This is a guest post by Peter Wetz.
When the pre-Wimbledon grass court tournament in Antalya was announced by the ATP in May 2016, some people were scratching their heads: Which top players will be willing to play in Antalya, Turkey one week ahead of Wimbledon? Even more so, because one week earlier two events are played in London and Halle, the latter being considerably closer to London. If a player wanted to participate in Antalya, he would have to fly from Halle (or London) to Antalya and then back to London for Wimbledon, not an ideal itinerary.
Taking a glance at the entry list, the doubts are verified: After Dominic Thiem, the only top 10 player entered in the event, there were just three other men (Paolo Lorenzi, Viktor Troicki and Fernando Verdasco) ranked within the top 40. Only three (Thiem, Verdasco, and Lorenzi) of the 28 players who were directly accepted to the main draw of the event, will be seeded at Wimbledon.
But how weak is the field really compared to others? Of course there are countless ways to measure the strength of a draw, but for a quick and dirty approach we will simply look at two measures, that is, the last direct acceptance (LDA) and the mean rank of quarterfinalists.
The LDA is the rank of the last player who gained direct entrance into a tournament’s main draw excluding lucky losers, qualifiers and special exempts. Comparing the last direct acceptance of the Antalya draw (86, Radu Albot) to all other ATP Tour level events with a draw size of 32 or 28 players, it turns out that Antalya is at the 39th percentile. This means that 39% of the other tournaments have a better/lower (or equal) LDA and that 61% have a worse/higher LDA, respectively. The following image shows a percentile plot of LDAs of tournaments since 2012, highlighting this week’s event in Antalya:
The fact that the LDA compares well against the other tournaments tells us that despite the lack of top ranked seeds, the field seems to be more dense at the bottom. Not that bad after all?
Let us take a look at the mean rank of the eight players who made it into the quarterfinals. Choosing quarterfinalists limits the calculation to the players who were able to perform well at the event, winning at least one, and usually two, matches. This should reduce some of the noise in the data that would be otherwise included due to lucky first round wins.
The mean rank of the quarterfinalists at the Antalya Open 2017 is 109. Out of the 726 tournaments since 2000 with 32 or 28 player draws which were considered in this analysis, only 35 tournaments had a higher mean rank of players at the quarterfinal stage. With nine out of those 35 tournaments, the Hall of Fame Tennis Championships at Newport–which takes place each year after Wimbledon–stands out from the pack. As the following plot shows, the Antalya Open is at the 95th percentile in this category. This seems to be more aligned with what we would have expected.
To provide some context, the following table lists the top 10 tournaments with links to the draws having the worst mean rank of quarterfinalists.
# Tournament Mean QF Rank 1 Newport '10 240 2 Newport '01 197 3 Delray Beach '16 191 4 Moscow '13 166 5 Newport '11 166 6 Newport '07 165 7 s-Hertogenbosch '09 164 8 Newport '08 163 9 Gstaad '14 156 10 Amsterdam '01 152 ... 36 Antalya '17 109
The seeds are to blame for this: Of the eight seeds, only Verdasco managed to win a match. The other seven went winless. We have to go back as far as 1983’s Tel Aviv tournament to find a draw where only one seed won a match. In Tel Aviv, however, the third seed Colin Dowdeswell won three matches all in all, whereas Fernando Verdasco crashed out in the second round. By the way, Tel Aviv 1983 marks the first title of the then 16 years and 2 months old Aaron Krickstein, still the youngest player to win a singles title on the ATP Tour. That only two out of eight seeds win their first match happens about once per year. The last time this happened at the 2016 Brasil Open, where only Pablo Cuevas and Federico Delbonis won matches as seeds.
Despite the presence of only one top 30 player in this year’s Antalya draw, the middle and bottom of the field looked surprisingly solid, as we saw when considering the last direct acceptance. However, if we take into account the development of the tournament and calculate the mean rank of quarterfinalists, it becomes clear that the field got progressively weaker. Still, there have been worse draws in the past and there will doubtless be worse draws in future. Maybe even in the not too distant future, if we take a glance at this year’s Newport entry list.
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Peter Wetz is a computer scientist interested in racket sports and data analytics based in Vienna, Austria.