Author: jsackmann

On Tuesday, Matteo Berrettini and Alexander Zverev slugged out a 48-shot rally, the longest of the season so far. It came at 5-5, deuce, in the deciding set. Berrettini won it, opening the door for a final break of serve and a hold to seal the match.

At almost no stage of the epic point would we have picked the Italian to come out on top. First, it was a Zverev service point. The server’s advantage doesn’t last 48 strokes (or anywhere close), but it gives him an edge for the first several shots. Second, the German is more of a grinder. On reputation, anyway, he’s the easy pick in a marathon rally. Finally, Berrettini thrice found himself digging out of a corner with a defensive chip, a shot that is often an invitation for the man across the net to end the point, even on slow clay.

Yet long rallies are not well understood. Once the seventh or eighth ball was struck, the odds were only barely in Zverev’s favor. And Berrettini’s chip recoveries, while from defensive positions, didn’t give his opponent much of an advantage.

It’s easy to picture a strong baseline player outmuscling a weaker one, steadily building up an edge until he is finally able to put the point away, whether on the 8th, 28th, or 48th shot. But while point construction remains a valuable skill, there’s nothing inexorable about it. As we will see, even a mediocre defender can cancel out those efforts and put the rally back on equal footing.

By the time the stroke count hits double digits, the momentum has probably flipped or reset. By 48 shots, there have been several such shifts. It’s no longer a battle for supremacy but a fight for survival, with an ending that might as well be a coin flip.

Prolongation

Virtually everyone on tour wins between 40% and 60% of their double-digit rallies. Based on charted matches from the last 52 weeks, Zverev stands at 51%, with Berrettini at 47%.

Even in Tuesday’s match itself, the outcome of the marathon point was no outlier. The Italian won 12 of 22 in the ten-plus category. He even won the seven- to nine-shot category by the same margin.

The players we might think of as long-rally experts have a slightly different skill. They don’t win an overwhelming number of the long points (Casper Ruud: 49%, Lorenzo Musetti: 51%), but they are more likely to get there. Returners begin the point at a disadvantage, so the longer they stick around, the more likely they are to win the point. Zverev doesn’t win many more long rallies than Berrettini does, but he plays a lot more, and those 50/50 propositions are a better deal for him than, say, losing the point six strokes earlier.

This might sound familiar: I wrote about Daniil Medvedev’s rally-stretching skill about a year ago. Zverev rated as highly as the Russian in terms of dragging points onto equal terms.

Here is how the returner’s odds look at each stage of the rally, based on clay-court matches since 2020 in the Match Charting Project. The table shows the returner’s win rate when he puts each shot in play:

Shot #         Point W%  
2 (vs 1st sv)     44.9%  
2 (vs 2nd sv)     52.5%  
4                 52.7%  
6                 54.5%  
8                 55.1%  
10+               56.6%

Short version: The longer you last, the better your chances. That 56.6% for shot number ten (and beyond) really means something more like 50/50. A pro who has just put the ball in play has a better chance of winning simply because he hasn’t just made an error, and the other guy might. In a very long, evenly-balanced point, the odds will bounce between 60% and 40% in favor of the guy who just landed his last shot.

Recovery

If you haven’t seen the rally, jump to 1:22 here:

(If you have already seen it, go ahead, click, nobody’s gonna know.)

Zverev’s first real move comes on the 25th shot of the rally (~1:56 in the clip), when he sends a backhand up the line. Berrettini had been cheating to his backhand side, so he’s not ready for it. He’s forced to play a forehand chip to stay alive.

This is Matteo’s position (at the far end) to hit shot #26:

Wild guess: If you find every shot that looks like that, you won’t find many guys who come back to win the point.

Yet Berrettini not only kept the ball in the court, he dropped it within inches of the baseline. The two- or three-shot sequence that Zverev had in mind was now off the table. Maybe the Italian didn’t boost his point-winning odds back up to the standard 56.6%, but he came close.

It’s no secret that depth matters. I’m going to go one step further and say: However much you think depth matters, it is more important than that.

