notes on methodology. For each 0-40 or 15-40 game, I calculated the server’s rate of service points won in that match. Since we would expect 0-40 games to occur more often in matches with good returners, in-match rates seem more accurate than season-long aggregates. Given the in-match rate of serve points won, I then determined the odds that the server would come back from the 0-40 or 15-40 score. For each game, then, we have a result (came back or didn’t come back) and an estimate of the comeback’s likelihood. Combining both numbers for all of a player’s service games tells us how effective he was at these scores.
For 30 of the players best represented in the dataset, here are their results at 0-40, showing the number of games, the number of successful comebacks, the rate of successful comebacks, and the degree to which the player exceeded expectations from 0-40:
Player 0-40 0-40 W 0-40 W% W/Exp
Tommy Robredo 110 30 27.3% 1.59
Denis Istomin 114 26 22.8% 1.36
John Isner 87 31 35.6% 1.34
Guillermo Garcia-Lopez 161 29 18.0% 1.32
Kevin Anderson 130 38 29.2% 1.28
Bernard Tomic 110 24 21.8% 1.25
Fernando Verdasco 141 30 21.3% 1.17
Rafael Nadal 140 32 22.9% 1.15
Kei Nishikori 122 23 18.9% 1.15
Marin Cilic 125 26 20.8% 1.14
Player 0-40 0-40 W 0-40 W% W/Exp
Jo-Wilfried Tsonga 124 29 23.4% 1.14
Novak Djokovic 124 34 27.4% 1.12
Andreas Seppi 145 24 16.6% 1.09
Grigor Dimitrov 115 22 19.1% 1.08
Philipp Kohlschreiber 146 28 19.2% 1.08
Roger Federer 107 26 24.3% 1.07
Ivo Karlovic 56 17 30.4% 1.07
Santiago Giraldo 113 18 15.9% 1.06
Alexandr Dolgopolov 141 25 17.7% 1.03
Milos Raonic 82 23 28.0% 1.01
Player 0-40 0-40 W 0-40 W% W/Exp
Tomas Berdych 149 30 20.1% 1.01
Jeremy Chardy 122 21 17.2% 0.98
Feliciano Lopez 136 26 19.1% 0.97
Fabio Fognini 211 24 11.4% 0.97
Mikhail Youzhny 155 18 11.6% 0.92
David Ferrer 203 32 15.8% 0.89
Richard Gasquet 152 25 16.4% 0.87
Andy Murray 164 24 14.6% 0.80
Gilles Simon 158 16 10.1% 0.72
Sam Querrey 84 12 14.3% 0.68
As I mentioned above, Robredo has been incredibly effective in these situations, coming back from 0-40 30 times instead of the 19 times we would have expected. Some big servers, such as Isner and Kevin Anderson, are even better than their well-known weapons would leads us to expect, while others, such as Karlovic and Milos Raonic, aren’t noticeably more effective at 0-40 than they are in general.
Many of these extremes don’t hold up when we turn to the results from 15-40. Quite a few more games reach 15-40 than 0-40, so the more limited variation at 15-40 suggests that many of the extreme results from 0-40 can be ascribed to an inadequate sample. For instance, Robredo–our 0-40 hero–falls to neutral at 15-40. Here is the complete list:
Player 15-40 15-40 W 15-40 W% W/Exp
John Isner 238 122 51.3% 1.33
Milos Raonic 215 98 45.6% 1.18
Feliciano Lopez 304 108 35.5% 1.17
Jo-Wilfried Tsonga 301 119 39.5% 1.17
Denis Istomin 304 101 33.2% 1.17
Rafael Nadal 320 118 36.9% 1.16
Ivo Karlovic 148 68 45.9% 1.15
Kevin Anderson 338 132 39.1% 1.15
Guillermo Garcia-Lopez 405 106 26.2% 1.14
Andreas Seppi 396 113 28.5% 1.12
Player 15-40 15-40 W 15-40 W% W/Exp
Bernard Tomic 273 86 31.5% 1.12
Kei Nishikori 298 96 32.2% 1.10
Novak Djokovic 348 132 37.9% 1.07
Richard Gasquet 325 106 32.6% 1.07
Roger Federer 281 109 38.8% 1.07
Fernando Verdasco 306 94 30.7% 1.06
Philipp Kohlschreiber 352 110 31.3% 1.06
Andy Murray 431 135 31.3% 1.06
Santiago Giraldo 331 86 26.0% 1.05
Tomas Berdych 398 131 32.9% 1.05
Player 15-40 15-40 W 15-40 W% W/Exp
Marin Cilic 357 109 30.5% 1.05
Sam Querrey 244 78 32.0% 1.04
Jeremy Chardy 300 91 30.3% 1.04
Fabio Fognini 422 98 23.2% 1.03
Tommy Robredo 285 78 27.4% 0.99
Grigor Dimitrov 307 89 29.0% 0.99
David Ferrer 498 138 27.7% 0.98
Alexandr Dolgopolov 299 77 25.8% 0.95
Mikhail Youzhny 339 77 22.7% 0.94
Gilles Simon 426 93 21.8% 0.91
The big servers are better represented at the top of this ranking. Even though Isner is expected to come back from 15-40 nearly 40% of the time–better than almost anyone on tour–he exceeds that expectation by one-third, far more than anyone else considered here.
Finally, let’s look at comebacks from 0-30:
Player 0-30 0-30 W 0-30 W% W/Exp
John Isner 338 229 67.8% 1.19
Bernard Tomic 299 146 48.8% 1.15
Grigor Dimitrov 342 166 48.5% 1.11
Novak Djokovic 409 235 57.5% 1.10
Santiago Giraldo 344 142 41.3% 1.10
Fernando Verdasco 373 175 46.9% 1.10
Rafael Nadal 376 194 51.6% 1.09
Tomas Berdych 492 262 53.3% 1.09
Tommy Robredo 296 132 44.6% 1.08
Roger Federer 344 193 56.1% 1.08
Player 0-30 0-30 W 0-30 W% W/Exp
Feliciano Lopez 326 161 49.4% 1.07
Alexandr Dolgopolov 347 154 44.4% 1.07
Marin Cilic 378 179 47.4% 1.06
Jo-Wilfried Tsonga 357 185 51.8% 1.06
Guillermo Garcia-Lopez 380 146 38.4% 1.06
Ivo Karlovic 186 118 63.4% 1.04
Philipp Kohlschreiber 395 185 46.8% 1.03
Denis Istomin 314 135 43.0% 1.03
Kei Nishikori 341 145 42.5% 1.03
David Ferrer 529 227 42.9% 1.02
Player 0-30 0-30 W 0-30 W% W/Exp
Kevin Anderson 361 181 50.1% 1.02
Mikhail Youzhny 390 142 36.4% 1.00
Andy Murray 419 185 44.2% 1.00
Andreas Seppi 418 164 39.2% 0.99
Jeremy Chardy 316 132 41.8% 0.99
Milos Raonic 246 139 56.5% 0.99
Fabio Fognini 478 153 32.0% 0.99
Sam Querrey 292 131 44.9% 0.97
Gilles Simon 442 155 35.1% 0.96
Richard Gasquet 370 159 43.0% 0.95
Isner still stands at the top of the leaderboard, while Bernard Tomic and Grigor Dimitrov give us a mild surprise by filling out the top three. Again, as the sample size increases, the variation decreases even further, illustrating that, over the long term, players tend to serve about as well at one score as they do at any other.