The story of the the 2024 ATP Tour Finals was the dominance of Jannik Sinner. I’ll refer you to what I wrote after the Australian Open: Yes, Jannik Sinner Really Is This Good. He just passed the 2,300 Elo threshold, becoming only the 12th man since Rod Laver to do so. When I update the Tennis 128 in a few weeks, he’ll be on it.
For all that, I’m preoccupied with something else. On the final day of round robin play, Casper Ruud beat Andrey Rublev to secure a place in the semi-finals. It was their eighth meeting and the Norwegian’s third victory:
Notice anything odd? Take away the unfinished Australian Open tilt, and the head-to-head breaks down precisely on surface lines. Rublev has won all four encounters on clay, while Ruud has run the table on hard courts. Not just any hard courts: indoors, at the Tour Finals.
We can look to external factors to explain some of the individual results. Casper had more at stake on Friday than the Russian did, with a chance to qualify for the final four. Rublev is older and broke through correspondingly earlier, so he was the natural favorite in their early meetings. Injuries and illness may have influenced another outcome or two, even aside from the retirement in Melbourne.
Still: 0-3 in completed matches for the ball-basher on hard courts, and 0-4 for the Roland Garros finalist on clay. Something’s going on here.
Not so fast
Rublev, to be fair, is hardly a fast-court specialist. His first tour-level title came on dirt in Umag, and he picked up a Masters crown last year in Monte Carlo, on one of the circuit’s slowest surfaces. The Russian’s forehand is a weapon in any conditions, and slow courts can disguise some of his weaknesses.
On the other hand, however much Rublev likes the dirt, Ruud likes it more. Earlier this year, I quantified the notion of “surface sensitivity,” the degree to which a player’s results are influenced by court speed. Rublev scored at -2.2, indicating that he does better on slower surfaces, a bit more so than the typical tour regular. Casper was considerably further down the list, at -5.0. The rating tells us that he’s more receptive to slow courts than Pablo Carreno Busta or Jaume Munar. He’s grades about the same as Diego Schwartzman.
Maybe the oddball head-to-head is a quirk of when the pair have met? Not all hard courts play fast, and not all clay behaves like the crushed brick at Roland Garros. Here are the venues for the seven completed meetings, along with my ace-based surface speed rating for each. Ratings above 1 are faster than average, below 1 are slower:
Year Tournament Winner Speed
2024 Tour Finals Ruud 1.36
2023 Bastad Rublev 0.86
2022 Tour Finals Ruud 1.50
2021 Tour Finals Ruud 1.51
2021 Monte Carlo Rublev 0.54
2020 Hamburg Rublev 0.52
2019 Hamburg Rublev 0.74
Hypothesis denied! The 2021 and 2022 Tour Finals were the fastest conditions of their respective years, while Monte Carlo was the slowest of the entire 2021 season. Last year’s Bastad surface was fairly neutral for a clay court, but the rest of the Ruud-Rublev showdowns took place on fast hard courts or slow clay.
We could always mark down a string of seven surface-confounding results to luck, especially when both players are capable in all conditions. But it would be far more satisfying to find an explanation that tells us something about the players and their particular skills.
Stoppable
We don’t have to look far. Here are Casper’s win rates on first and second serve points against Rublev, separated by surface:
Everybody wins fewer first serve points on clay than on hard courts, but not like this. The average gap for top-50 players in 2024 is four percentage points–not sixteen. At tour level against the entire field, Ruud has shown an even smaller difference, winning 73.1% of hard-court first-serve points against 71.2% of those on clay.
Rublev is not a brilliant returner. He’s a serviceable one with tactics to match. He often struggles to get first serves back in play. On second serve, he’s unafraid to unleash his weapons, accepting some errors in exchange for tilting other points in his favor. On clay, he’s able to turn a few more first serves into rally openers. In 2024, his gap between clay and hard-court first-serve return points won was bigger than average. But not nearly as wide as it is against Casper.
When it works…
Ruud, like many men who have developed into strong clay-courters, doesn’t have a monster serve. He can place it, he can disguise it, and he knows how to play behind it. On a fast hard court, those skills–combined with a bit more risk-taking–can result in numbers that look more like those of a big server. Against Rublev last week, he won just shy of 80% of his serve points, supported by 15 aces.
When the Norwegian is hitting corners and the ball is skimming off a court like the speedy one in Turin, Rublev is helpless. Over his career, according to the nearly 200 matches logged by the Match Charting Project, he puts 58% of first serves back in play. Against Casper on Friday, he didn’t manage 50%–a repeat of his performance on the same court two years earlier.
Rublev’s first-serve-return struggles on hard court contrast with how he feasts on Ruud’s serve on clay. The next table shows the rate at which the Russian puts Casper’s first serves in play, as well as his win percentage when he does so:
Match Result 1st: RiP% RiP W%
2024 Tour Finals RR L 46.9% 43.3%
2023 Bastad F W 64.6% 61.3%
2022 Tour Finals SF L 45.7% 50.0%
2021 Tour Finals RR L 67.5% 51.9%
2021 Monte Carlo SF W 84.4% 59.3%
2020 Hamburg SF W 91.4% 59.4%
The exception to the rule here is the 2021 Tour Finals match, which ended in a third-set tiebreak. It was the closest either man has come to securing one of the matches he “should” have won. Rublev won 52.9% of total points, but Ruud served his way out of just enough jams to come through.
On the very slow Monte Carlo and Hamburg courts, Rublev’s ability to handle the Norwegian’s first serve meant that Ruud was left with no edge whatsoever. Casper might be the superior baseliner, but he started too many points at a disadvantage. The picture might look different if they played on slow clay today, since Ruud is stronger and tactically savvier on serve. But I imagine it would still be a struggle, one in which few of Casper’s service games would sail by quickly.
Pundits like to say that tennis is a game of matchups. They often overstate their case: The better player (by ranking, or Elo rating, or whatever) usually wins. When they don’t, it isn’t always because of some quirk in the head-to-head. With Rublev and Ruud, though, such a quirk dictates the results. Few men are able to erase Rublev’s advantage on a hard court as much as the Norwegian can. Casper’s first serve is rarely so ineffectual as when the Russian is waiting for it on dirt. Ruud is set for another big European clay swing next year–so long as his buddy Andrey lands in the other half of the draw.
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Taylor Fritz at the 2023 US Open. Credit: Andy M. Wang
Taylor Fritz has been remarkably consistent over the last three seasons. He ended the 2022 campaign ranked 9th, finished last year 10th, and enters this week’s Tour Finals in 5th place, with a chance to overtake Daniil Medvedev for a spot in the top four.
Take a look at his top-line statistics for 2022, 2023, and 2024. They’re sorted by total points won (TPW). Can you tell which one belongs to his career-best current season?
You might be tempted to go with the first row, since he won the most points then. But the margin is small, and he won matches at a better clip in the second. Wait, though: He snagged the most return points in the third season, and more breaks of serve are particularly crucial for a player hovering in the 36% to 38% range.
I won’t leave you hanging. The second line belongs to 2024. Here are the three stat lines, now sorted by season:
The 27-year-old American is clearly doing something right that isn’t captured by the usual stats. 10th to 5th is a major move. Last year he didn’t even qualify for the Tour Finals. After beating Medvedev yesterday, he’s one win away from a probable berth in the semis. What’s going on here?
All the right matches
The official ranking system ensures that tournaments and matches are very much unequal. When Fritz beat Frances Tiafoe in the Acapulco quarter-finals last year, he gained an additional 90 points for his semi-final showing. When he slipped past Tiafoe in this year’s US Open for a place in the championship match, he earned a whopping 480 points.
I could just about stop here. 480 points is the difference between Fritz’s current point total and 8th place. A slightly bigger difference of 560 points would knock him down to 10th, and he’d be hanging around Turin this week as an alternate. His stats would barely change, but the story of his season would be very different.
It’s not just the Tiafoe match; it’s more than the US Open final. 2024 was the first year that Fritz lived up to expectations at the slams in general. Here are his grand-slam win totals back to 2018:
Year Wins
2024 17
2023 8
2022 8
2021 6
2020 6 * no Wimbledon
2019 4
2018 4
No top tenner would be happy with just eight wins at majors. Simply reaching the fourth round at each slam adds up to 12. In 2022, Fritz lost five-setters to Stefanos Tsitsipas and Rafael Nadal, then fell to a streaking Brandon Holt in Flushing. Last year, he suffered two second-round exits. Both five-setters, the losses came against Alexei Popyrin in Australia and Mikael Ymer at Wimbledon.
When the 2024 season kicked off, Fritz had just two major quarter-finals to his name. His career record in five-setters was 8-10.
Since then, the American has reached three more quarters (including the US Open final run). He won four five-setters against just one defeat. He avenged the Melbourne loss to Tsitsipas and twice upset Alexander Zverev, a player who had beaten him in five of eight previous meetings.
The re-balancing
The odd thing about Fritz’s season is that his slam success has been offset by weaker results elsewhere. Returning to the observation I started with: He won nine more matches at majors in 2024 than in 2023, but his winning percentage barely budged. Instead of losing to Ymer or Holt on a big stage, he fell to Matteo Arnaldi in Acapulco, Thiago Seyboth Wild in Miami, Alex Michelsen in Geneva, and more.
It was a smart trade, though it was surely not a premeditated one. You can train with the majors in mind, but you can hardly punt an early-round match at a 250 with any kind of hope that it will result in a quarter-final victory at the next slam.
There’s another category, though, in which Fritz may have used stronger tactics to get better “luck.” Here are the American’s tiebreak records since 2021:
The 2023 mark of 59% is about where Fritz should be, based on the rate at which he normally wins serve and return points, combined with the matches in which he finds himself in tiebreaks. 2024 was the first season he beat tiebreak expectations by a non-negligible margin.
This could be luck. Tiebreak records fluctuate, and very few players sustain records above or below expectations for long. Still, the American might have figured something out. In the sample of 2024 matches logged by the Match Charting Project (plus several others from grand slams), Fritz is serving waybetter in tiebreaks than he has in the past:
80% is Isner territory. In the improbable event that Fritz can sustain these kinds of numbers, coupled with a solid return-points-won rate around 38%, he should be winning even more tiebreaks than he already does.
