Andrey Rublev, Grand Slam Quarter-finalist

Also today: Jannik Sinner’s rosy forecast; lopsided fifth sets

Andrey Rublev is a known quantity. He will hit big first serves, but his second serves can be attacked. He will hit monster forehands, often venturing far into his backhand corner to play them, and his opponents will often be stuck in place, watching them go by. He’ll also miss a lot of them. His backhand isn’t the same type of offensive shot; he can be dragged into long rallies if you pepper that side.

There isn’t a lot of subtlety to his game. That isn’t a criticism: Subtlety can win you acolytes and endorsement deals, but it isn’t necessary to win championships. With yesterday’s five-set win in Australia over home hope Alex de Minaur, Rublev advanced to his tenth career grand slam quarter-final. He’s 0-9 so far in those matches, but his consistency in getting there is the bigger story. Alexander Zverev is the only other man under the age of 30 with ten major quarter-finals. Rublev will get on the board eventually.

What you might not know about the 26-year-old Russian is that he has matured into a reliably dangerous returner. He’s always been effective on that side of the ball, and his return numbers have remained steady as the strength of his competition has increased. Last year, he won nearly 39% of his return points, good for 3.2 breaks of serve per match–seventh-best on tour. At the 2023 US Open against Daniil Medvedev, his most recent attempt to reach a major semi-final, Rublev broke serve five times in his straight-set defeat. The return wasn’t the problem.

That day, Medvedev’s return was the problem. (Andrey’s second serve didn’t do him any favors either, but that’s nothing new.) Of Rublev’s 98 serve points, 65 of them lasted four shots on longer. I can’t emphasize enough how bizarre that is–or, seen from another perspective, what a performance it was from his opponent. Medvedev not only got 65 serves in play, he got 65 plus-one shots back. Rublev’s top two weapons were negated.

The standard Rublev performance, at least among the 138 matches logged by the Match Charting Project, involves 59% of his service points ending by the third shot. He wins just over three-quarters of those. (Against Medvedev, he tallied a respectable 70%, but 70% of not very many is still not very many.) Put those numbers together, and 45% of his serve points end in his favor in three shots or less.

That’s a pretty good head start! Last year, the Russian won 66% of his total serve points. The majority of the damage gets done early.

The serves and plus-ones not only account for a decent chunk of the points played–at least on a good day–but they also serve as a proxy for how the longer rallies turn out. When Rublev wins most of his short service points–even when he doesn’t play as many as he would like–he almost always comes out on top. If we sort his charted matches by winning percentage on short service points, then split them into thirds, the difference is stark:

<=3 SPW%       Matches  Match Win%  
81%+                45         87%  
75.5% - 80.9%       44         64%  
up to 75.4%         49         24%

(The buckets are slightly different sizes only because I didn't want to put nearly identical percentages into separate categories.)

When Rublev wins most of the short service points, he wins the match. When he doesn't, he usually loses. If anything, the table understates the contrast; a disproportionate number of the low-percentage victories came on clay, including several on the slow dirt of Monte Carlo.

To some extent, it's obvious that "winning more of some subset of points" correlates with "winning more of all the points" and thus winning the match. But remember, this is the success rate independent of how many points end quickly. The combination of frequency and success--"what percent of total service points end quickly and in the server's favor"--should tell us more about the overall result. But for Rublev, that metric isn't as predictive of final outcomes as the winning percentage alone.

Battling demon

Yesterday against de Minaur, Rublev won 82% of the short service points. The Australian kept it close by reducing the number of short points to just under half of Rublev's serves. But the rule I've just outlined held true, despite a pesky defense. When de Minaur put the fourth shot back in play, he won 57% of return points. That's great, but with Rublev cleaning up the overwhelming majority of the short points, it wasn't enough.

