Expected Points, my new short, daily podcast, highlights three numbers to illustrate stats, trends, and interesting trivia around the sport.
Up today: Rublev is climbing up the first-serve leaderboard, Bianca Andreescu escapes her closest Miami match yet, and a young Brit survives a four-hour match in India.
Scroll down for a transcript.
You can subscribe on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, and elsewhere in the podcast universe.
Music: Love is the Chase by Admiral Bob (c) copyright 2021. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. Ft: Apoxode
The Expected Points podcast is still a work in progress, so please let me know what you think.
Rough transcript of today’s episode:
The first number is 84.4%, Andrey Rublev’s rate of first-serve points at this year’s Miami Open. He posted almost that exact number in last night’s quarter-final against Sebastian Korda, winning 84.8% en route to a 7-5 7-6 victory. It’s not unusual for many players to crack 80% for a single match, but it’s an impressive and important number to sustain for any length of time. Since the restart, only two players—Milos Raonic and Matteo Berrettini, have averaged better than 80% of their first serve points won—Daniil Medvedev entered the week at 79.7%, and Reilly Opelka—who has little other than a first serve—has won 78.5%. Even before his arrival in Miami, Rublev was fourth on tour in this category, and he has upped his game even further. There’s every reason to believe he’ll post another 80-plus number tonight in his semi-final against Hubert Hurkacz. Their only previous meeting was on clay, in Rome last fall, when Rublev won 78%. The Polish underdog has his work cut out for him.
Our second number is 49%, the fraction of total points won by Bianca Andreescu last night in her semifinal victory over Maria Sakkari. The Canadian won 109 to the Greek’s 113, but she locked down the ones that mattered, at the business end of a 9-7 first-set tiebreak and to run up a 6-2 lead in a deciding-set breaker. Sakkari saved two match points to go with the six she saved against Jessica Pegula in the round of 16, but her heroics finally ran out. For her part, Andreescu is worked herself back into shape the hard way. 8 of her 10 completed matches this season have gone three sets, including her last four in a row. Deciding sets are where the 20 year old sets herself apart, with a 25-6 record in three-setters since the beginning of 2019. If the final ends up going the distance as well, Andreescu will have her work cut out for her—Ashleigh Barty’s three-set record in that span is an almost equally impressive 28-9.
Today’s third and final number is 249 minutes, the length of a second-round singles match between Aidan Mchugh and Nitin Kumar Sinha at the ITF Futures event in New Delhi yesterday. After more than four hours, the 20-year-old Brit McHugh triumphed, 5-7, 7-6, 7-6. Unless the two players are grossly abusing the time violation rule, there must be some epic rallies involved—the match spanned only 232 points, a total that rarely corresponds to a length of more than three hours. However long the points, the 544th-ranked McHugh has made a habit of this sort of thing lately. Last month in the final of another Futures event in Indore, he played a three-tiebreak tilt against American Zane Kahn, losing in three hours and 23 minutes. In February, he lost a 3 hour, 53-minute second-rounder—another three-tiebreak special–against the Italian Flavio Cobolli. Even on the Futures tour, where anything can happen and it usually does, this kind of thing is out of the ordinary. Alas, McHugh finally ran out of gas, falling in a two-and-a-half hour quarterfinal today.