Take long-rally shots in general. The Match Charting Project has depth for over 7,000 shots (again, on clay since 2020) that were hit down the middle on the 10th stroke or later. Here is the shotmaker’s chance of winning the point, depending on depth:

Depth      Point W%  
Shallow       41.3%  
Deep          45.7%  
Very deep     49.4%

(“Shallow” is anything in front of the service line. “Deep” is behind the service line, but closer to the service line than the baseline. “Very deep” is closer to the baseline.)

Remember that most players end up between 40% and 60% on long points, and Zverev is barely above neutral. The difference between a shallow groundstroke down the middle and a very deep one is almost as dramatic as the gap between a poor long-rally player (say, Nicolas Jarry) and Zverev.

Back to the Monte Carlo slugfest: By dropping his forehand near the baseline, Berrettini’s chip recovery almost literally neutralized the point that Zverev had just tilted heavily in his own favor.

And again

The German knew he was on to something: He tried essentially the same play two more times in succession. His 31st and 35th shots were both backhands up the line, and an increasingly-gassed Berrettini was leaning the wrong way again. (And again.)

But twice more, the Italian chipped his way out of trouble. His second hail mary was even better than the first: He not only dropped it very deep, he put it in Zverev’s forehand corner. In other words, he bought himself some time to recover, and he limited his opponent’s ability to keep peppering him wide to the backhand.

Let’s consider the role of depth for slices, including chips like Berrettini’s. Here is the winning percentage after landing a slice in a long rally, separated by depth and whether the shot was down the middle:

Depth      Slice-middle W%  Slice-corner W%  
Shallow              34.7%            48.6%  
Deep                 39.3%            43.8%  
Very deep            39.6%            51.8%

As you’ll see, the very deep, down-the-middle slice isn’t as effective as the typical very deep shot. In the case of Berrettini’s 26th shot, I think his odds were closer to 50% than 40% because it was so deep. But more to the point of his second recovery, on his 32nd shot, the very deep slice to a corner puts him above 50/50.

Point neutralized, again.

Endgame

Ironically, after all of Berrettini’s digs, Zverev the grinder failed to match him. The 46th shot was a strong down-the-line backhand from the Italian. Zverev, accustomed to seeing slices from that wing, lost a split-second of reaction time. He had to chip to stay alive, but his attempt at a neutralizer wasn’t so deep. It barely cleared the service line, right in the middle of the court.

Matteo, master of the serve-plus-one, puts away balls like these in his sleep:

This rally, like most long points, ended up hinging on survival ability. Zverev did a lot of things right, forcing his opponent to play from his weak side, opening up space, attacking that space … and then going at it again when it didn’t work the first time. But on a clay court–especially one as slow as Monte Carlo–the defender always has a chance.

Or as your youth tennis coach might have said: Just make one more ball.

The pro equivalent: Yes, make one more ball, and be sure to hit it deep!

* * *

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The headline of this piece should end with a question mark. But that seemed churlish, so I saved my skepticism for the next couple thousand words. (Is it a deterrent to warn you of the word count in the first paragraph? Your call!)

Last week I wrote about the giant-killing game of 19-year-old Jakub Mensik. He kept winning, defeating Jack Draper, Arthur Fils, Taylor Fritz, and Novak Djokovic (among others) to claim the Miami title. His serve numbers boggle the mind. He cracked aces on at least 24% of points in every match before the final. Djokovic held him to a mere 18%.

While I generally steer clear of the word “clutch,” it was undeniably a clutch performance. The young Czech won all seven tiebreaks he played, including two each against Draper, Fritz, and Djokovic. He allowed Arthur Fils five points in their breaker, but none of the top-tenners managed more than four in a single tiebreak. Awesome as his serving was in general, it was even better at the tail end of those sets.

Mensik’s tiebreak record is almost as stunning as his ace numbers. Coming into Miami, his career tally at tour level was 23-13, a 64% winning percentage in a category where non-elite players tend to stick around 50%. Djokovic is the all-time leader at 66% (minimum 400 breakers), and only a handful of stars have posted career marks above 60%.