I don’t want to overemphasize tiebreaks: After all, his 21-11 record is only one or two tiebreaks better than it “should” be. On the other hand, it’s easy to scan through Fritz’s career results–including those at majors–and see how one or two tiebreaks could change the story. He took a first-set tiebreak from Tsitsipas in Melbourne this year. He split two against Zverev at Wimbledon, then took two of two from the German in New York. Take one of those away–just one!–and again, he might be watching the Tour Finals from the sidelines.
Zverev tolerance
Regardless of whether tiebreak luck played a role, Fritz’s two major victories over Zverev helped to define his season. Neither pre-match betting odds nor my Elo ratings predicted an American victory on either occasion.
Both Fritz and Zverev are tall guys with big serves; either one can put away a service game with four quick strikes. One key difference between them is that Zverev is more patient, comfortable playing long points from the baseline. This isn’t necessarily an asset: It isn’t always in the German’s interest to let matches go that way. But if you’re going to pick one of these two guys to play points from the baseline, it’s pretty clearly Zverev.
In the US Open quarter-final, though, 39 points went ten strokes or longer. Fritz won 20 of them. In the fourth-set tiebreak, three and half hours into the battle, the American won two of two: a 24-stroke grinder that Fritz finished at the net, then a 12-shotter on match point that Zverev squandered with a unforced forehand error.
Two lessons jump out. First, the American can hold his own from the backcourt with one of the best baseliners in the game, at least on a hard court. Second, that skill doesn’t seem to fade with fatigue, something that might have caused Fritz’s five-set struggles in the past.
A third takeaway may be even more important. Instead of the numerator–20 points won–consider the denominator: 39 points played. The first time Fritz and Zverev met at a major, at Wimbledon back in 2018, barely half as many points lasted so long, even though the match itself was longer. Yes, the surface kept that number down, but not by a factor of two. At Washington early in Fritz’s career, on a surface more like that in Flushing, the two men played an entire match with just one rally that reached ten strokes.
In that 2018 Wimbledon meeting, Fritz held his own in the long rallies, winning 9 of 21. The problem was his rush to avoid them. He committed 56 unforced errors to the German’s 36.
Zverev keeps his unforced error rates down because he is willing to wait. He forces opponents to take risks unless they want to spend all day grinding out baseline battles. Most players in the Fritz mold–including Fritz himself, in the past–opt to take their chances. They usually lose, which is why Zverev is ranked second in the world. The American has steadily improved his groundstrokes and his fitness to the point that he doesn’t need to take low-percentage big swings. It’s no guarantee of victory–after all, Fritz won just 50.9% of points in the Flushing four-setter–but it’s a better bet than the alternative.
Let’s play ten
There’s a wider lesson here, and not just for Taylor Fritz. We tend to think of long-rally proficiency as a clear-cut skill. Yes, some players are better at it than others, but not by a wide margin.
Here are the long-rally (10+ shots) winning percentages for the ATP top ten, based on Match Charting Project data for the last 52 weeks:
Player 10+ W%
Alex de Minaur 57.4%
Carlos Alcaraz 57.1%
Jannik Sinner 55.8%
Daniil Medvedev 55.0%
Grigor Dimitrov 54.2%
Novak Djokovic 52.8%
Andrey Rublev 51.8%
Casper Ruud 50.2%
Alexander Zverev 50.2%
Taylor Fritz 46.8%
Before I studied this, I would’ve expected considerably more dispersion. While every edge counts, this one is not as crucial as it gets credit for. Fewer than one in ten points reach the long-rally threshold, so even the most extreme gaps–like that between Fritz and de Minaur here–would determine the outcome of only the closest matches.
More important, I suspect, is willingness to play these points. Fritz is never going to crack the top half of a list like this. He has–to his credit–maxed out the rally tolerance that his size and physical gifts will grant him. Still, a 47% chance of winning a protracted point is better than his odds after belting a low-percentage salvo to avoid the battle altogether.
Players who serve as effectively as Fritz does tend to be considerably less sturdy from the baseline. Pros with his (adequate if not world-beating) groundstrokes are often less inclined to rely on them. One-dimensional big servers almost never reach the top five. Yet Fritz, combining his primary weapon with a tactical savvy that allows him to maximize the rest of his assets, has done exactly that.
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Since a first-round exit to Lulu Sun at Wimbledon this year, Qinwen Zheng has transformed herself from a rising prospect to a force at the top of the women’s game. The 22-year-old has won 30 of 35 matches, picking up three titles including an Olympic gold. In her first appearance at the tour finals this week, she has defeated two top-five players and earned a place in the semi-finals.
Zheng currently sits at 7th in the official rankings, equal to her career best. Her performance in Riyadh will move her up to at least sixth. Elo, a leading indicator as usual, already considers her the third-best player in the world, behind only Aryna Sabalenka and Iga Swiatek. The Chinese player is riding an astonishing 30-2 streak against everyone not named Sabalenka, so it’s hard to argue.
What has changed? Zheng has long been ticketed for big things. Her January run to the the Australian Open final indicated that she was reaching her potential. But she made only two quarter-finals in the next ten events, losing both. There were clear weaknesses in her game then. Has Qinwen 2.0 plugged those gaps?
Lifting all metrics
When I last wrote about Zheng, I referred to her serve as “under construction.” Her first serves were (and are) among the very best in the game. But she missed often, and her second serve was below average for a top-50 player.
I proposed an admittedly theoretical solution, that she could play somewhat more conservatively on the first serve, still winning plenty of points. Then she could go (relatively) bigger on seconds, trading a few more double faults for better results. The bottom line, at least according to the algorithm, was that the shift would increase her serve points won from a good 60.1% to a great 61.7%.
She hasn’t done any of that. Yet since leaving Wimbledon, she has won 63.3% of service points. That’s better than the full-season mark of anyone except Swiatek.
Qinwen found a blunter solution: She just got better at everything. Here’s an overview of her serve and return results for the two halves of 2024–up to and after Wimbledon–as well as her hard court results in 2023:
First serves in? Up two percentage points. First serves won? Two points. Second serves won? Two points. Return points won? Three points from the first half of 2024 to the second, even though the average surface is faster.
These are enormous shifts. 54% of first serves in still leaves her near the bottom of the table, but moving from 60.6% to 63.3% serve points won is the difference between the edge of the top ten and, as noted, number two. Key to the move is the rate of second serves won, which improved from the bottom third of tour players to the top half. On return, 42.9% to 45.9% is a jump from the bottom quartile of tour regulars to the top.
In short, Zheng went from having weaknesses to not having weaknesses. It’s never easy to divvy up the credit between player and coach, but if Pere Riba doesn’t win coach of the year, we might as well quit giving out the award.
Ratioing the tour
One of the goals of my research is to help us be more specific when we analyze players. Zheng’s various points-won rates give us a clearer view than just going goggle-eyed at a 30-5 record. But it’s tough to pinpoint a player’s improvement when she suddenly does everything better.
Qinwen’s rates of winners and unforced errors leave us in the same conundrum: She’s just gotten better by every conceivable metric. Still, I have to share. Sometimes it’s worth going goggle-eyed.
I have winner and unforced error stats for a limited subset of matches–77, in Zheng’s case–from a combination of grand slam data and the Match Charting Project. For the 58 matches through the loss at Wimbledon, she hit winners on 16.9% of points, versus UFEs on 19.2%. That works out to a ratio of 0.88, which is quite good. Commentators like to point to a 1:1 ratio as a goal, but that’s relatively rare on the women’s tour. 0.85 is usually sufficient to win a match.
Since July, the Chinese player’s W/UFE rates have basically flipped. In 18 matches worth of data, she’s hit winners on 19.3% of points, against a 17.0% unforced error rate. Those numbers are good for a ratio of 1.14. Here’s a complete list of the women who have posted better ratios this year:
1. Aryna Sabalenka
That’s it. With more complete data, it’s possible that Zheng would outscore Sabalenka, too. We have W/UFE for four of Qinwen’s five second-half losses, but only 14 of 30 wins. The sample is probably a bit biased against her.
The backhand complement
When I wrote about Zheng in January, her forehand–assessed by my Forehand Potency (FHP) metric–already ranked in the top ten among tour regulars. Her backhand remained a question mark.
If there are any specifics we can glean about the 22-year-old’s improvement, it is here. Until the beginning of this season, her backhand was, more or less, a neutral shot. The Backhand Potency (BHP) stat measures how often a shot ends the point for or against the player, as well as how often it sets up a point-ending shot shortly thereafter. In 2024, Qinwen’s backhand has been five times more effective that it was before:
Time Span BHP/100 Negative Matches
2021-23 1.2 13 of 32
2024 6.3 6 of 34
In the past, the Zheng backhand cost her points–that is, it rated a negative BHP–nearly half the time, in 13 of 32 charted matches. This year, it has rarely done so. While BHP per 100 backhands (BHP/100) can’t be directly converted to a number of points per match, it’s safe to estimate that her backhand is now worth at least two or three points per match that she wasn’t winning before.
A few points per contest are enough to separate a good player from a great one. The backhand alone accounts for a big chunk of the gap between early Qinwen and the current unbeatable model.
We can even see the connection between BHP and return points won. This year, Zheng has gotten more returns in play: about one percentage point more, despite the fact that she has played Sabalenka so many times. Often, pros increase that metric by playing more conservatively. They send more balls back but do so weakly, losing most of those points. The Chinese woman, on the other hand, has also improved her win rate when she puts the return in play. That number–at least in the sample of charted matches–has risen from 53.8% to 56.8%.
Return stats aren’t all about the backhand, but when someone has as dangerous of a forehand as Zheng does, opponents make the return as much about the backhand as they can. No longer anything resembling a servebot, Qinwen threatens in more and more return games. Last year, she earned a break point in 43% of (charted) return games; this year, she is up to 49%.
Up and to the right
At the risk of repeating myself: Every trendline for the 22-year-old is headed in the right direction.
Zheng has never beaten Sabalenka, but after losing 6-1, 6-2 at the US Open, she pushed the Belarusian to three tough sets in Wuhan. She had lost five straight to Swiatek, then straight-setted her on the Parisian clay at the Olympics. Last fall, Qinwen salvaged just three games against Elena Rybakina in Beijing. This week she beat her. Zheng needed three sets to get past Jasmine Paolini last month; yesterday she allowed the Italian a measly 37 points.
