It’s been a little while since I’ve posted anything from my ranking system. If you’re new around here and don’t know what I’m talking about, you can read up on how my rankings are calculated here. The short version is that they take into account results, giving you more points for beating good players than beating weaker players. There are many other factors that go into it, and once the stew is stirred, these rankings do a better job of predicting match results than do the ATP rankings.
One odd thing about surface rankings is that they are most interesting when they are most unreliable. Right now, we’re shifting gears from clay to grass, and no one has played a match on a hard court since Miami. But because we’ve switched over, hard court results matter. (Because there are so few grass-court events, I have to group hard and grass together.)
Without further ado, here is the top 40 through the French Open, rated for current hard-court ability level.
1 Novak Djokovic 6836
2 Rafael Nadal 5090
3 Roger Federer 4902
4 Juan Martin del Potro 4207
5 Andy Murray 3726
6 Robin Soderling 2682
7 Stanislas Wawrinka 2244
8 Mardy Fish 2072
9 Gael Monfils 1909
10 Tomas Berdych 1862
11 Andy Roddick 1858
12 Marin Cilic 1826
13 David Ferrer 1742
14 Nikolay Davydenko 1721
15 Marcos Baghdatis 1603
16 Milos Raonic 1477
17 Alexander Dolgopolov 1416
18 Jo-Wilfried Tsonga 1393
19 Richard Gasquet 1389
20 Florian Mayer 1354
21 Gilles Simon 1333
22 Viktor Troicki 1226
23 Fernando Verdasco 1192
24 Kei Nishikori 1180
25 Mikhail Youzhny 1156
26 Jurgen Melzer 1116
27 Samuel Querrey 1031
28 Janko Tipsarevic 1015
29 Ivan Ljubicic 993
30 Guillermo Garcia-Lopez 983
31 Juan Monaco 967
32 Michael Llodra 914
33 John Isner 907
34 Philipp Kohlschreiber 890
35 Jeremy Chardy 872
36 Nicolas Almagro 852
37 David Nalbandian 846
38 Feliciano Lopez 784
39 Radek Stepanek 759
40 Lleyton Hewitt 753
(The points don’t mean anything concrete, though they do give you an idea of the differences between adjacent players.)
The biggest surprise in the top 10 is Stanislas Wawrinka, and of course, he’s made me look dumb by losing in his first match to British wild card James Ward. Yikes. That will probably knock him down a spot or three before next week’s rankings. Seeing Lleyton Hewitt at the bottom of this list is a reminder that he’s only a year removed from some very good hard-court results, and if healthy, he could generate some upsets at Halle and Wimbledon.
This sort of upset happens all the time when players switch to grass. Remember that while Wawrinka was playing on clay in Paris, Ward was getting 11 sets of grass-court tennis under his belt in Nottingham. Besides which, he is the type of player who is at his best on grass. Unless they also flourish on hard courts, good grass players might never get up the rankings as there are so few grass tournaments nowadays.