Expected Points, my new short, daily podcast, highlights three numbers to illustrate stats, trends, and interesting trivia around the sport.
Up today: Badosa could be the most dangerous floater in Paris, Pablo Cuevas looks to get his game back on track, and Caty McNally is a doubles wizard regardless of who she partners.
Scroll down for a transcript.
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Music: Love is the Chase by Admiral Bob (c) copyright 2021. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. Ft: Apoxode
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Rough transcript of today’s episode:
The first number is 16, Paula Badosa’s win total on clay since the tours restarted last summer. When Covid brought the WTA to a halt early last year, the 23-year-old Spaniard was barely inside the top 100, with one tour-level semi-final and one other quarter-final to her name on her preferred surface. Since then, it’s been off to the races: a semi in Istanbul, fourth round at the French, and in the last six weeks, semi-finals in Charleston and Madrid, and now a quarter-final in Belgrade. Her ranking is comfortably inside the top 50, and her clay-specific Tennis Abstract Elo is 16th best in the game. If her ranking remains outside of the range for a Roland Garros seeding, she’ll be the most dangerous early-round floater in the draw. Three more wins in Serbia this week and her peers will be breathing a sigh of relief: Titlist points from Belgrade will move her up to 34th on the official list, likely good enough for a French Open seed after the inevitable withdrawals.
Our second number is 2, the number of games Pablo Cuevas needs to win today to advance to his first tour-level quarter-final in in 15 months. The Uruguayan’s second-rounder in Geneva was one of many matches around Europe suspended by rain yesterday, leaving him up a set and a break on 18-year-old French wild card Arthur Cazaux. It’s already been a confidence-building week for Cuevas, who came through qualifying and won back-to-back matches for the first time since Hamburg last fall. The 35-year-old missed this year’s South American golden swing, site of his most recent career highlights, including last year’s Buenos Aires quarter-final, when he battled Diego Schwartzman for nearly four hours before losing 7-5 in the third. In retrospect, that classic looks like a final hurrah. Two weeks ago, Cuevas fell out of the ATP top 100 for the first time in seven years, and the only top-50 players he’s defeated since the restart are two Americans on clay. Assuming he finishes the job against Cazaux, the quarter-finals will bring a good test of his level, in 4th-seeded Grigor Dimitrov.
Today’s third and final number is 10, Caty McNally’s current win streak in doubles, with three different partners. The 19-year-old American is best known for her doubles exploits with Coco Gauff, a duo that reached the Australian Open quarter-finals in 2020 and repeated their final eight showing this year. McNally’s singles ranking remains outside the top 100, so she can’t follow Gauff to every tour-level event. But that hasn’t stopped her from winning. In the second WTA Charleston event last month, she partnered countrywoman Hailey Baptiste to a title, beating Aussies Ellen Perez and Storm Sanders in the final. She followed that up three weeks later at an ITF 100K in Charleston, partnering Sanders and beating Baptiste in the semis. Now she’s in Parma, where she lost in the first round of singles to Sloane Stephens, but has cruised to the doubles semis with Gauff. In two matches, the Americans have lost only three games, spending a total of 105 minutes on court. McNally may never achieve the superstar status of her regular partner, but as doubles prospects go, her future is as bright as anyone’s.