The only player left in the Riyadh field that the Chinese woman hasn’t defeated is Coco Gauff. They’ve met just once, in Rome this season. Zheng won just 44% of points that day, landing an abysmal 41% of first serves. Should the pair meet to decide the season-ending championship, Gauff may still have enough of an edge to come out on top. But if we’ve learned anything from Qinwen’s four-month surge, it’s that she’s going to play a whole lot better this time.
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Aryna Sabalenka, watching another poor woman hopelessly run around
In May this year, Aryna Sabalenka unleashed a new weapon: a drop shot she was willing to use far more than ever. After winning six of six drop-shot points in a Rome first-rounder against Katie Volynets, Sabalenka inflicted 28 droppers on Elina Svitolina. That match went to a third-set tiebreak, and her 15 outright drop-shot winners represented more than the margin of victory.
In her career up to that point, Sabalenka’s drop shots represented 1.1% of her (non-serve) strokes–about half the tour average of 2.2%. That rate nearly quadrupled, to 4.1%, for her eleven matches in Rome and Paris. On faster courts since, it has fallen, but not all the way back. Her drop-shot rate since June has been 1.9%. As we will see, the weapon has continued to give her more value even as she uses it less often.
The tactic makes perfect sense for a player with Sabalenka’s skills. She hits hard from the baseline, so opponents are usually positioned defensively, on the back foot. She’s capable in the forecourt (former doubles #1!), so not only does she have the touch to pull off the deception, she has the ability to deal with the rapid-fire net play that can ensue when someone runs a drop shot down.
The only question–had we thought to make the suggestion, say, a year ago–was whether the idea appealed to her. Not everyone is Carlos Alcaraz, ready to throw the tennis equivalent of a curveball into any point. Sabalenka was doing fine bashing groundstrokes into submission; why change? Now we know she’s comfortable with the tactic, even if 4% is probably reserved for the slowest courts.
How, then, does Aryna’s drop shot stack up against those of her peers, in terms of frequency, success rate, and value? I wrote twoarticles in March that outlined various ways of analyzing drop shot tactics. Those pieces looked at Alcaraz, Alexander Bublik, and the men’s game in general. The same approach can shed light on Sabalenka and the women’s tour, as well.
Getting the drop
All the data in this piece is based on the shot-by-shot logs from the Match Charting Project. I’ve limited the scope to the last decade. Nearly every tour-level Sabalenka match is charted, but for many other players, coverage is more limited. It’s also not necessarily random, so these numbers are approximate.
It’s also important to define “drop shot.” For the purposes of this piece, I’m looking only at the first drop shot in each point. “Re-drops” are a skill of their own, and probably a very different one. They are also tough to study because they are so much rarer than the already-uncommon standard drop shot. So we skip them for now.
Let’s start with the most prolific WTA drop-shotters since 2015. Remember that tour average is 2.2%–one dropper per 45 shots or so. Here are the thirteen women who have equaled or exceeded clay-Aryna’s 4.1% for their entire (charted) careers:
Player Drop%
Yulia Putintseva 8.6%
Ons Jabeur 8.2%
Laura Siegemund 7.6%
Anastasija Sevastova 6.6%
Marketa Vondrousova 6.3%
Petra Martic 5.6%
Kristina Mladenovic 5.2%
Su Wei Hsieh 4.5%
Agnieszka Radwanska 4.2%
Karolina Muchova 4.2%
Kiki Bertens 4.1%
Viktorija Golubic 4.1%
Everything checks out so far. Putintseva dropshots to drive you nuts, Jabeur hits them to show off, and Aga did it just because she could.
The other end of the list has its amusements as well. In over 50 charted matches, spanning over 7,000 points, Camila Giorgi hit five drop shots. Yes, five. Two of them went for winners, and she lost the other three.
More important than frequency is points won. Here are the 14 women whose career drop-shot win rates surpass Sabalenka’s recent clip of 55.6%:
There is virtually no correlation between frequency and success rate, so players like Vondrousova and Kenin (and slow-clay Sabalenka) really stand out.
Here’s the same dataset, with more players, in visual form:
Most women cluster in the 1-2% frequency range, regardless of their drop-shot skills. Vondrousova and Putintseva really stand out for their combination of frequent attempts and consistent success.
Chasing down value
As much as youngsters dream of someday showing up on a leaderboard on this blog, what really matters is winning points. You can do that by hitting tons of drop shots and winning those points at a decent rate (like Putintseva), or by choosing moments carefully and executing well (like Qinwen Zheng).
Assume for the time being that the typical drop shot is hit from a perfectly neutral position, one in which each player has a 50% chance of winning the point. Combine the two metrics we’ve seen so far–multiply frequency by the difference between winning percentage and 50%–and we have the value added by a player’s drop shots. I’ve multiplied the results by 1,000 so all the zeroes don’t make our eyes hurt.
Clay may be particularly drop-shot friendly, but still, how about clay-Aryna!
At the other end of the spectrum… is Jabeur actually bad at drop shots? We need more context before we could establish any such conclusion. Perhaps the Tunisian hits droppers at particularly desperate times. Still, it’s jarring to see the star’s name at the bottom of the list.
Did someone say context?
The most common situation for a Sabalenka drop shot is when she makes a first serve and the ball comes back to her backhand. Over her entire career, when she hits a dropper with her second shot, she wins 51.1% of points. If she doesn’t go for the drop, she wins 51.8%.
Without camera-tracking data, that (and the dozen-plus analogous categories) is as far as we can drill down. Maybe the returns to the backhand that she dropshots are different from the ones she doesn’t. Match Charting Project data can’t tell us that.
Adjusting for context remains valuable even with those limitations. We can classify each drop shot by whether the player who hit it was the server or returner, whether it was a first or second serve point, whether it was a forehand or backhand-side drop shot, and how far into the rally it occurred. When Aryna waits one more shot on a first-serve point, her drop is much deadlier. Instead of the 47% of points she wins on a third shot from her backhand side with something other than a drop shot, she wins 55%.
The list looks quite a bit different when we take these additional factors into consideration. I tallied each player’s results in each of those categories, so we can compare their drop shot winning percentages with how they fared in the same mix of situations. “DSWOE” is Drop Shot Wins Over Expectation, the ratio between the two numbers:
(The winning percentages here are very slightly different from the ones above because some of the data wasn’t detailed enough to be used for this calculation.)
The average rate of 1.04 seems plausible. Players generally know what they’re doing; they wouldn’t hit drop shots if they didn’t have reason to think it would improve their odds. Jabeur does indeed look better in context. She still finds herself in the bottom ten, but a DSWOE of 0.99 means that if she is costing herself anything with all the droppers, it isn’t much. It’s possible that even this more granular approach is missing some details that would explain why Ons makes the decisions she does.
I must also acknowledge the oddity of finding Swiatek at the bottom of the list–or any list. Her 49.6% drop shot win rate isn’t that bad: It’s what she does the rest of the time that is such an outlier. She isn’t known for her drop shot, and she doesn’t hit many. So as with Jabeur, it’s possible that these categories don’t capture how hopeless the situations are when she tries to drag her opponent up to the net.
This metric confirms our story about Sabalenka. Her drop shots were fine–if rare–before May, became devilishly effective on the clay, then settled back to a more modest level on faster surfaces:
Player Drop W% Exp W% DSWOE
2017-April 53.3% 51.2% 1.04
May 61.9% 51.4% 1.20
Second Half 55.6% 52.4% 1.06
Buried in the details of Aryna’s respectable 1.06 ratio since June is a particularly encouraging trend. Remember those plus-one backhands that she shouldn’t have been dropshotting? Since June, she basically stopped. Out of 108 total drop shots, those have represented only five.
Drop and roll
For someone who hits as hard as Sabalenka does, throwing in a drop shot can be about more than just winning a point. Once an opponent realizes that they might have to chase down a dropper, they are that much less focused on defending against deep groundstrokes.
That’s the idea, anyway. When I wrote about drop shots in the men’s game, I was surprised to discover that drop shots didn’t influence the outcome of subsequent points in the way I expected. The majority of drop shots are hit by servers, but after they hit one, servers are less likely to win points later in the same game. If there is any discernable pattern in the ATP data, it is that once a drop shot is played–whichever player makes the move–the returner has an edge for the rest of the game. This probably isn’t a causal relationship: Perhaps drop shots are more likely to come into play when the server is struggling to control the action.
The data for women’s tennis tells a different story. On the point after a drop shot–win or lose!–the drop-shotting player wins 51.1% of the time. Two points later, there’s still an advantage, and the edge stays in place for the remainder of the game:
Situation Win%
Next point 51.1%
Two points later 50.7%
Same game 50.7%
All others 49.9%
That advantage is not the same for every player. The following list shows the point winning percentages for players who get the biggest post-drop-shot bang for the buck, along with those who–like servers in the men’s game–see their post-drop fortunes dip.
Jasmine Paolini! It’s tough to pinpoint exactly what she does that has caused her improvement in 2024. Her post-drop-shot success rate is too niche a skill to account for much of it, but it’s fascinating to consider.
I added Jabeur to this list because she illustrates one of the factors that makes analyzing drop shots so complicated. As noted, the theory is that once a player hits a drop, her opponent has to start thinking about it. But against Jabeur, opponents have to think about it from the moment they step on court! One more drop shot from the wizard isn’t going to change that.
That’s just one reason why the relationships between frequency, success rate, and post-drop-shot success rate are unpredictable. Some players, like Stephens and Osaka, play droppers rarely. They don’t win much when they do. But the after-effect might make up for it. At the other end, Muchova has a great drop shot that she deploys often, and for whatever reason, her results on subsequent points suffer.
Back to Sabalenka one last time. I snuck her into the table above because, even before she hit lots of drop shots, she saw a post-drop boost. You will not be surprised to learn that those numbers have gotten better in the last six months:
Span Same game All others Diff
2017 - Apr '24 54.3% 52.3% 1.9%
2024 Rome/RG 60.2% 53.7% 6.5%
2024 2nd half 58.9% 54.2% 4.8%
Clay-Sabalenka got the best of both worlds. She won more points by playing the drop, and she won more points because of the tactic’s lingering effect. Perhaps because of her growing reputation as a drop shot queen, the effect has persisted since June, even when she doesn’t go to the well so often.
