With Tommy Paul, Get Ready To Backhand

On Sunday, Tommy Paul won the Stockholm final with one well-executed tactic. He hammered the Grigor Dimitrov backhand, shot after shot, point after point. Paul hit 71% of his backhands cross-court, far above the tour average of 50%. He also aimed his forehands at Dimitrov’s weaker side, going inside-out with 38% of his forehands, compared to the typical clip of 24%.

The results: 6-4 6-3 to the American, and a paltry seven rally winners for his opponent. Dimitrov was forced to hit backhands for 58% of his non-return groundstrokes, compared to his usual hard-court rate of 43%.

Paul doesn’t have any overwhelming weapons of his own, so he wins matches–42 of them already this year–by neutralizing opponents. In the case of Sunday’s final, that meant putting pressure on a backhand that is more flashy than effective. Dimitrov’s signature one-hander is not the worst on tour, but it is not much of an asset. His career backhand potency (BHP) is negative, meaning it costs him more points than it gains. Paul’s elite movement allowed him to exploit a weakness that the Bulgarian can usually hide.

Grigor isn’t the only man on tour with a preference for the forehand. Even players with top-tier backhands will often opt for a forehand because of the angles it opens up. Paul’s ability to pepper the backhand, then, is often on display. Facing Jannik Sinner at the US Open, the American hit 60% of his backhands cross-court–good enough to push the world number one to two tiebreaks. At Indian Wells against Casper Ruud, he hit 61% of his backhands cross-court. That proved successful enough to secure his first top-ten win of the season.

Few pros play like this. Or more accurately: Few men are able to play like this. The Match Charting Project has at least 20 hard-court righty-versus-righty matches for almost 100 different men. Here are the top 15, ranked by how often they hit backhands cross-court.

Player                 BH XC%  
Lleyton Hewitt          70.0%  
Andre Agassi            65.9%  
Marat Safin             62.8%  
Yevgeny Kafelnikov      62.8%  
Richard Gasquet         59.8%  
Daniil Medvedev         59.4%  
Jenson Brooksby         59.3%  
James Blake             59.0%  
Kei Nishikori           58.7%  
Pete Sampras            58.6%  
Tommy Paul              58.6%  
Borna Coric             58.1%  
David Ferrer            58.0%  
Juan Martin del Potro   58.0%  
David Nalbandian        57.9%

That’s pretty good company. The active players highest on the list–Medvedev and Gasquet–are known for camping out far behind the baseline, giving them extra time to choose their shot. Paul and Nishikori (and the category-busting Brooksby) act faster. They rely on anticipation, footwork, and racket control to direct the ball where their opponent doesn’t want it to go.

Here’s a similar list–again, out of 100 or so players–ranked by inside-out forehand frequency. Same goal, different shot:

Player                 FH IO%  
Milos Raonic            39.5%  
Jack Sock               38.4%  
John Isner              38.1%  
Jim Courier             37.9%  
Reilly Opelka           33.3%  
Robin Haase             33.1%  
Andrey Rublev           33.0%  
Holger Rune             32.5%  
Daniel Evans            32.3%  
David Ferrer            32.3%  
Marin Cilic             31.8%  
Felix Auger-Aliassime   31.7%  
Thanasi Kokkinakis      31.6%  
Fabio Fognini           31.3%  
Kevin Anderson          31.1%  
Jo-Wilfried Tsonga      30.6%  
James Blake             30.1%  
Roberto Bautista Agut   30.0%  
Matteo Berrettini       29.9%  
Tommy Paul              29.7% 

Many of these men make the list because they prey on weak service returns, or because they play high-risk shots when running around their backhands. Despite standing outside those categories, Paul ranks high on this metric as well. There’s very little overlap between the two lists: Only James Blake ranks above Tommy on both.

In short: Everybody (usually) wants to hit to the backhand, but few men are able to do so as often as Tommy Paul.

When tactics fail

Stockholm trophy in tow, Paul took his winning streak to Vienna. He began his campaign yesterday against compatriot Brandon Nakashima. Nakashima has become a thorn in Paul’s side, with three previous tour-level wins on three different surfaces. Tommy’s only victory came at a Challenger in 2019, when Nakashima was and 18-year-old ranked 942nd in the world.

Nothing changed this week. Nakashima secured a 6-4, 6-4 victory and improved his record against the older man to 4-1. Paul unleashed the same tactical plan that he used to beat Dimitrov, and he discovered–not for the first time–that it isn’t so effective against a sturdier backhand.

Paul hit nearly as many backhands cross-court as he did in the Stockholm final. But unlike Dimitrov, Nakashima was able to go toe-to-toe from that corner. Dimitrov went to the slice nearly half the time–opening up, incidentally, many of the opportunities Paul seized to hit inside-out forehands. Nakashima hit the slice barely half as often. 12% of Dimitrov’s topspin backhands became unforced errors; only 5% of Nakashima’s did.

We can’t explain the entire result based on Paul’s tactical preference. He looked sluggish throughout, coughing up 31 unforced errors compared with just 20 in the Stockholm final. But causation can run multiple directions: Nakashima didn’t allow him to play the clean, logical game that earned him the trophy in Sweden. The veteran scuffled to find another solution.

Another of Tommy’s worst matchups has a similar profile. He is 0-5 against Alex de Minaur, whose backhand also rarely lets him down. Both times they met in 2023, Paul hit his backhand cross-court more than 62% of the time. In Acapulco, the American hit his forehand inside-out more than 40% of the time, the highest mark we have for him in the Match Charting Project database. De Minaur doesn’t blow him off the court, so Paul can hit the shots he wants. Those shots–regardless of the Aussie’s own traits–are aimed at the backhand corner.

But against a player like Nakashima or de Minaur, the tactic doesn’t work. Lots of inside-out forehands are a safe bet against a player like Dimitrov, but de Minaur’s defense is too good. In Acapulco, Paul won only half of those inside-out forehands, well below tour average. The American generally played the way he wanted to, forcing de Minaur to hit a whopping 66% of his rally groundstrokes from the backhand side in their Los Cabos meeting. But the Aussie didn’t mind. At least in those matches, Paul showed little sign of a plan B.

Another dilemma for Tommy arises when someone takes away his plan A. The only other player who has defeated him five times is Andrey Rublev, hardly a man you’d select to run a backhand clinic. We don’t yet have any charted matches from this head-to-head, but it’s easy to speculate what goes wrong for Paul. In order to hit a disproportionate number of shots to a particular location, you need to have some control over the proceedings. Rublev, with his devastating forehand and aggressive mindset, is one of the few players on tour who can outslug the American’s speed.

The American’s losses are a good illustration of just how hard it is to excel at the highest levels of professional tennis. He is perhaps as good as anyone in the game at taking and keeping control of rallies from the baseline. But even that world-class skill can be nullified by a howitzer forehand or a backhand like a brick wall. Paul has twice upset Carlos Alcaraz, but when handed a first-round opponent with a solid backhand, as he was yesterday in Vienna, he sometimes finds that his best isn’t good enough.

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