(I’m excluding tiebreaks from the NextGen Finals event last December. Mensik won just two of eight in Jeddah. The under-21 tourney is played with different rules and doesn’t award ranking points, so it seems logical to leave it out.)

Having run the table for the last two weeks, the Czech is up to 30-13, a 70% win rate. Mensik sure seems like a young master of the tiebreak. He’s cool under pressure, and he has the monster serve. Is he going to spend the next decade 7-6-ing his peers into oblivion?

The next 43

Let’s get some context. Mensik has played 43 tiebreaks, so here are the players (born 1975 or later) with the best records in their own first 43:

Player                     W-L   Win%  
Pablo Cuevas             33-10  76.7%  
Novak Djokovic           32-11  74.4%  
Marcelo Rios             31-12  72.1%  
Lucas Pouille            30-13  69.8%  
Jakub Mensik             30-13  69.8%  
Sergiy Stakhovsky        29-14  67.4%  
Tommy Haas               29-14  67.4%  
Sebastien Grosjean       28-15  65.1%  
Marcos Baghdatis         28-15  65.1%  
Bernard Tomic            28-15  65.1%  
Milos Raonic             28-15  65.1%  
Botic van de Zandschulp  28-15  65.1%  
Alexei Popyrin           27-16  62.8%  
Kei Nishikori            27-16  62.8%  
Roberto Bautista Agut    27-16  62.8%  
Felix Auger-Aliassime    27-16  62.8%  
Lukas Lacko              27-16  62.8%  
Philipp Petzschner       27-16  62.8%  
Kristof Vliegen          27-16  62.8%  
Dominik Koepfer          27-16  62.8%

Not bad company, but something of a mixed bag. Mensik is tied for fourth behind an all-time great, a near-Hall of Famer, and a clay court stalwart. The rest of the list includes both top-tenners and journeymen.

How did these guys fare in their next 43 tiebreaks?

Player                   First 43  Next 43   Win%  
Pablo Cuevas                33-10    22-21  51.2%  
Novak Djokovic              32-11    33-10  76.7%  
Marcelo Rios                31-12    23-20  53.5%  
Lucas Pouille               30-13    22-21  51.2%  
Jakub Mensik                30-13        -      -  
Sergiy Stakhovsky           29-14    19-24  44.2%  
Tommy Haas                  29-14    20-23  46.5%  
Sebastien Grosjean          28-15    26-17  60.5%  
Marcos Baghdatis            28-15    25-18  58.1%  
Bernard Tomic               28-15    22-21  51.2%  
Milos Raonic                28-15    25-18  58.1%  
Botic van de Zandschulp     28-15    19-23  45.2%  
Alexei Popyrin              27-16    22-21  51.2%  
Kei Nishikori               27-16    25-18  58.1%  
Roberto Bautista Agut       27-16    25-18  58.1%  
Felix Auger-Aliassime       27-16    26-17  60.5%  
Lukas Lacko                 27-16    19-24  44.2%  
Philipp Petzschner          27-16    21-22  48.8%  
Kristof Vliegen             27-16    19-21  47.5%  
Dominik Koepfer             27-16     9-14  39.1%  
TOTAL                     570-290  422-371  53.2%

(Some of them didn’t make it, or haven’t yet made it, through another 43.)

These numbers are… less impressive. Djokovic was unstoppable in the early going; he has managed to win “only” 61% after that second batch of 43. Grosjean and Auger-Aliassime came close to matching their first 43s. But the rest of the group made a beeline for mediocrity. Even counting the three standouts, the group won only 53% of their follow-up tiebreaks. 53% is fine–it worked for Marin Cilic and Marat Safin–but if Mensik had won 53% of his career tiebreaks so far, we’d be celebrating a different champion in South Florida.

Breakcasting

Bigger picture, there is almost no correlation between a player’s record in their first 43 tiebreaks and their next 43, or their ensuing career.

