Italian translation at settesei.it
At Wimbledon this year, 19-year-old rising star Nick Kyrgios has shown himself to be impervious to pressure. In his second round upset of Richard Gasquet, he tied a Grand Slam record by surviving nine match points. Against Rafael Nadal, he withstood perhaps the best clutch player in the game. Despite Nadal’s stature as one of the best tiebreak players in the game, the Australian won both of the tiebreaks they contested.
As I’ve shown in other posts, tiebreaks are–for most players–toss-ups. Better players typically win more than 50% of the tiebreaks they play, but that’s because they’re better players, not because they have some tiebreak-specific skill. Only a very few men–Nadal, Roger Federer, and John Isner are virtually alone among active players–win even more tiebreaks than their non-tiebreak performance would indicate.
Kyrgios is making a very strong case that he should be added to the list. In his career at the ATP, ATP qualifying, and Challenger levels, he’s won 23 of 31 tiebreaks, good for an otherworldly 74% winning percentage. Isner has never posted a single-season mark that high, and Federer has only done so twice.
Nick isn’t playing these matches against weaker opponents, and he isn’t cleaning up in non-tiebreak sets. (Too many scores like 7-6 6-1 might suggest that he shouldn’t have gotten himself to 6-6 in the first place.) Based on Kyrgios’s serve and return points won throughout each match, a tennis-playing robot would have had a 52% chance of winning each tiebreak.
Given those numbers, it’s extremely likely that Kyrgios is one of the outliers, a player who wins many more tiebreaks than expected. There’s only a 1% chance that his excellent winning percentage is purely luck. We can be 95% sure that a tiebreak winning percentage of 58% or better is explained by skill, and 90% sure that his tiebreak skill deserves at least a winning percentage of 62%.
Either one of these more modest figures would still be excellent. Milos Raonic, his quarterfinal opponent and a player who represents an optimistic career path for Kyrgios’s next few years, has posted a 58% tiebreak winning percentage at tour level. Tomorrow’s match won’t be enough to prove which player is better in these high-pressure moments, but given each man’s playing style, it’s almost certain that we’ll see Kyrgios tested in another batch of tiebreaks.