The Aryna Sabalenka path to drop shot success won’t help everybody. But no matter how we slice up the numbers, it sure has worked for her.
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Giovanni Mpetshi Perricard in Basel, playing a longer rally than usual. Credit: Skyscraper2010
The story of last week’s tournament in Basel was the blistering service performance of Giovanni Mpetshi Perricard. The six-foot, eight-inch Frenchman racked up 109 aces in five matches, including more than one-third of his service points in Sunday’s final against Ben Shelton.
Mpetshi Perricard is a big server straight out of central casting. He can nail the corners at 150 miles per hour; on Sunday he hit one second serve at 146. He puts plenty of mustard on his groundstrokes as well. He often plays a high-risk brand of baseline tennis, recognizing that with a serve like his, he only needs to break once or twice–or just pick off a couple of return points in the tiebreak.
The Frenchman’s rapid rise through the ranks also fits his style. For a big server, wins can come in batches, when conditions–or, simply, tiebreak luck–are on his side. After an unexpected breakthrough on clay in Lyon, Mpetshi Perricard upset Sebastian Korda (in four tiebreaks!) and reached the second week at Wimbledon. Basel played faster than any tour event this year, and he took advantage. In between, he suffered through a 1-7 stretch in which he lost five straight tiebreaks and saw his double-fault rate balloon into double digits.
Much of Mpetshi Perricard’s future success will depend on his ability to handle these ups and downs. So far, he has struggled a bit to avoid the bad patches that spell doom for one-dimensional players. In his limited tour-level action, he has won more service points (70.2%) than anyone except Jannik Sinner. Yet five men hold more reliably than the Frenchman does, even after an unbroken week in Basel. The successes of Milos Raonic and John Isner–and even Shelton last year–come from playing better than usual under pressure, something Mpetshi Perricard has yet to consistently demonstrate.
I do love talking about servebots serving service aces. But while everybody raves about the GMP serve, I keep thinking about the backhand.
On the one hand
Mpetshi Perricard is now the fourth-highest ranked man with a one-handed backhand. His shot is nothing like the graceful, big-backswing, Federer- and Gasquet-inspired strokes of Grigor Dimitrov and Lorenzo Musetti. He often does little more than set up the racket to block the ball back. Strong as he is, the resulting flat shot can be much more than a mere defensive maneuver.
A few generations ago, it was standard to see big servers with one-handers. Think Richard Krajicek or Greg Rusedski; you might even put Pete Sampras in that category. More recently, Ivo Karlovic sported a one-handed backhand, though he mostly hit slices. Christopher Eubanks fits a broadly similar mold. Now, though, one-handers are dying breed, with just nine representatives in the top 100 of the ATP rankings.
Unlike Musetti or Stefanos Tsitsipas, Mpetshi Perricard isn’t likely to inspire the next generation of one-handed stars. No one is going to call this guy a throwback. On a good serving day, the Frenchman’s highlight reel features barely any groundstrokes at all.
What, then, do the numbers say? Is the Mpetshi Perricard backhand any good? Would he be better off with a two-hander like Raonic’s, Isner’s, or Reilly Opelka’s? Or, to return to the question I started with: For someone who specializes in ending rallies before they begin, does his backhand even matter?
Safely hidden
When the Frenchman’s game plan is working, his backhand is tucked away, out of sight. No backhands are necessary when the serve doesn’t come back, and when he controls the point, he prefers the forehand. Setting aside service returns, few players avoid their backhands as scrupulously as Mpetshi Perricard does.
The average ATPer hits 44% of their groundstrokes from the backhand side. Here are the most backhand-shy men with at least 15 matches in the Match Charting Project database, along with some other big servers of note:
Player BH/GS
Ivo Karlovic 30.1%
Jack Draper 32.5%
Ryan Harrison 35.2%
Thiago Monteiro 35.5%
Giovanni Mpetshi Perricard 35.5%
Jaume Munar 36.1%
Vasek Pospisil 36.4%
Alejandro Tabilo 37.1%
Alexei Popyrin 37.3%
Guido Pella 37.4%
Ben Shelton 37.6%
Maxime Cressy 37.9%
…
Christopher Eubanks 38.9%
Matteo Berrettini 41.1%
Milos Raonic 42.9%
-- Average 44.0%
John Isner 44.3%
Reilly Opelka 45.6%
Greg Rusedski 46.2%
Nick Kyrgios 46.8%
Pete Sampras 47.7%
Richard Krajicek 48.3%
Goran Ivanisevic 51.1%
Mark Philippoussis 52.1%
Backhands per groundstroke is not the easiest stat to parse, because it is the product of so many different factors. Nearly everyone would like to keep their number low, so it’s partly a function of footwork and anticipation. (And sheer willingness to hit forehands from outlandish positions.) But it is also influenced by opponents, who will work more or less hard to find the backhand. Mpetshi Perricard’s place on this list, then, could be telling us various things. He hits his forehand when he can, and his movement is good enough to make it happen. Opponents might not be trying as hard as they could to force a backhand.
Yet another factor is how comfortable the player is with their slice. GMP hits his quite a bit, meaning that he unleashes the flat one-hander that much more rarely. The typical tour player hits their flat or top-spin backhand on 35% of groundstrokes. The Frenchman comes in at 25%, not as often as his most extreme peers, but in line with other big servers:
Player not-slice-BH/GS
Ivo Karlovic 6.1%
Daniel Evans 11.6%
Milos Raonic 20.2%
Maxime Cressy 20.4%
Matteo Berrettini 21.3%
Grigor Dimitrov 22.7%
Corentin Moutet 23.3%
Christopher Eubanks 23.6%
Giovanni Mpetshi Perricard 25.2%
Alexei Popyrin 26.3%
...
Bernard Tomic 27.9%
John Isner 28.0%
Ben Shelton 28.5%
Reilly Opelka 31.5%
-- Average 34.7%
All of this is to say: Mpetshi Perricard hardly leans on the flat backhand. His serve keeps point short, and his preferences are for other shots. In the 138 points of the Basel final, he hit only 28 flat backhands, six of them on service returns.
Backhand impact
When the Frenchman is forced to hit a backhand (or chooses to–anything’s possible, I guess), the results aren’t great. When he goes for the flat backhand, he wins 43% of points, compared to a tour average of 49%. He takes more risks than his peers, but not overwhelmingly so: 9% of his one-handers end in a winner or forced error, while 12% are unforced errors. (Tour norms are 8% and 9%, respectively.)
These outcomes aren’t as extreme as his preferences. Of about 200 players with as many non-slice backhands in the MCP database, Mpetshi Perricard’s 43% comes in 21st from the bottom. Compared to other big servers, that win rate is positively respectable:
Player W/FE% UFE% inPointsWon%
John Isner 6.9% 12.8% 35.8%
Milos Raonic 7.3% 12.5% 40.4%
Matteo Berrettini 4.8% 10.4% 42.5%
Andy Roddick 5.5% 7.8% 42.6%
Felix Auger-Aliassime 6.0% 9.9% 43.4%
Giovanni Mpetshi Perricard 8.9% 12.6% 43.5%
Ben Shelton 6.2% 11.1% 43.8%
Nick Kyrgios 7.9% 10.7% 43.9%
Kevin Anderson 7.6% 11.0% 44.1%
Hubert Hurkacz 6.2% 10.0% 45.6%
-- Average 7.3% 9.0% 48.6%
Jack Draper 6.5% 5.7% 49.1%
Against this group, the Frenchman’s winner (and forced error) rate really stands out. Given the outcomes when he doesn’t go for it, it’s possible he should be even more aggressive than he already is. Master tactician Milos Raonic took a similar tack, piling up as many unforced errors as GMP does, but without quite as many winners.
The picture is less rosy when we look at slice backhands. As noted, Mpetshi Perricard hits a lot of them–close to one-third of his groundstrokes from that wing. When he does, he wins 33% of points, compared to 42% for his peers. Only a handful of players have posted such low slice-backhand win rates, and they are mostly the names you would expect:
Player W/FE% UFE% inPointsWon%
John Isner 1.5% 11.1% 27.3%
Christopher Eubanks 1.6% 10.7% 30.2%
Kevin Anderson 3.2% 6.5% 31.4%
Nicolas Jarry 4.0% 13.2% 32.7%
Ivo Karlovic 3.5% 12.0% 32.8%
Giovanni Mpetshi Perricard 3.1% 3.9% 33.1%
Ben Shelton 2.0% 7.1% 33.3%
...
Nick Kyrgios 4.2% 6.1% 35.6%
Felix Auger-Aliassime 3.6% 8.2% 38.1%
Hubert Hurkacz 2.7% 3.9% 38.1%
Milos Raonic 4.7% 9.4% 40.3%
Matteo Berrettini 2.8% 9.0% 41.5%
-- Average 3.3% 5.4% 41.6%
The Frenchman doesn’t miss much. Why just keep the ball in play, though, if you’re likely to lose the point anyway? By hitting so many slices, Mpetshi Perricard makes his flat-backhand numbers look better, but he probably doesn’t pick up any points by making the trade. Prolonging the point is a good strategy if you’re Casper Ruud–or, really, about 80% of the guys on tour. But if you play like GMP, it’s better to go big.
This is one way in which the one-hander may cost him. The two-handed backhand is particularly valuable in its ability to block overpowering shots without retreating to a fully defensive mode. While players with one-handers try to achieve the same thing with a slice, the stats tell us that it’s a poor imitation. The Frenchman’s in particular isn’t doing him any favors.
So, does it even matter?
Mpetshi Perricard doesn’t hit that many backhands, and he isn’t that much worse than average when he does. But, the margins in tennis are small, and the margins for big servers are smaller still. In 26 tour-level matches this year through the Basel final, GMP won exactly 50% of his points. (Not 50.1%, not 49.9%–50% on the dot.) Five players in the top 20 win 50.8% or less. That’s how close the Frenchman is to an even bigger breakthrough.