Djokovic maintained his breathtaking record because he was extremely good at tennis, not because he had secret tiebreak mojo. Players who aren’t on the way to double-digit slams (and even some who are!) can’t count on winning two-thirds of their tiebreaks.

This doesn’t mean, however, that everybody trends toward 50% on the dot. Better-than-average pros win more points, both in and out of busters. I introduced a stat a few years ago called Tiebreaks Over Expectation (TBOE), which hinges on that notion of “expectation.” Take a player’s rate of serve and return points won in a given match, plug it into a tiebreak simulator, and you get the likelihood that he’ll be first to seven. No clutch, no wizardry, just the assumption that playes are about the same in breakers as they are the rest of the time.

Mensik’s idol Tomas Berdych is a good example. He won 225 of his 374 career breakers, a 54% success rate. While it’s a pedestrian number compared to Mensik’s, it’s solid! And it’s precisely what the formula expects. Run the exercise for each of the 374 breakers, and it predicts 225 wins. (224.86, in fact.) In other words, Berdych was exactly as good in the jeu decisif as he was in those matches as a whole.

TBOE makes for a better–if considerably less exciting–forecast of future tiebreak results. Here’s the top 20 again, with “expected” records for their first 43:

Player                   Actual  Expected  
Pablo Cuevas              33-10     24-19  
Novak Djokovic            32-11     23-20  
Marcelo Rios              31-12     24-19  
Jakub Mensik              30-13     22-21  
Lucas Pouille             30-13     21-22  
Tommy Haas                29-14     22-21  
Sergiy Stakhovsky         29-14     21-22  
Milos Raonic              28-15     24-19  
Marcos Baghdatis          28-15     23-20  
Bernard Tomic             28-15     22-21  
Sebastien Grosjean        28-15     22-21  
Botic Van De Zandschulp   28-15     22-21  
Kei Nishikori             27-16     24-19  
Felix Auger Aliassime     27-16     23-20  
Kristof Vliegen           27-16     22-21  
Philipp Petzschner        27-16     22-21  
Alexei Popyrin            27-16     21-22  
Roberto Bautista Agut     27-16     21-22  
Dominik Koepfer           27-16     20-23  
Lukas Lacko               27-16     20-23

An enormous amount of those all-time-best career starts come down to luck. Cuevas really did win those 33 tiebreaks. But his performance in those matches didn’t merit so many 7-6’s in his favor. Fortune caught up with him, and he won less than half of the 170 breakers he played over the remainder of his career.

Mensik is no exception. Here are his serve and return win rates against his opponents in Miami, along with the resulting probability that he would win a tiebreak in each match:

Opponent    SPW    RPW  p(TB Win)  
Draper    75.0%  33.7%      65.1%  
Fils      73.6%  42.0%      74.7%  
Fritz     74.3%  30.7%      58.9%  
Djokovic  69.2%  29.7%      48.2%

Replay the tournament, and some of those seven breakers will almost certainly not go the same way, no matter how calm the Czech is under pressure. The odds of converting all seven tiebreaks against this competition is about 2.5%.

Yeah, but!

None of this is meant to take away from what Mensik has accomplished. He is 8-5 against top-tenners. He just won a Masters 1000. He powered through the last fortnight with one unhittable serve after another, especially when it mattered.

What the numbers do say is that he’s unlikely to keep it up.

Some of you, surely, want to argue that the 19-year-old will defy the odds. He has a huge serve, and big servers do better in tiebreaks, right? He’s clutch, and that doesn’t just go away–it isn’t like we’re rolling dice to get the outcomes of these tiebreaks.

These arguments are appealing, in part because we’ve heard them from players and commentators ever since Jimmy Van Alen figured out a slick new way to end sets. But they are not true.

There’s almost no relationship between a player’s serving ability and his performance in tiebreaks. Of course, the better the serve, the stronger the player, and the better the results, whether we’re talking games or sets or breakers. But when it comes to winning more tiebreaks than expected–getting from Mensik’s expected 22 of 43 to his actual 30 of 43–serving big doesn’t help. (There’s one twist to that rule, and I’ll get there in a minute.)

