Rafael Nadal has finally nosed his way into the lead. With his Australian Open title yesterday, he became the first man to 21 major singles titles, breaking away from the three-way tie at 20 with Novak Djokovic and Roger Federer.
For some people, leading the all-time grand slam race is enough to cement a player as the greatest of all time. A different crowd considers this year’s Australian Open tainted because Djokovic was not allowed to play. Still others think that Federer played some beautiful tennis, and they considered the matter concluded at least five years ago.
I belong to a fourth camp, which I can summarize with two positions:
- The grand slam race isn’t everything.
- If you do focus on grand slams, you must adjust the major count for the quality of opponents each player faced.
I’ve written about this before, first at The Economist, and then here at the blog. When I checked in 18 months ago, Nadal’s 20 majors were worth a bit more than Djokovic’s 17, which were themselves more impressive than Federer’s 20. The margins have always been slim between these three, and properly adjusting for quality of opponents makes things even tighter.
The update
Here’s how the adjustment works. For each slam that a player won, we take the Elo rating of all of his opponents, and work out the probability that the average Open Era grand slam winner would beat all of them. Once we have that number–which centers around 23%–we normalize it so that the value of an “average” major is 1.0.
When a major title requires facing down a lot of tough opponents, its rating is higher than 1.0, while a relatively easy one rates below 1.0. In the last few years, the numbers have drifted downward, because while the familiar names keep winning quite a bit, they haven’t needed to face each other as often as they used to.
You might disagree with the methodology, and that’s fine. But I find that most people end up making some sorts of adjustments, even if they shy away from stats or only tweak the totals when it favors their idol. Some Djokovic fans want to downplay Nadal’s recent win, and it’s true that Novak’s absence lowered the quality of the draw. But surely Rafa’s title isn’t worth zero. He beat many excellent players, and there was no guarantee that Novak would advance through the draw–or that Rafa would lose if they met.
This approach allows us to avoid specific minefields and answer all the analogous questions about every slam. Considering the seven opponents that Nadal faced, his Melbourne title rates at 0.84, weaker than average, but more difficult than seven of his prior titles. Djokovic has not enjoyed as many “easy” paths to major titles, but his Wimbledon victory last summer rates at a mere 0.60, the second-weakest of his career and lower than all but one of Rafa’s. Sometimes players just get lucky, with or without a geopolitical brouhaha.
Nadal’s 21st title rates only a bit lower than Djokovic’s two other titles last year: 0.90 at the Australian and 0.93 at the French.
Here are the updated rankings for “adjusted slams,” along with a table showing how many easy, medium, and hard paths that the Big Three have endured:
Player Slams Avg Score Total
Nadal 21 0.95 19.9
Djokovic 20 1.01 20.1
Federer 20 0.89 17.9
Player Easy Medium Hard
Nadal 8 8 5
Djokovic 6 7 7
Federer 9 10 1
As if 21 and 20 weren’t close enough, this approach gives Djokovic 20.1 adjusted slams to Nadal’s 19.9. Again, you don’t have to agree with every step of my approach here to accept that we often think in terms of these kind of adjustments, and that Djokovic has–on average–faced tougher roads to titles than Nadal, while Federer had it easier than both of them.
Players can’t control who they face, but as fans, we can appreciate who worked the hardest to achieve near-equivalent feats. Fingers crossed that both Novak and Rafa excel at Roland Garros, so they can fight it out on the court, not in some random guy’s spreadsheets.