My backhand potency (BHP) stat quantifies the impact that each player’s (non-slice) backhands have on their broader results. The stat measures how often a shot ends the point in either direction, as well as what happens on the shot after that. Based on the matches we’ve charted this year, GMP’s BHP per 100 backhands stands at -4.3, one of the lower numbers on tour for players with at least 10 charted matches from the last 52 weeks:
Player BHP/100
Nicolas Jarry -6.9
Felix Auger Aliassime -4.6
Tallon Griekspoor -4.6
Flavio Cobolli -4.3
Giovanni Mpetshi Perricard -4.3
Alexei Popyrin -4.2
Dominic Thiem -4.1
Botic Van De Zandschulp -3.5
Matteo Berrettini -3.1
Ben Shelton -2.4
Stefanos Tsitsipas -2.4
What does this mean for the bottom line? -4.3 BHP is equivalent to about -3 points per 100 backhands. Since he doesn’t hit many backhands, that’s about -1.1 per 100 points.
My best estimate, then, is that if we magically replaced the Frenchman’s backhand with a neutral one–say, that of Arthur Fils–he’d pick up 1.1 more points per 100. Instead of winning 50% of points at tour level, he’d win 51.1%. That isn’t good enough to crack the top 10, but it would probably get him into the top 20.
Quantifying the impact of slices is tougher, because the more conservative shot is less likely to end the point immediately, or even on the next shot. If we figure that Mpetshi Perricard’s slice is roughly the same distance below average as his flat backhand, that’s another 0.5 or 0.6 points per 100 he could gain by acquiring a tour-average shot. Daniil Medvedev has hung in the top five in the ATP rankings while winning 51.9% of points. Stringing all of these assumptions together, we can start to see how a capably-backhanded GMP could reach that level.
The bad news for the Frenchman is that climbing the ranks is hard. Mpetshi Perricard is the worst returner in the top 50, and it isn’t even close. He breaks in about 10% of his return games; no one else is below 14%. Earlier this year, I wrote about the similar challenges facing Ben Shelton: Historically, a lot of players have arrived on tour with big serves, huge potential, and tons of hype. Few of them have been able to shore up their weak points enough to crack the top ten, let alone achieve greater feats.
The good news: There is so much room for improvement. Even without polishing the strokes themselves, it’s possible that a more aggressive set of tactics could win him a few more points on return. In yesterday’s loss to Karen Khachanov, the Frenchman won the first set despite picking off just two of 37 return points. One-dimensional servebot or not, he can learn to do better than that.
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On Sunday, Tommy Paul won the Stockholm final with one well-executed tactic. He hammered the Grigor Dimitrov backhand, shot after shot, point after point. Paul hit 71% of his backhands cross-court, far above the tour average of 50%. He also aimed his forehands at Dimitrov’s weaker side, going inside-out with 38% of his forehands, compared to the typical clip of 24%.
The results: 6-4 6-3 to the American, and a paltry seven rally winners for his opponent. Dimitrov was forced to hit backhands for 58% of his non-return groundstrokes, compared to his usual hard-court rate of 43%.
Paul doesn’t have any overwhelming weapons of his own, so he wins matches–42 of them already this year–by neutralizing opponents. In the case of Sunday’s final, that meant putting pressure on a backhand that is more flashy than effective. Dimitrov’s signature one-hander is not the worst on tour, but it is not much of an asset. His career backhand potency (BHP) is negative, meaning it costs him more points than it gains. Paul’s elite movement allowed him to exploit a weakness that the Bulgarian can usually hide.
Grigor isn’t the only man on tour with a preference for the forehand. Even players with top-tier backhands will often opt for a forehand because of the angles it opens up. Paul’s ability to pepper the backhand, then, is often on display. Facing Jannik Sinner at the US Open, the American hit 60% of his backhands cross-court–good enough to push the world number one to two tiebreaks. At Indian Wells against Casper Ruud, he hit 61% of his backhands cross-court. That proved successful enough to secure his first top-ten win of the season.
Few pros play like this. Or more accurately: Few men are able to play like this. The Match Charting Project has at least 20 hard-court righty-versus-righty matches for almost 100 different men. Here are the top 15, ranked by how often they hit backhands cross-court.
Player BH XC%
Lleyton Hewitt 70.0%
Andre Agassi 65.9%
Marat Safin 62.8%
Yevgeny Kafelnikov 62.8%
Richard Gasquet 59.8%
Daniil Medvedev 59.4%
Jenson Brooksby 59.3%
James Blake 59.0%
Kei Nishikori 58.7%
Pete Sampras 58.6%
Tommy Paul 58.6%
Borna Coric 58.1%
David Ferrer 58.0%
Juan Martin del Potro 58.0%
David Nalbandian 57.9%
That’s pretty good company. The active players highest on the list–Medvedev and Gasquet–are known for camping out far behind the baseline, giving them extra time to choose their shot. Paul and Nishikori (and the category-busting Brooksby) act faster. They rely on anticipation, footwork, and racket control to direct the ball where their opponent doesn’t want it to go.
Here’s a similar list–again, out of 100 or so players–ranked by inside-out forehand frequency. Same goal, different shot:
Player FH IO%
Milos Raonic 39.5%
Jack Sock 38.4%
John Isner 38.1%
Jim Courier 37.9%
Reilly Opelka 33.3%
Robin Haase 33.1%
Andrey Rublev 33.0%
Holger Rune 32.5%
Daniel Evans 32.3%
David Ferrer 32.3%
Marin Cilic 31.8%
Felix Auger-Aliassime 31.7%
Thanasi Kokkinakis 31.6%
Fabio Fognini 31.3%
Kevin Anderson 31.1%
Jo-Wilfried Tsonga 30.6%
James Blake 30.1%
Roberto Bautista Agut 30.0%
Matteo Berrettini 29.9%
Tommy Paul 29.7%
Many of these men make the list because they prey on weak service returns, or because they play high-risk shots when running around their backhands. Despite standing outside those categories, Paul ranks high on this metric as well. There’s very little overlap between the two lists: Only James Blake ranks above Tommy on both.
In short: Everybody (usually) wants to hit to the backhand, but few men are able to do so as often as Tommy Paul.
When tactics fail
Stockholm trophy in tow, Paul took his winning streak to Vienna. He began his campaign yesterday against compatriot Brandon Nakashima. Nakashima has become a thorn in Paul’s side, with three previous tour-level wins on three different surfaces. Tommy’s only victory came at a Challenger in 2019, when Nakashima was and 18-year-old ranked 942nd in the world.
Nothing changed this week. Nakashima secured a 6-4, 6-4 victory and improved his record against the older man to 4-1. Paul unleashed the same tactical plan that he used to beat Dimitrov, and he discovered–not for the first time–that it isn’t so effective against a sturdier backhand.
Paul hit nearly as many backhands cross-court as he did in the Stockholm final. But unlike Dimitrov, Nakashima was able to go toe-to-toe from that corner. Dimitrov went to the slice nearly half the time–opening up, incidentally, many of the opportunities Paul seized to hit inside-out forehands. Nakashima hit the slice barely half as often. 12% of Dimitrov’s topspin backhands became unforced errors; only 5% of Nakashima’s did.
We can’t explain the entire result based on Paul’s tactical preference. He looked sluggish throughout, coughing up 31 unforced errors compared with just 20 in the Stockholm final. But causation can run multiple directions: Nakashima didn’t allow him to play the clean, logical game that earned him the trophy in Sweden. The veteran scuffled to find another solution.
Another of Tommy’s worst matchups has a similar profile. He is 0-5 against Alex de Minaur, whose backhand also rarely lets him down. Both times they met in 2023, Paul hit his backhand cross-court more than 62% of the time. In Acapulco, the American hit his forehand inside-out more than 40% of the time, the highest mark we have for him in the Match Charting Project database. De Minaur doesn’t blow him off the court, so Paul can hit the shots he wants. Those shots–regardless of the Aussie’s own traits–are aimed at the backhand corner.
But against a player like Nakashima or de Minaur, the tactic doesn’t work. Lots of inside-out forehands are a safe bet against a player like Dimitrov, but de Minaur’s defense is too good. In Acapulco, Paul won only half of those inside-out forehands, well below tour average. The American generally played the way he wanted to, forcing de Minaur to hit a whopping 66% of his rally groundstrokes from the backhand side in their Los Cabos meeting. But the Aussie didn’t mind. At least in those matches, Paul showed little sign of a plan B.
Another dilemma for Tommy arises when someone takes away his plan A. The only other player who has defeated him five times is Andrey Rublev, hardly a man you’d select to run a backhand clinic. We don’t yet have any charted matches from this head-to-head, but it’s easy to speculate what goes wrong for Paul. In order to hit a disproportionate number of shots to a particular location, you need to have some control over the proceedings. Rublev, with his devastating forehand and aggressive mindset, is one of the few players on tour who can outslug the American’s speed.
The American’s losses are a good illustration of just how hard it is to excel at the highest levels of professional tennis. He is perhaps as good as anyone in the game at taking and keeping control of rallies from the baseline. But even that world-class skill can be nullified by a howitzer forehand or a backhand like a brick wall. Paul has twice upset Carlos Alcaraz, but when handed a first-round opponent with a solid backhand, as he was yesterday in Vienna, he sometimes finds that his best isn’t good enough.
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Matteo Berrettini hitting a forehand that will probably end the point
A few weeks ago, Agustin Lebron made a broad claim:
Most strategic improvements in sports have been in the direction of increasing variance and living with the (better EV) results: Baseball: more extra base hits, no more bunting. Football: more passing game, going for it on 4th. Golf: driver ball speed increases. Bball: 3 pointer Tennis: bigger serves/groundstrokes. Snooker: cannoning the pack to extend breaks. Chess: sub-optimal but niche exploitive lines.
“EV” means expected value or, roughly speaking, probability of success. Thanks to baseball’s sabermetric revolution and its influence on other sports, we better understand how players and teams win. Competitors, knowingly or not, are chasing EV.
Lebron’s claim is a bit more specific, that players and coaches across sports are playing riskier games because the ultimate payoff is greater. In baseball, a sacrifice bunt makes it more likely that a team scores one run, but less likely that the team piles on multiple runs. Hoopsters land two-point shots at a better rate than three-pointers, but the additional point makes the tradeoff worthwhile. Ice hockey coaches pull the goalie sooner than they used to, taking the chance that an extra skater will result in a game-tying goal, even if the decision could result in an easy score for the opposition.
Many more examples and counter-examples appear in the discussion around Lebron’s tweet and in the comments at Marginal Revolution.
It’s less clear that tennis ought to be grouped with these other sports. It may be true that players have uniformly bigger serves, or that they hit forehands harder than their predecessors. But is their pursuit of expected value causing them to take more risks?