Next: If clutch ability exists, it is remarkably fickle. Players do clutch things, like reel off seven tiebreaks against higher-ranked players on a big stage. But that doesn’t mean they’ll be clutch the following week, month, or season. We saw that in the “first 43” versus “next 43” comparisons. Every one of those players with a hot start looked clutch. With the exception of Djokovic and maybe a couple of others, their ability to raise their game in tiebreaks disappeared. Even Novak steadily drifted back to earth.

Big Jake and Big John

There are a few big servers who have outperformed tiebreak expectations. The poster boy is John Isner. By my TBOE metric, he won 16% more tiebreaks than he “should” have, flipping the result of about 70 breakers over the course of his career. No one with at least 150 career tiebreaks has consistently stepped up their game so much.

We can learn a lot from that one example. The main thing is that +16% is the best anyone can reasonably hope for. What if Mensik really is the chosen one of the tiebreak? We’ve already seen a chosen one of the tiebreak, and we know how much his magical skills impacted his results.

In his first 43 tiebreaks, Mensik has beaten expectations by 36%, more than double Isner’s career mark. If we assume all of the Czech’s superb tiebreak performance is a mirage, we’d expect him to go 22-21. If we grant him an Isnerian level of clutch performance, he moves up to 25-18, or maybe 26-17. At that rate, he’d be climbing the ranking table, but this week’s storyline would be Djokovic and his 100th career title instead of the teen sensation.

Even +16% is a big ask. Next on the career overperformance list is Nick Kyrgios, at a slightly lower +16%. (I promise it’s not all big servers, and plenty of big servers underperform as well. Ivo Karlovic, Hubert Hurkacz, and Sam Querrey are a few counterexamples.) One thing we know about Kyrgios is that he–sometimes quite blatantly–saves his energy for key points. When he does that, of course he’s going to get better results on the key points, including tiebreaks.

Did Isner do the same? Maybe not as demonstratively, but I can’t imagine he tried very hard when returning at 30-0 or 40-0. Some of the 16% overperformance can likely to be attributed to that. He played better in breakers because he cared more about every point. It’s a sound tactic for a certain type of player; it’s just not as common among those with more modest serves.

Mensik, to his credit, is not so one-dimensional. I don’t get the sense he’s conserving energy for tiebreaks, tanking return games, or anything like that. If that’s true, his overall serve and return stats are a good indicator of his true ability level, unlike Kyrgios’s, which are deflated by his occasional apathy. Accurate serve and return stats make it even less likely that Mensik, or anyone else, can improve on them so much at the end of sets.

The sustain

There’s another reason why Isner–and Mensik–might outperform expectations. It’s not that they get better in tiebreaks, it’s that their serves are so good that they don’t get worse.

I looked at tiebreak tactics a few years ago and discovered that servers, on average, become more conservative. Rallies stretch out. Here were the key findings:

If every player reacted to the pressure in the same way, this would be bad news for someone like Mensik. The longer the rally, the worse he fares. But at least through his first 43 tiebreaks, he has defied the trend. While I don’t have tiebreaks split out for every match, the records I do have suggest he’s winning a whopping 78% of service points in breakers, compared to 65% overall.

His performances in Miami might have been even better. Facing Djokovic in the final, fewer than half of his serves came back. Against Draper, he served ten points in the two tiebreaks. Only two serves came back.

I don’t think it’s realistic to expect Mensik to continue to be the greatest server in the history of the sport every time the score reaches six-all. On the other hand, the best servers have more options than their less-fortunate peers. Roger Federer is another guy who outperformed tiebreak expectations. He, like Isner, could hit a first serve at 90% strength that still left returners flat-footed. Mensik may be in the same category. He can pile up aces without taking on an unacceptable amount of risk.

It’s reigning Mensik

The Miami title moved the Czech up to 24th in the ATP rankings. My Elo ratings–which don’t make any adjustment for whether tiebreak records are sustainable–put him in 13th place.

Assuming he comes back to earth and loses closer to half of his tiebreaks, can he sustain that?

