I’m excited to share with you a couple of new features I’ve been working on for TennisAbstract.com.
First is an interactive ranking map:
The above map shows the geographic concentration of teenagers in the WTA top 1000. Click through to the full-size map, and you can mouse over any country to find out how many players they have in that category.
More importantly, you can customize the map in a variety of ways. Choose from either the ATP or WTA rankings, decide how deep you’d like to go in the rankings, and if you’d like, limit the age range. It’s a great way to see which countries are most dominant on each tour, and it’s also an opportunity to visually investigate which nations are likely to hold that power in the near future.
Next is an interactive ranking history chart:
This chart shows ranking points for the big four over the past three years. Again, if you click through to the full-size map, you’ll get more features: mouse over any line to see the date and the player’s ranking points at the date.
Like the map, the ranking chart is fully interactive. You can select anywhere from one to four players–for now, only in the ATP top 100–choose a timeframe, and select either ranking or ranking points.
One option I want to call you attention to is one of the timeframes: “Year-end (by age).” Here, instead of dates, the horizontal axis shows ages. For instance, this graph shows the big four’s year-end rankings at each age.
Enjoy!
There’s some mistakes in the ranking points by age. They changed the ranking points system in 2009, so while you compare Rafa’s points at age 22 ( in 2008), with Novak’s at 22 in 2009, you need to make the necessary adjustment. If you recalculate Rafa’s points using 2009 points system, Rafa would get 12050 points, not 6675.
Two options I thought about that would be cool if feasible:
1. cumulative point totals
2. an “area under the curve” feature. This would be an interesting way of comparing players. Take a time span and compare their area under the curve.
But as noted above, some normalization for changes in the way ranking points are accumulated might not be a bad idea. Always nice to compare apples to apples.
The raking comparison feature was really cool., especially by age. If possible, can you please make the data uptodate, currently it shows only upto 2013.
Regarding the adjustment of points around 2009, you can use the current ranking points system for all past data( eg 2000 for majors, 1000 for masters, etc) but dont change level of tournaments ( eg if hamburg was a master on a certain year, it should be 1000pts for that year,even though now it would be 500pts)
With these changes, this would go a long way is demonstrating dominance+consistency of top players at similar age.