Serve trends
Since 1991, when the ATP started recording stats like aces and double faults, aces have indeed gone up. That first year, about 5% of points ended with an untouched serve. The tour reached 7% by 2000, then cleared 8% in 2014. The rate has held fairly steady since then, sitting at 7.7% in 2024.
One way to hit more aces is to push closer to the edge. Aim for the lines, smack it as hard as you can, and accept that you’ll miss more, too. That would fit nicely with the increasing-variance hypothesis. But that’s not what has happened. As aces have gone up, the percent of first serves made has also risen:
The increasing-variance hypothesis holds for 1991-2000: Aces went up at the cost of fewer first serves in the box. Since then, though, players have kept hitting more aces (if only slightly), while landing even more first serves.
This is almost definitely thanks to better racket and string technology. You can swing harder than ever, with more spin than ever, and keep control of the ball. But that isn’t the whole story. For any given level of technology, players could take more risks, cracking still more aces at the expense of fewer first serves in. For nearly a quarter-century, that is not the decision pro men have made.
Second serves and double faults tell the same story:
Second serves offer an opportunity to take even more risks. If you go big and miss, you lose the point. But men have generally opted to take their chances with a ball in play. Double faults have cratered since the mid-90s and are currently at an all-time low. Yet players are winning about as many second serve points as ever.
In the last decade, we’ve seen a few players–Nick Kyrgios and Alexander Bublik come to mind–who do sometimes take their chances with a big second serve. Across 129 charted matches, Kyrgios hits aces on 4% of his second serves. Tour average is below 1%. Even Nick, though, doesn’t think it’s worth a major change in his risk profile. His career double fault rate is 4.2%: above average, but hardly an outlier among tour regulars.
The Aussie recognizes that the second serve evolved for a reason. Hitting a big second serve–deploying, in other words, two first serves–is a negative-EV play. It may be worth trotting out for variety’s sake, but not more than that.
Which brings us, finally, to Matteo Berrettini. The six-foot, five-inch Italian is the apotheosis of the big-serve, big-forehand, “plus-one” game. He’s the sort of player Lebron might have been thinking of when he bucketed tennis with the other sports on the list.
For all his power from the line, Berrettini is as conservative as they come. His career ace rate of 12.3% is outstanding, yet there is no apparent cost. He makes almost 64% of his first serves. He wins more second serve points than average, too, despite a miniscule double-fault rate of 2.4%. His game has gotten even safer as he reaches his late 20s. This year, he is hitting slightly more aces (12.8%) and landing far more first serves (68.6%) and committing fewer double faults (2.0%).
If the Italian is any indication, tennis is moving toward bigger serves and forehands. Yet when it comes to the serve, variance is headed in the opposite direction.
Rally aggression
What about groundstrokes? Nearly everyone these days talks about plus-one tennis. The serve–when it doesn’t end the point outright–generates opportunities to put the ball away. When those opportunities appear, don’t screw around! The strategy looks different in the hands of Berrettini than it does with, say, Jelena Ostapenko, but more than ever, players think in terms of recognizing and converting opportunities to end points.
Once the serve has landed, some players have indeed adopted a higher-variance approach that is probably unprecedented. Ostapenko, the freest swinger of all, ends nearly two-thirds of points on her own racket. Inevitably, she misses a huge fraction of those. Her Rally Aggression score of 182 (on a scale designed to run from -100 to 100) leads active players, and it massively outstrips anyone who started their career before about 2005.
Here, alas, we are hamstrung by data limitations. I discussed the men’s tour above because women’s ace and double-fault data only goes back to 2010 or so. The situation is even worse with groundstrokes. While the Match Charting Project now spans over 14,000 matches, relatively few of those predate 2010. Those “early” matches are heavily skewed toward a handful of top players.
We can still draw some comparisons. Lindsay Davenport and Maria Sharapova, often-erratic free swingers a generation or two before Ostapenko, grade out with Rally Aggression scores in the mid-40s. That’s below Iga Swiatek. Let that sink in for a moment. Today’s rock-solid, heavy-topspinning queen of clay plays as aggressively as two earlier-era emblems of high-risk slugging.
Again, we see the effect of better tech. When Ostapenko swings away, there is perhaps a 60% chance it lands in. If it does, it probably isn’t coming back. When Davenport (or to a greater extent, her own predecessors) took a big cut with a 60/40 chance of falling between the lines, it wasn’t quite as hard, and it didn’t have as much spin. It was that much less likely to end the point immediately, or in her favor at all. The chance of an error was always high; modern rackets and strings have upped the odds that the risk is worth taking.
Berrettini, though, once again illustrates that the risk isn’t necessary. The Italian’s Rally Aggression score is 24: above average but not by much. In part the number is low because he struggles to create opportunities on return (or when his serve fails to create chances), but in part he rates where he does because he doesn’t often miss. Roger Federer, for broadly similar reasons, is in the same range.
Modern tech allows players to hit as many winners as ever with less risk. Jannik Sinner, with his career Rally Aggression score of -24 and Carlos Alcaraz, at +8, point toward a lower-variance future, at least in the men’s game.
Ebbs and flows, serves and volleys
The biggest gap in the increasing-variance hypothesis is that it doesn’t explain the death of the serve-and-volley.
Few tactics in any sport are higher variance than old-school, rush-the-net-on-every-point serve-and-volleying. Think of Boris Becker at Wimbledon. He hit a bomb, and if it came back, he was often sprawled across the court simply trying to get a racket on the ball. Today’s net forays aren’t always so kinetic, but they remain high-risk. For every easy volley, there’s an untouchable passing-shot winner.
What’s more, the most dedicated form of serve-and-volleying, Jack Kramer’s “Big Game,” was explicitly an EV play, the brainchild of an actual engineer decades before anyone thought to put “sports” and “analytics” in the same sentence. Kramer and club-mate Cliff Roche worked out the angles and the probabilities, and the on-court results were so overwhelmingly positive that other Americans quickly followed suit. Thanks to a Davis Cup drubbing in 1946, Kramer’s game also changed the course of Australian tennis, inspiring Frank Sedgman and indirectly defining the style of innumerable hopefuls, including Rod Laver.
Serve-and-volleying, in the right hands, was the smart play for reasons that no longer persist. Returners couldn’t do much with a good serve. Court conditions made baseline tennis chancy: Much more tennis was played on grass, and almost none of that grass resembled the impeccable grounds at Wimbledon. Rushing the net was the only way to avoid losing on a bad bounce.
There’s a direct line running from Kramer, through Laver and Pete Sampras, to early-career Federer. Roger gave up serve-and-volleying only when Lleyton Hewitt showed how a sturdy, precise defense–made possible, again, by improved tech–could turn even a strong serve-and-volley attack into a negative-EV proposition.
The overarching theme here is that tennis pros will chase expected value, just as they have for a century. If they don’t, other players will come along with a better approach and displace them. The tactics that work in a given era are heavily driven by tech, and they may or may not move in the direction of higher variance.
The women’s game shows us the potential of high-risk tennis. So many top players go for broke that someone like Swiatek–an aggressive player by historical standards–looks conservative by comparison. Ostapenko-style slugging looks nothing like serve-and-volleying, but the philosophy is similar: Put the ball away before your opponent has the chance.
The men’s game, though, is becoming ever more precise. Sinner and Alcaraz don’t have low Rally Aggression scores because they play so passively. They just don’t miss very often. Berrettini is more aggressive, but only just. Few men hit serves harder or pepper the corners so persistently. Fewer still are so relentless in how they capitalize on a short ball. Yet he does that seemingly without cost. The Italian has plenty of limitations–injuries and a limited backhand, for starters–but they aren’t tactical. He and his colleagues have concluded that higher risks aren’t worth it, and they are probably right.
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Coco Gauff at the 2022 US Open. Credit: All-Pro Reels
The best players are able to work around their weaknesses. Coco Gauff is so solid that she has overcome two: an unreliable forehand and a second serve that hands too many points to her opponents. On Wednesday in Wuhan, Gauff coughed up 5 double faults out of 19 second serves. Despite surrendering more than 10% of her serve points for the fifth consecutive match, she eased past Viktoriya Tomova. The Bulgarian managed just three games.
The forehand is a subject for another day. Lately, the serve has been a bigger concern, the one blot on an eight-match win streak (and counting) in China.
Start with season totals. Through last week’s Beijing final, Gauff has missed more than one in five of her second serves. The result: She has double-faulted 8.9% of her 2024 service points. No other woman in the WTA top 60 has double faulted so often.
The typical tour regular loses barely half so many points this way. Tour average is 5.1%. Fellow elites Iga Swiatek, Jessica Pegula, and Jasmine Paolini come in at 3% or lower; Emma Navarro just misses that mark at 3.1%. Even Aryna Sabalenka, with her recurring bouts of service shakiness and occasional risk-taking on the second serve, gives away only 4.5% of points.
Still, Coco rates as the fourth-best player in the world. She’ll be back to #3 on Monday, and she has a good chance of ending the season there. The rest of her game is so sturdy that she has piled up nearly 50 wins on the season despite committing 274 more double faults than Swiatek has.
This is uncharted territory. In the last 15 years–the extent of my serve stats for women’s tennis–only two players have hit double faults so often and still managed to finish in the top five. No one has cracked the top three:
DF Rate Player Year Rank
10.4% Aryna Sabalenka 2022 5
9.6% Maria Sharapova 2011 4
8.9% Coco Gauff 2024 ?
8.7% Elena Dementieva 2009 5
8.4% Maria Sharapova 2015 4
8.1% Dinara Safina 2008 3
7.9% Dinara Safina 2009 2
7.9% Maria Sharapova 2014 2
7.9% Karolina Pliskova 2021 4
7.6% Victoria Azarenka 2013 2
7.6% Aryna Sabalenka 2021 2
7.5% Maria Sharapova 2013 4
7.3% Maria Sharapova 2012 2
7.0% Venus Williams 2010 5
The typical year-end number one double faults only 4.1% of the time. Victoria Azarenka’s 2012 season, at 6.8%, was the only such occasion over 6%. This isn’t exactly a law of physics, but if Gauff is to dislodge the two women atop her in the ranking table, she’ll probably need to make a substantial move in that direction.