The answer just might be yes–at least for the ATP ranking. Over the last 52 weeks, Mensik has won 50.5% of his points. Here are the ATP top-50 guys who also have total-points won rates in the same range:

Rank  Player                 TPW  
14    Ben Shelton          50.9%
49    Jan Lennard Struff   50.9%  
25    Sebastian Korda      50.8%  
50    Zizou Bergs          50.7%  
21    Tomas Machac         50.7%  
17    Frances Tiafoe       50.6%  
29    Jiri Lehecka         50.6%  
44    TM Etcheverry        50.5%  
12    Holger Rune          50.5%  
24    Jakub Mensik         50.5%  
34    Alex Michelsen       50.4%  
42    Gael Monfils         50.3%  
48    Miomir Kecmanovic    50.3%  
43    Nuno Borges          50.3%  
40    A Davidovich Fokina  50.2%

The Czech is basically tied with top-20 players Holger Rune and Frances Tiafoe, and he isn’t far behind another in Ben Shelton. Also of note, John Isner finished 2018 in the top ten with a TPW% of just 51.1%.

If anything, that comparison understates Mensik’s level. Thanks to his knack for upsetting seeds and going deep in draws, the 19-year-old has faced tougher competition than almost anyone else. Here are the top-50 players who have played the most difficult schedules, as measured by median opponent rank:

Rk  Player            MdOppRk  
1   Jannik Sinner        27.0  
3   Carlos Alcaraz       28.0  
7   Jack Draper          30.0  
4   Taylor Fritz         30.5  
5   Novak Djokovic       35.0  
24  Jakub Mensik         35.5  
42  Gael Monfils         36.0  
11  Daniil Medvedev      36.0  
2   Alexander Zverev     37.0  
28  Alexei Popyrin       38.0

Mensik isn’t just winning points at a solid rate, he’s doing so against top-tier competition. Alexander Zverev, Casper Ruud, and Stefanos Tsitsipas have all faced weaker average opponents than the Czech has.

One takeaway here is that ATP rankings are awfully noisy. They are so dependent on context that it’s virtually impossible to say what a player’s ranking “should” be. Had Mensik’s tiebreak streak ended in the Draper match, he’d still be about the same player, but his ranking would be 20 places lower. In that plausible counterfactual, he’d be underrated.

As it is, the 19-year-old doesn’t need a 30-13 tiebreak record to be seen as an outstanding player on the rise. He’s a credible top-30 player–maybe more–even without it. Which is good, because he’s not going to keep winning 70% of his breakers. Isner earned his one year-end top-ten finish with a season tiebreak record of just 53%. With a better second serve, Mensik can do the same.

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It was just a matter of time before Jack Draper had a run like this. He has been a favorite of the Elo algorithm for months, if not longer. His injuries, retirements, and occasional choices to rest kept him from piling up official ranking points. But Elo recognized that when he stepped on court, he rarely suffered a bad loss. He was fifth on the Elo list before Indian Wells, and with two top-five wins and a title in the desert, he has cracked the top four.

The Brit’s retirements have concealed just how reliable he has been. On a tour where everyone except for Sinner and Alcaraz have turned inconsistent, Draper has been upset-proof for six months, if not longer. The last time he lost a match he “should” have won–excluding retirements–was last September in Davis Cup, when he dropped a close decision to Francisco Cerundolo. That’s hardly an embarrassment, and Draper won 49% of points that day.

Since then, Draper has had good days and bad, but the results are almost always positive. When he’s on, he can be as overpowering as Jannik Sinner. Against Taylor Fritz in the Indian Wells fourth round, Draper won every single one of his first-serve points in the first set. It was one of three matches at the event–including the final!–in which he won 90% or more of his first-serve points. The Brit’s streakiness extends to both sides of the ball: From 4-5 in the first set against Fritz, he reeled off seven straight games.