We have shot-by-shot logs for four of the six matches between these two guys:

Tournament        Result  Short%  Short W%  
2024 Australian        W   49.4%     82.0%  
2023 Rotterdam         L   60.3%     75.6%  
2022 Monte Carlo       W   42.7%     73.2%  
2018 Washington        L   53.2%     71.6%

De Minaur did his job yesterday, keeping the ball in play more often than he did in the two previous hard-court meetings. (The Monte Carlo surface presumably helped lengthen points in that match.) The Australian won both of those earlier contests, watching Rublev make more plus-one mistakes and taking care of business when the rallies lasted longer.

In Melbourne, the Russian stayed a bit more within himself. He was able to hit a forehand on barely half of his plus-one shots--below both tour average and his own typical rate. Instead of blasting away with ill-advised backhands--part of what lost him the Rotterdam match--he accepted the invitation to rally. His 43% rate of winning longer service points isn't great, but it's far superior to the 0% chance of claiming the point after smacking an unforced error.

I don't want to overstate Rublev's caution, because he didn't play a cautious match. He probably never should. But getting a few more balls in play and fighting out the ensuing rallies makes his second serve look a lot better. As we've seen, Rublev does well on return. His second-serve points aren't much better than return points... but that's okay! Yesterday he won 55% behind his second serve, a glittering result compared to the 37% and 38% he won against de Minaur in Washington and Rotterdam, respectively.

Is this the one?

Rublev can be forgiven for having a losing record in major quarter-finals; he's been the lower-ranked player in seven of the nine. He's dropped two to Novak Djokovic, one to Rafael Nadal, and three to Medvedev. He should have picked up one (or three) along the way, but as the fifth man on a tour that always seems to have a big three or four, it's an uphill struggle.

Tomorrow's opponent is Jannik Sinner, just one place above him in the ATP rankings. (Elo likes him more than that--a lot more. See below.) This will be their seventh meeting, and history doesn't bode well for the Russian. Sinner has retired twice but won the other four.

Here are the short-service-point stats for Rublev in three of those matches:

Tournament        Result  Short%  Short W%  
2023 Miami             L   62.5%     77.1%  
2022 Monte Carlo       L   41.0%     58.5%  
2021 Barcelona         L   43.8%     85.7%

(Unfortunately we don't yet have a chart of his 7-6, 7-5 loss last fall in Vienna.)

This isn't insurmountable for the Russian: He often wins matches behind 77% of his short service points, and he almost always does with a 86% win rate. He'd like more than 44% of his serve points to end quickly, but that's tougher to execute on clay.

Against Sinner, the first three shots are even more important than usual, because the Italian plays a similar game, and once a rally reaches four strokes, he plays that game better. In Miami, Sinner won two-thirds of Rublev's "long" service points. In Monte Carlo, he won 54%, in the vicinity of what de Minaur did yesterday. In Barcelona, Sinner won a whopping 70% of return points when he got the fourth shot in play--as he more often than not did.

Rublev's second serves tell the story, as they did in the de Minaur match. Those, typically, are the points he can't finish early, when he should be thinking in terms of constructing the point, not grunting and crushing. In the four completed Sinner matches, he won only 37.5% of second-serve points. That's not going to get it done.

To beat an elite opponent, Rublev needs to remember when to bash and when to think. He executed well yesterday, pulling away in the end against a man who never stops fighting. Reaching his first major semi-final, against 22-year-old who seems to get stronger every week, he'll need to play even better.

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Sinner in the hands of a friendly forecast

Jannik Sinner is the favorite tomorrow: According to my Elo-based forecast, he has a 78% chance of advancing to the final four. That's a hefty margin for a match between players adjacent to one another in the official rankings. The difference is more about Sinner than Rublev: My forecast gives Sinner a nearly 30% shot at taking the title, second only to Djokovic.

While the Italian ranks fourth on the ATP computer, he's second according to the Elo algorithm, closer to Djokovic than anyone else is to him. Here is the top of the table entering the Australian Open:

Rank  Player             Elo  
1     Novak Djokovic    2217  
2     Jannik Sinner     2197  
3     Carlos Alcaraz    2149  
4     Daniil Medvedev   2104  
5     Alexander Zverev  2037  
6     Andrey Rublev     2035  
7     Grigor Dimitrov   2032 

If you think in terms of major titles, official ranking points, or hype, this probably seems wrong. By those measures, Sinner is the laggard among the top four.