What-ifs
It’s no easy task to fix a leaky serve. The good news for Coco is that it may be all she needs to do.
Back to the season totals. Gauff is basically tied with Swiatek as the best returner in the game. The American has won 48.4% of her return points this year, compared to Iga’s 48.5%. Gauff has played slightly weaker opposition, but in any case, it’s a minor gap. Both women stand well above the pack; no one else tops 47.5%. With no double faults working against her, Coco’s return game is worthy of a world number one.
By service points won–where the double faults come into play–Gauff ranks a more pedestrian 12th. That’s entirely because of the deliveries that miss. She wins more first-serve points than anyone except for Qinwen Zheng and Elena Rybakina. In an era without megastars, the combination of 1st or 2nd on return and 12th on serve might be good enough to lead the field, but with an all-rounder like Swiatek and a dominant slugger like Sabalenka to contend with, it doesn’t do the job.
Here, then, is the what-if. Wave a magic wand and proclaim that all of Gauff’s second serves find the box. The 9% of her service points that end in double faults turn into second serves in play: points that she wins at a 56% clip.
Do that, and her rate of serve points won–currently at 60.2%, good for 12th place–becomes 65.3%, better than anybody. A double-fault-free Coco Gauff would rack up more serve points than anyone on tour, while still winning almost as many return points as Iga does. A handful of key points might swing the year-end number one in either direction, but statistically, the American would be the best player in the world.
You might argue that even in the rosiest real-life scenario, Coco isn’t going to eliminate double faults entirely. Fair enough. Reduce her double fault rate to tour average, and she wins 62.5% of service points. Not as good as Swiatek, Sabalenka, or Rybakina (or, technically, Lulu Sun in her limited tour-level action), but ahead of everybody else.
Combine serve and return into total points won (TPW%), and we see how these wishful adjustments move Gauff clear of the field–or, at least, everyone except for Iga:
TPW% Player
56.9% Coco Gauff (no dfs)
56.5% Iga Swiatek
55.4% Coco Gauff (avg dfs)
54.3% Coco Gauff (actual)
54.3% Aryna Sabalenka
53.7% Elena Rybakina
53.1% Karolina Muchova
52.9% Qinwen Zheng
52.8% Danielle Collins
52.7% Mirra Andreeva
52.6% Jessica Pegula
52.3% Victoria Azarenka
52.3% Maria Sakkari
52.3% Paula Badosa
52.1% Madison Keys
52.0% Jasmine Paolini
Actual-Coco is already near the top of the list. Take away all or half of her double faults, and at the very least she looks stronger than Sabalenka and Rybakina.
The specifics
This may seem a bit too abstract, especially since the total-points-won list has so many differences from the official ranking table. Greatness is not measured by points, but by titles, and some trophies count much more than others.
Remember that these points we’re changing took place in real–often close–matches. Reversing just a few of the double faults would have tipped the scales in Gauff’s direction. In the counterfactual, she probably didn’t lose 15 matches this year. She likely picked up more than two titles.
Take the most painful loss of the season: Coco’s fourth round defeat at the US Open. Against Emma Navarro, she committed a gut-wrenching 19 double faults. Despite that, she won 46.8% of total points. All else equal, had she landed those 19 second serves, Gauff would have almost exactly flipped the tally, winning 53.0% of points. Even with a tour-average double fault rate, she would have won 51.0% of points and–barring bad luck or a ill-timed choke–earned a victory.
Run the same exercise for the American’s other defeats this year, and we see just how strong her season could have been. If we reduce her double faults to a tour-average 5.1%, 4 of her 15 losses probably would have gone her way. Two more matches would have ended within a point of 50/50, safely in the range where a clutch (or lucky) break point or two can reverse the result.
Cut out double faults entirely, and Gauff wins at least 50.8% of points in six of the losses. She would have cleared 48% in four more, putting those in the range where luck could hand her the victory.
Even in the more conservative scenario, Gauff’s campaign looks quite different. Instead of losing to Anna Kalinskaya in the Dubai quarters, she would have faced off with Iga in the semi-finals. She wouldn’t have lost to Marta Kostyuk in Stuttgart: She’d have played Marketa Vondrousova for a place in the final. In Madrid, she would have handily beaten Madison Keys, earning a quarter-final date with Ons Jabeur. Flip the Navarro result in New York, and Coco could well have defended her US Open title.
Today’s action in Wuhan offered a glimpse of a sturdier future. Gauff cast aside Kostyuk with nary a double fault, advancing to the quarters in just 61 minutes. It was her quickest match since April–against an opponent who has bedeviled her in the past–and her first double-fault-free outing in 14 months.
The American has somehow established herself as a top-five player and grand slam champion despite handing her opponents more free points than any of her peers. A stingier Coco Gauff could soon be the best player in the world.
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Clay-court tennis is known for its slow bounces, defensive court positions, and long rallies. Still, a whole lot of points are determined by the bang-bang, plus-one tactics that define the modern game.
The first week of this year’s European clay season was a wake-up call. The champions in Estoril, Houston, and Marrakech were Hubert Hurkacz, Ben Shelton, and Matteo Berrettini, hardly a trio of counterpunching grinders. In Estoril, 70% of Hubi’s serve points ended in four shots or less–and he won 83% of them. In Houston, three-quarters of Shelton’s ended so quickly, and runner-up Frances Tiafoe’s serve points were even shorter. Berrettini finished 77% of his serve points in four shots or less, winning 76% of them. In other words, the Italian won nearly 60% of his serve points with his serve and plus-one alone.
Tournaments since then have settled into something closer to the stereotype. Marton Fucsovics outlasted Mariano Navone in a Bucharest slugfest. The Munich final was decided between two big hitters, Taylor Fritz and Jan-Lennard Struff, but Struff secured the victory with far fewer short serve points than Berrettini and company.
Yet quick points have an outsized effect on clay-court outcomes. When Stefanos Tsitsipas beat Casper Ruud in Monte Carlo, he finished nearly 70% of his serve points in four shots or less–a Hurkaczian performance befitting a server of his caliber. A week later in Barcelona, the relevant number fell to 63%, not much better than tour average on the surface. Stef found himself exposed, fighting out more rallies against one of the game’s best baseliners. He was broken three times and lost in straights.
Fans tend to look at rally-length stats and focus on winning percentage. How did Jannik Sinner fare on points between 0 and 4 shots? Did Carlos Alcaraz win more than half of 10-plus-shot rallies? While these sliced-up winning percentages matter, you can often tell more about a match–including the likely victor–by looking at the frequency of point types. When Berrettini finishes so many of his serve points quickly, his game is working as intended, and he’s probably winning. If he’s spending more time in long rallies, his opponent has more chances to dictate play, hinting at the opposite outcome.
On clay, then, the battle is to survive, to drag the server into a rally. Nobody on tour does that better than Daniil Medvedev.
Octopus on dirt
In the typical men’s clay-court match, 61% of points end in four strokes or less. That’s based on Match Charting Project data since 2015, spanning over 200,000 clay-court points. Here’s how the returner fares in each type of rally:
Frequency Win %
Short (0-4) 61.2% 33.1%
Medium (5-9) 27.5% 35.3%
Long (10+) 11.2% 55.8%
The longer the rally, the better the returner’s chances, even if the process is gradual. Five- and six-shot rallies still lean in the server’s direction, though not as much as shorter ones. Ten-plusses are effectively neutral. They look slightly returner-friendly because rallies of exactly ten shots are won by the returner, and that’s the most frequent length in the ten-plus bucket. (If we drew the line at nine or eleven, we’d have the opposite problem.)
Now check out Medvedev:
Frequency Win %
Short (0-4) 52.5% 35.5%
Medium (5-9) 30.3% 36.1%
Long (10+) 17.2% 52.3%
The short- and medium-point winning percentages are a bit better, but the real story is in the frequency column. The average match has about 80 serve points for each player. In that time, Medvedev erases about seven short points and adds about five long ones.
In this sense, being a good returner isn’t about cracking return winners or wrong-footing the server. The goal is simply to stay alive. Get the return back, preferably placed well-enough to take away a high-percentage plus-one winner. In last year’s Rome final, Medvedev dragged Holger Rune into long service points almost exactly in line with his career averages: 54% short points, 31% mediums. Rune did just fine through those first nine shots. But when Medvedev reached the ten-shot mark–10 times in 67 Rune service points–he snatched away all but one. Two of those long points gave Medvedev a break for the first set; another 22-shot gutbuster secured the break when Rune failed to serve out the second set.
The Russian’s defense is even more impressive when we compare him to men with better clay-court pedigrees. Here are the top 20 players (minimum 500 charted clay-court return points since 2015) ranked by frequency of short return points:
Player Frequency Win %
Daniil Medvedev 52.5% 35.5%
Diego Schwartzman 53.5% 36.5%
Rafael Nadal 54.7% 39.5%
Alex de Minaur 54.9% 31.2%
David Ferrer 55.1% 34.6%
Marton Fucsovics 55.6% 41.8%
Andy Murray 55.6% 40.0%
Novak Djokovic 55.7% 36.4%
Gael Monfils 55.8% 34.7%
Francisco Cerundolo 55.8% 38.6%
Stefanos Tsitsipas 56.1% 31.8%
Jannik Sinner 56.9% 36.0%
Jaume Munar 57.0% 36.5%
Hubert Hurkacz 57.1% 30.3%
Alexander Zverev 57.5% 34.8%
Alejandro Davidovich Fokina 58.3% 33.7%
Sebastian Baez 58.3% 36.3%
Gilles Simon 58.6% 35.9%
Dominic Thiem 58.6% 32.5%
Guido Pella 58.8% 35.1%
The entire list is packed in a range of about six percentage points, so the full point between Medvedev and Diego Schwartzman–not to mention the two-plus points between him and Rafael Nadal–illustrates just how much of an outlier he is. A low frequency isn’t necessarily better: I’d take Rafa’s combination of frequency and winning percentage over Medvedev, just as I’m sure you would have before reading the first word of this article. But while the Russian doesn’t pick off as many short return points as Nadal, Andy Murray, or Fucsovics(?), his conservatism is hardly a liability. He wins nearly as many as Schwartzman, Sinner, or Novak Djokovic. All this despite a game style tailored to neutralizing the rally further down the line.