Draper’s entire effort on Sunday was another such streak. He won 24 of 26 first-serve points against Holger Rune, cracking 10 aces and adding another 20 winners in fewer than 100 total points. He picked off nearly half of Rune’s serve points, converting three of seven break chances. It was an appropriate finish to a fortnight in which Draper lost just one set in six matches, beating four top-20 players, not to mention the fast-rising Joao Fonseca.

For all that, the Brit’s game remains something of a work in progress. His serve can be as dominant as almost anyone’s, but he alternates shutout performances with decidedly mediocre ones. And the tactics don’t always match the talent. While his first strikes offer plenty of opportunities for plus-one putaways, he grinds out rallies like an Andy Murray wannabe.

Let’s take a closer look.

Plus fours

To be clear, Draper in passive mode is a very talented Andy Murray wannabe. He was undersized for much of his junior career, so he developed a defensive game to match. Now he’s six-feet, four-inches tall with the ability to crack serves at 130 miles per hour. But old habits die hard. It’s clear that Draper developed along a different trajectory than, say, Fritz or his quarter-final victim, Ben Shelton.

The result is that Jack can hold his own in long rallies. That gives him a bit of Alcaraz-style flashiness: He can grind it out for a half-dozen strokes, then come forward and wow you with a stop-volley winner. It’s a good skillset to have. But it’s not necessarily a good tactical guide. Here is how Draper’s win percentage breaks down by rally length over the last 52 weeks:

Rally len   Win%  
1-3 shots  53.3%  
4-6 shots  48.1%  
7-9 shots  50.3%  
10+ shots  48.6%

He does fine in long rallies, but the first row shows where he succeeds. 53% on short rallies doesn’t just mean that a player wins a lot of quick points on serve–of course he does, everybody does. It means he wins more than he allows his opponents.

In fact, only four tour regulars outscore Draper in that category:

Player             1-3 W%  
Hubert Hurkacz      55.0%  
Jannik Sinner       54.4%  
Taylor Fritz        54.2%  
Novak Djokovic      53.7%  
Jack Draper         53.3%  
Alexander Zverev    53.0%  
Matteo Berrettini   52.8%  
Carlos Alcaraz      52.5%  
Lorenzo Sonego      52.5%  
Jakub Mensik        52.2% 

Guys like Hurkacz, Fritz, Berrettini, and Sonego build their entire match strategy around maximizing this stat. (Though they probably wouldn’t describe it that way.) The number tells us how a player executes plus-one tennis on serve, combined with how well they defend against it on return.

Negative results

At his best, Draper is as ruthless as any of those guys. In the sixth game of Sunday’s final against Rune, he held serve with a total of five shots: Four first serves and one forehand winner. But on return, or when the first serve doesn’t find its target, Jack tends to go passive.

The one-number summary is Draper’s Aggression Score of -38. Aggression Score measures how often a player ends the point, for good or ill, excluding serves. A higher number means more aggressive play, with average set to zero. In the last 52 weeks, Denis Shapovalov is +47, while Daniil Medvedev is -96. It is possible to win with a big game and a low Aggression Score: Sinner–surprisingly–is in the minus 30s, and Alexander Zverev (much less surprisingly) is in the minus 40s.

Here’s a scatterplot of the 25 men with the best first-serve percentages in the ATP top 50, along with their Aggression Scores:

I’ll be honest, I expected a clearer relationship here–any relationship! I assumed that the biggest servers would have the most aggressive games, at least as a general rule. Nicolas Jarry is trying, and Reilly Opelka–who doesn’t have the ranking to get himself on this graph–is even more aggressive still.

There is no single profile for the low-Aggression Score players. Sinner is patient because he knows he can outhit you. Fritz is also deceptively capable of waiting you out, though he doesn’t have the baseline weapons to effectively play another way. Zverev and Monfils could adopt just about whatever tactics they want to, but they naturally incline to passivity.

I would be surprised if, in two years’ time, Draper still sits right next to Zverev in this graph. Maybe that’s just how he’s comfortable playing, but the results are likely to convince him to adjust. While he’ll probably never go full-Shapo, his best performances tend to spit out Aggression Scores in positive territory. Sunday’s Rune match was almost neutral, at -1. The Fritz demolition was also closer, at -14. When Jack beat Karen Khachanov for the Vienna final last fall, his Agg Score was above zero. On grass last summer, he posted four straight matches at +25 or higher, including the final two contests in his Stuttgart title run.

