This is a guest post by Peter Wetz.
In recent years, the steady decline of the holders of 116 doubles titles–Bob and Mike Bryan–has resulted in more variety at the very top of the game. The 16-time Grand Slam champions won their last major at the US Open 2014. Since then, eight different teams have won their first title at the highest level of the sport.
Even though none of these debut winners emerged out of nowhere, the doubles team consisting of Oliver Marach and Mate Pavic, which formed in the middle of last season, has enjoyed an exceptional run at this year’s start of the season. This prompted me to take a closer look at the performance of doubles teams per season.
The following table shows each team’s won-loss record through the French Open for each season since 2000 . It’s sorted by number of wins up to that point, and the last column displays the won-loss record for the complete season. Only teams that have won more than 30 matches until the French Open are listed.
Year Team W-L (%) Start W-L (%) Full 2013 Bryan/Bryan 40-4 (91%) 71-11 (87%) 2002 Knowles/Nestor 38-7 (84%) 66-14 (82%) 2007 Bryan/Bryan 37-5 (88%) 73-10 (88%) 2008 Bryan/Bryan 37-9 (80%) 63-17 (79%) 2009 Bryan/Bryan 37-9 (80%) 68-18 (79%) 2014 Bryan/Bryan 36-6 (86%) 64-12 (84%) 2018 Marach/Pavic 36-7 (84%) tbd 2010 Nestor/Zimonjic 35-7 (83%) 57-19 (75%) 2012 Mirnyi/Nestor 34-9 (79%) 43-18 (70%) 2003 Knowles/Nestor 34-9 (79%) 57-16 (78%) 2006 Bryan/Bryan 33-9 (79%) 65-15 (81%) 2004 Bryan/Bryan 32-8 (80%) 57-17 (77%) 2010 Bryan/Bryan 31-7 (82%) 67-13 (84%) 2011 Bryan/Bryan 31-7 (82%) 59-16 (79%) 2009 Nestor/Zimonjic 31-8 (79%) 57-17 (77%) 2014 Nestor/Zimonjic 31-8 (79%) 42-18 (70%) 2003 Bryan/Bryan 31-12 (72%) 54-20 (73%)
As we can see, Marach/Pavic come in seventh with a very healthy 36-7 won-loss record this year. Their first loss came in the Rotterdam final, their fourth tournament after collecting titles in Doha, Auckland, and at the Australian Open–a streak of 17 consecutive match wins. If we ignore the all-time greats, there hasn’t been a better start to a men’s doubles season in the past 16 years.
The fact that the Bryan twins show up ten out of seventeen times in the table underlines just how dominant they were. And even though they did not win a Grand Slam in the last three years, they still had the best season starts in 2015 and 2016 (just barely missing the table, because they did not reach 30 match wins).
The last column gives a clue of what to expect from Marach and Pavic for the rest of the year. Most of the time, the teams at the very top only slightly decline. Notably, in 2007 the Bryan brothers maintained a win percentage of 88%, which led to the best doubles season in the dataset, measured by won-loss record.
After losing their seventh match this season at the 2018 French Open final to Herbert/Mahut and therefore missing the chance to win the first two majors of the season–a feat achieved in the open era only by the Bryans in 2013–it will be interesting to see if they will be able to sustain their level over a full season.
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Peter Wetz is a computer scientist interested in racket sports and data analytics based in Vienna, Austria.