But Elo gives credit based on the quality of opponents beaten, and Sinner built quite a resume in the last quarter of 2023. He beat Rublev, Alcaraz, Medvedev (three times!), and most important, Djokovic twice. Nothing catapults you up the Elo list faster than knocking off the top dog.

The question, then, is whether Elo has overreacted to those two victories. My implementation of the Elo algorithm doesn't differentiate between narrow wins and blowouts. (Other versions use sets, games, or even points, though in my testing, those alternatives don't make the ratings more predictive.) The two Djokovic upsets were nail-biters. The Tour Finals round-robin match was decided in a third-set tiebreak, and each man won exactly 109 points. At the Davis Cup Finals, Sinner took the third set 7-5 despite winning fewer total points than his opponent.

While Sinner certainly deserved those victories--staring down match point against a 24-time major winner is a feat in itself--we might wonder how much they tell us about future results. If the two men keep fighting out such close matches, Djokovic is going to win some of them.

Each of the two upsets were worth a gain of 15 Elo points. Had Sinner lost them, he would've dropped 10 or 11 points instead. Call it a 25-point swing for each match. Thus, if we take the most pessimistic possible route and give both of the dead-heat results to Djokovic, Sinner's Elo rating would stand about 50 points lower, roughly tied with Alcaraz around 2,150.

(That isn't exactly right, because if Djokovic had won the Davis Cup match, Italy wouldn't have advanced to the final, and Sinner would've have beaten de Minaur. But Sinner did beat de Minaur, handily, and if we want to assess his current level, we shouldn't ignore that match.)

Handing both of the close results to Djokovic seems extreme. If we want to measure each player's current level without putting too much weight on the tiny number of points that decided those two matches, we might give one of the two victories to Djokovic. That would knock Sinner down to about 2,172, while boosting Djokovic to around 2,225.

In the Australian Open title-chances forecast, Novak would look a little better, and there would be more daylight between him and Sinner. Still, unless we make the harshest possible adjustment to Sinner's Elo rating, the Italian remains the next most likely Melbourne champion and a heavy favorite against Rublev tomorrow.

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Dessert bagels

The Rublev-de Minaur match had an unusual ending: After splitting four sets, the Russian ran away with the fifth, 6-0.

Typically, if two players are so evenly matched that they reach a fifth set, neither one is going to dominate the decider. For the rare occasions that it happens, it's unique enough that I think it deserves its own name. I propose "dessert bagel."

In grand slam competition since 1968, there have been just 159 dessert bagels, including Rublev's--fewer than one per major. No one has ever recorded a dessert bagel in a final, but it has happened twice in semis. Mats Wilander polished off Andre Agassi in the 1988 Roland Garros semi-final, and Djokovic finished his 2015 Australian Open semi against Stan Wawrinka the same way. Still, second-week dessert bagels are rare: Rublev's was only the 16th in more than a half-century.

It's an oddity piled on oddities: Rublev-de Minaur was the fifth dessert bagel in Melbourne this year:

Round  Winner      Loser       Score                
R128   Mannarino   Wawrinka    6-4 3-6 5-7 6-3 6-0  
R64    van Assche  Musetti     6-3 3-6 6-7 6-3 6-0  
R64    Medvedev    Ruusuvuori  3-6 6-7 6-4 7-6 6-0  
R32    Kecmanovic  Paul        6-4 3-6 2-6 7-6 6-0  
R16    Rublev      de Minaur   6-4 6-7 6-7 6-3 6-0

Five 6-0 deciders is a record for a single slam. There haven't been as many as three since the 2007 Australian, and no major has seen more than one since 2017. If even more dessert bagels start piling up in the quarter-finals, we'll know that something bizarre is going on Down Under.

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