Expected Points, my new short, daily podcast, highlights three numbers to illustrate stats, trends, and interesting trivia around the sport.
Up today: Novak Djokovic continues to win without a dominant down-the-line backhand, Barbora Krejcikova is a throwback to earlier generations of two-event stars, and Felix Auger Aliassime has played a lot of late-round matches by age 20.
Scroll down for a transcript.
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Music: Love is the Chase by Admiral Bob (c) copyright 2021. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. Ft: Apoxode
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Rough transcript of today’s episode:
The first number is 20, the number of backhands that Novak Djokovic hit down the line in yesterday’s French Open men’s final against Stefanos Tsitsipas. That’s 12% of his total backhands—not only lower than Novak’s own career average rate of hitting down the line, but a tick lower than the tour average of 13%. Both Djokovic and Tsitsipas have the ability to get a crowd on their feet with a down-the-line winner, but in over four hours of play and nearly 1300 shots, they combined for only 8. Djokovic has developed other ways of winning from the backhand side, notably a dropshot that he deployed 16 times yesterday, 7 of them for winners. Every tactic mattered, as the margins in the championship match were slim. According to my Elo forecast, Djokovic entered with a mere 52% chance of winning, and in the five-set match, he claimed fewer than 53% of total points. A decade ago, it would’ve been unthinkable to imagine Djokovic preferring weapons other than his down-the-line backhand. As Tsitsipas can attest, there’s a lot more to a champion than one signature shot.
Our second number is 20, the number of women in the last century to have won both the singles and women’s doubles crowns at Roland Garros. Barbora Krejcikova became the first to do so since Mary Pierce in 2000. She came through the singles draw as an unseeded underdog, beating Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova in Saturday’s final. Yesterday, she topped it off with something much more expected, combining with long-time partner Katerina Siniakova to win their second French Open doubles title and third major. The 21-year gap between double-duty champions is the longest in tournament history: The singles winner also triumphed in doubles 27 times during the amateur era, then five more times in the 1970s alone. So Krejcikova joins a star-studded list of greats dominated by legends of earlier eras. Suzanne Lenglen won the two trophies six times in the 1920s, Margaret Court did it twice, and six different American women pulled it off in the glory years of California tennis between 1949 and 1960. When those women ruled the roost, doubles specialists were much less prevalent. Krejcikova’s feat won’t change the inexorable advance of specialization, but with proof of what she’s capable of on the singles court, the number of mere specialists on the doubles tour has decreased by one.
Today’s third and final number is 19, the total number of tour-level semi-finals and finals played by Felix Auger Aliassime. The 18th and 19th came over the weekend in Stuttgart, where Auger Aliassime opened his grass court season, losing to Marin Cilic yesterday with the trophy on the line. Beating Sam Querrey on Saturday improved his record in semi-finals to 7-4, while the defeat to Cilic padded one of the most head-scratching stats in tennis, Auger Aliassime’s 0-8 record in finals. The positive spin, of course, is that he’s 20 years old and has reached so many title matches. Cedric Pioline lost the first 9 finals of his career, but didn’t play his 8th until age 26. The latest final-round loss may give Auger Aliassime some fodder for his next session with a sports psychologist, but the final-round appearance is a reminder that he has a game built for grass, the surface on which he beat Grigor Dimitrov, Nick Kyrgios, and Stefanos Tsitsipas in three consecutive matches two years ago. There’s no guarantee Auger Aliassime will win his next final, but it’s a safe bet that his career record in championship matches won’t start with a zero.
