Italian translation at settesei.it
Yesterday, Frances Tiafoe added another breakthrough to his young career with a fourth-round defeat of 20th seed Grigor Dimitrov at the Australian Open. The whole tournament has been a coming-out party for the just-turned 21 year old, as Tiafoe only got this far thanks to an even more impressive upset of 5th seed Kevin Anderson in the second round. The American will see his ranking climb into the top 30 for the first time, and his marketability as a potential superstar will soar even higher.
The role of the statistical analyst is often to stand athwart an exciting trend yelling “Stop!,” and I’m afraid that’s my role today. Yes, Tiafoe is a compelling young player with a lot of potential. Throughout 2018 he repeatedly demonstrated he could hang with the best players in the world, something he further solidified with the win over Anderson last week. But the Dimitrov win, life-changing as it may be, was a bit of a fluke.
In fact, yesterday’s match was–by a couple of simple metrics–less impressive than a lot of his 2018 losses, including a defeat at the hands of Dimitrov in Toronto last year. Across 337 points against the Bulgarian on Sunday, Tiafoe lost more than half of them, winning only 34.7% of his return points compared to Dimitrov’s 39.5%. The resulting Dominance Ratio (DR) for the match is 0.88, a mark that almost never results in victory. (DR is the ratio of return points won to opponent return points won: 1.0 means that the players performed equally, and higher is better.) On the ATP tour last year, more than 92% of winners recorded a DR of 1.0 or better, and 97.4% of winners–that’s 39 out of every 40–won enough points to amass a DR of 0.9.
As I’ve said, many of Tiafoe’s losses have seen him play better. Against Dimitrov in Toronto, his DR was 0.98; versus Anderson in Miami his DR was 0.99 in a straight-set defeat; and even in his routine, 6-4 6-4 loss to Joao Sousa in the Estoril final, his DR was almost as good as it was yesterday, at 0.87. In the range of close-but-outplayed matches–let’s say DRs from 0.85 to 0.99–Tiafoe won 4 of 18 last year, and all but one of the wins were closer than yesterday’s triumph.
The trick to winning a match while tallying fewer than half the total points and a lower rate of return points than your opponent is to play better in the big moments, like break points. The American certainly did that, converting 5 of 13 break opportunities while limiting Dimitrov to only 3 of 18. Execution in tiebreaks also helps, though it didn’t make a difference in yesterday’s upset, as the two men split a pair of breakers. To Tiafoe’s credit, he outplayed the Bulgarian when it mattered most. In that sense, he deserved the victory, no matter what the stats say.
But break point and tiebreak performance tends to even out. Just because the 21-year-old captured lightning in a bottle at a few key moments to win a high-profile match doesn’t mean he’ll be able to do it again. Just as there are almost no players who win tiebreaks any more often than their overall performance would suggest, players with excellent single-year break-point records quickly regress to the mean. It may not be correct to say that Tiafoe was lucky to win yesterday–he may well have kept his focus and maintained his level better than opponent did–but whatever made the difference, it’s not something with predictive power. Next week, next major, or next year, he isn’t any more likely than the next guy to post a DR of 0.88 and come out on top.
Still, I’m not here just to throw cold water on a young player’s prospects. For one thing, had a couple of break points gone the other way yesterday and Dimitrov gotten through, a fourth-result result would still represent an encouraging step forward for the American. His upset of Anderson sported a particularly impressive DR of 1.29–35.1% of return points won compared to Kevin’s 27.2%–which was better than all but ten of Anderson’s matches last year. (Three of those ten came at the hands of Novak Djokovic, and seven of the ten were against top ten players.)
Tiafoe is getting better, and there are plenty of signs that indicate he’s the brightest young star in American men’s tennis. He’s accomplished a lot of things in Melbourne, but outplaying Dimitrov isn’t one of them.