The quickest path for a higher Aggression Score–one that he has already shown he can execute–would be to step forward behind the second serve. Draper already cleans up his first serves, but he only gets so many of them. Among the ATP top 50, he’s in the bottom third by first serves in. Even if he doesn’t boost that 53.3% win rate on short rallies, he can improve his overall results by moving more points into the short-rally category, out of the long-rally buckets.

Unhappy Jack

I haven’t said anything yet about Draper’s left-handedness. His game isn’t defined by it. He has the ad-court slider in his repertoire, but it is hardly his go-to. His favorite forehand seems to be inside-out, back at the forehand of a right-handed opponent.

In theory, southpaws are supposed to have an advantage on break points. The left-handed serve can drag opponents wide in the ad court, putting them at an immediate disadvantage. Rafael Nadal made this play famous, and Draper’s generation grew up watching him do it.

But Jack doesn’t. He hits break-point serves wide a bit less than 50% of the time, less than he does on ad-court serves in general. (And less than Nadal, who checked in at 60%.) The results, whether due to direction or something else, have been bleak. While Draper ranks 12th among the top 50 in service points won, he’s 44th in break points saved. He wins just 59.4% of those points–less than Sebastian Baez.

In one way, this is remarkable. Key points matter more than others: A player can boost his results by winning disproportionately often at crucial moments like tiebreaks and break points. Draper has climbed into the top ten despite losing a fair number of service games that, without such dreadful break-point performance, he would have won. Even at Indian Wells, he had to fight himself. Excluding the Fonseca match, he saved just 6 of 13 break points.

Here’s a look at the ATP top 25 and the typical relationship between serve points won and break points saved:

Players typically win fewer serve points when facing break point, because better returners generate more break points. But the relationship is fairly predictable. Men above the line (hello Ben Shelton!) have served better in big moments, while those below the line have performed worse.

No one is further from the line than Jack Draper. His nearly 68% rate of serve points won suggests he should have saved about 66% of break points, not his actual sub-60% figure. He has faced about 300 break points in the last year, so he has been broken about 20 more times than his SPW% would have predicted. That’s a lot! That’s one extra break of serve he’s had to overcome every third match he’s played.

There are two ways to interpret this. First is that it’s just bad luck. Players with extreme results in key situations tend to drift back to average. Just as a guy with an 80% tiebreak winning percentage probably isn’t going to keep it up, Draper is likely to start winning more than 59% of his break points faced. Simply regressing to the mean in this category will give him better results: No technical or tactical improvement necessary.

The alternative read is that break points are where Draper is particularly hurt by his lack of aggression. The theory goes like this: At key moments, most players tend to get more conservative. Serves come back, and rallies get longer. Points move out of the 1-to-3-shot category and into the others. The Brit already inclines to passivity, so he’s even more prone than usual to sacrifice the advantage of his big serve.

I don’t know if that’s true. Match Charting Project data, which has been so valuable today by giving us rally-length breakdowns and Aggression Scores, lets us down. In charted matches, Draper wins 64% of his break points faced, not 59%. His charted-match tendencies on break points, then, don’t tell us much. These matches aren’t the problem!

It’s a weaselly way of closing for today, but I suspect the answer is some mix of luck and passivity. Draper’s charted matches tend to be his more important ones, and if he were notably un-clutch, his chokes would show up in those big matches. They don’t. So luck is almost definitely part of it. At the same time, Jack is more passive than he needs to be, and good returners are able to exploit that.

The solution, of course, is to demolish opponents in 70 minutes without allowing a single break point. Sure, that strategy won’t work every time. But as Draper showed on Sunday, he’s capable of removing high-leverage moments from the equation entirely. He’ll do it again. It’s the other matches, the ones loaded with tension, that will determine how high the British number one can climb.

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