The ten-point truth
Medvedev’s long-rally domination of Rune can be misleading. As we’ve seen, he wins about half of clay-court return points that reach ten strokes. Most players do. The benefit of generating long rallies isn’t to sweep the lot: Nobody comes close to accomplishing that, as we will see. The goal is to neutralize rallies. The average server wins 64% of clay-court points, so anything the returner can do to increase the number of 50/50 points is a good deal.
There may be a knock-on effect, as well. Wear out the server, and he might not have as much energy for the next delivery. He might also take more risks in an attempt to end the next points quickly.
The best baseliners don’t need a knock-on effect. Medvedev excels at creating long points, but other men are much better at securing those rallies for themselves. Here are the top 20 among players with at least 100 charted long return points:
Player Long Points Win %
Kei Nishikori 141 69.5%
David Ferrer 129 67.4%
Nicolas Jarry 126 65.1%
Rafael Nadal 863 62.9%
Gilles Simon 121 62.0%
Philipp Kohlschreiber 133 60.9%
Aljaz Bedene 167 60.5%
Richard Gasquet 116 60.3%
Andrey Rublev 271 60.1%
Roberto Carballes Baena 158 60.1%
Carlos Alcaraz 381 60.1%
Botic van de Zandschulp 210 60.0%
Robin Haase 142 59.2%
Sebastian Baez 284 59.2%
Borna Coric 164 59.1%
Pablo Carreno Busta 203 58.6%
Lorenzo Musetti 144 58.3%
Novak Djokovic 1099 58.0%
Alexander Zverev 793 57.9%
Juan Martin del Potro 168 57.7%
(Nicolas Jarry?!)
That’s a very different list than what we saw above. The skills required to stretch out a rally are not quite the same as those needed to finish them off. The ideal, then, is a player who balances the two. Kei Nishikori’s win percentage is excellent, but Medvedev is nearly twice as likely to push any given return point to the ten-shot mark. Jarry plays ten-shot rallies on return less than one-third as often as the Russian does.
The key is to think in marginal terms. Longer points work in the returner’s favor, so we can think of every long point as a medium point that the returner successfully extended. The average player increases his chance of winning a rally by 21 percentage points (from ~35% to ~56%) by nudging it from “medium” to “long.” Call that the “marginal value” of a long rally. When we multiply a player’s marginal long-rally value with his frequency of generating long rallies, we get the total payoff of this defensive skill. The average player reaches ten shots about 11% of the time, so their payoff is 21% * 11% = 2.3%. It’s not a meaningful number on its own, but it provides a reference point for individual stats. If a returner’s payoff is higher, they get more benefit than average from their ability to generate long rallies.
Here’s the top 20 (plus a few other players of note), as measured by this combination of long-rally frequency and success rate:
Player Long Pts Freq MargValue Payoff
David Ferrer 129 14.2% 30.5% 5.3%
Roberto Carballes Baena 158 14.1% 29.0% 4.4%
Gilles Simon 121 14.7% 35.5% 3.9%
Aljaz Bedene 167 12.6% 31.2% 3.7%
Lorenzo Sonego 131 11.7% 23.0% 3.6%
Pablo Carreno Busta 203 13.0% 31.7% 3.5%
Robin Haase 142 11.5% 28.7% 3.5%
Rafael Nadal 863 14.4% 39.8% 3.3%
Novak Djokovic 1099 16.2% 37.5% 3.3%
Stefanos Tsitsipas 558 13.3% 32.4% 3.2%
Juan Martin del Potro 168 12.6% 32.1% 3.2%
Marton Fucsovics 137 16.0% 31.7% 3.1%
Diego Schwartzman 751 17.3% 37.7% 3.1%
Alexander Zverev 793 13.0% 36.0% 2.8%
Daniil Medvedev 394 17.2% 36.1% 2.8%
Richard Gasquet 116 10.5% 34.0% 2.8%
Kei Nishikori 141 9.6% 41.0% 2.7%
Dominic Thiem 931 13.2% 34.9% 2.7%
Holger Rune 185 11.1% 33.3% 2.7%
Cameron Norrie 103 10.0% 29.5% 2.7%
Player Long Pts Freq MargValue Payoff
Jannik Sinner 352 12.9% 38.5% 2.4%
…
Andy Murray 299 12.5% 33.1% 2.3%
AVERAGE 2.3%
…
Casper Ruud 560 9.3% 35.9% 1.7%
…
Carlos Alcaraz 381 8.4% 41.7% 1.5%
Nicolas Jarry 126 5.6% 38.4% 1.5%
…
Stan Wawrinka 193 8.4% 36.2% 1.4%
We have additional evidence, then, that David Ferrer is the 79th best player of the last century. These numbers might even understate his long-rally prowess, since I’ve limited this analysis to 2015-present. The timeframe probably hurts Nadal as well. Also, there aren’t many long points, so the small sample makes the top of the list somewhat misleading: I’m certainly not ready to take Lorenzo Sonego’s long-rally skills over most of the guys below him on the list.
Caveats aside, we have a plausible estimate of how much value each player reaps from his ability to drag servers into long rallies. Ruud and (especially) Alcaraz are very good past the ten-shot mark, but they don’t get there very often. Medvedev remains our king of negating short service points and creating long ones, but many of his peers are better at working a marathon rally to their own advantage.
No matter how we order the list, the key takeaway is that frequency is as important as win percentage. Returners rarely have a chance to finish points early, so extending the rally is almost always a positive step. Do that a lot, and you don’t have to convert a particularly high rate of those long points. Medvedev doesn’t, and he has become one of the tour’s best players on his least favorite surface. Annoyingly often, he breaks serve simply by putting one more ball in play.
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Danielle Collins at the 2023 Citi Open. Credit: Hameltion
Yesterday in Charleston, Paula Badosa hit 21 second serves. She missed five of them, and it’s easy to see why. With Danielle Collins on the other side of the net, Badosa salvaged just six second-serve points, a 29% success rate. Go big with your second serve, and you’ll rack up double faults. Play it safe, and Collins will destroy you.
The American has never been kind to second serves, and her current hot streak is no exception. With the defeat of Badosa to open her Charleston campaign, Collins has won eight in a row, including upsets of Elena Rybakina and fellow giant-killer Ekaterina Alexandrova. Here are the second-serve return stats for her title run in Miami:
Round Opponent W% vs 2nd
Final Rybakina 45%
SF Alexandrova 67%
QF Garcia 50%
R16 Cirstea 62%
R32 Avanesyan 82%
R64 Potapova 86%
R128 Pera 71%
AVERAGE 64%
Defending champion Ons Jabeur, waiting in the Charleston second round, has every reason to be nervous. The last time she faced Collins, in Miami two years ago, the American snatched 69% of Jabeur’s second-serve points.
These numbers are outrageous. The average top-50 player on the WTA tour wins about 56% of second-serve return points. Over the last 52 weeks, Collins is one of only four women to post a mark of 59% or better. The others–Iga Swiatek, Daria Kasatkina, and Lesia Tsurenko–take a different approach, defending with consistency and strategy. No one among the legions of lower-percentage sluggers handles second serves better than Collins does. Jelena Ostapenko is close, winning 58.8% of second-serve return points, though against slightly weaker opposition. Rybakina and Aryna Sabalenka come in under 56%, and Alexandrova–perhaps the freest swinger of all–sits at 54.5%.
Badosa, then, has nothing to be ashamed of. On a typical day, Collins will maul your second serve. At her current level, you might as well be a ball machine set to easy.
Second to none
Collins’s second-serve return skill is rather specific. Many of the game’s best returners–Iga and Kasatkina, Coco Gauff, Jessica Pegula–are better than average against both first and second serves. They excel at handling a variety of serves, and they rack up points when they put balls in play and let rallies develop.
Danielle is different. She’s fourth-best among the top 50 in second-serve points won, but 41st when the same group is ranked by first-serve points won. Match Charting Project data tells us that she is among the worst on tour at putting first serves back in play. Her aggression against attackable first serves prevents her results from being too dire. But she struggles to get the point going when she can’t take a big swing.
Here’s a visualization of each player’s success rates against first and second serves. The relationship between the two is fairly close–much closer than equivalent results on serve–so the trend line from the lower left to upper right is evident. Women located toward the upper left corner, like Collins, are those who are better at returning seconds than firsts. Those toward the lower right, such as Karolina Muchova, are better (relative to average) at handling firsts than seconds.
The plot makes it clear how Collins stacks up against her peers. She cleans up second serves as well as otherwise superior returners, like Pegula and Gauff. Against first serves, she plays more like other big hitters, such as Alexandrova and Rybakina. On return, she is basically the same as Ostapenko, even if her overall approach isn’t as mind-bogglingly aggressive as the Latvian’s.
The first-draft game plan against Danielle, then, is to make some first serves. For the love of all that is holy, make some first serves.
Desperate measures
In Saturday’s Miami final, Rybakina did not do that. The fourth-ranked woman in the world owns what might be the best first serve in the game; the problem is that she doesn’t land many of them. When I wrote about her back in February, she was showing signs of greater consistency. Since then, however, she has reverted to her usual rate of making fewer than 60% of her first serves. Over six matches in Miami, Rybakina cracked 53 aces but found the service box only 58% of the time.
Against Collins, her first-serve rate fell to a measly 53%. That, more than anything else, determined the outcome of an awfully close match. The American earned seven break points, and Rybakina landed her first serve on just two of them. One or two more unreturned firsts at those critical moments, and the story of the final would have been quite different.
Given Collins’s assault on second serves, it is worth asking: Are opponents going about this the wrong way? If the American is relatively weak against harder serves, why not accept more double faults and hit two first serves against her?
Fans have speculated about a “double-first” strategy for years. Back in 2014, Carl Bialik examined its potential, and I followed up a year later. The general conclusion is that two first serves is not a good idea, though for a few women–Victoria Azarenka and Sara Errani among them, in Carl’s analysis at the time–it could have improved their results.
(I say could because we don’t know the knock-on effects of such a radical approach. Carl and I both assumed that if a player hit two first serves, all of their serves would continue to be as effective as before. That might not hold true if returners saw less variety coming from the other side of the net.)
In my follow-up, I found that many individual matches offered opportunities for a double-first attack. It was next to impossible to predict them ahead of time, so it still didn’t make for much of a strategy. But it left open the possibility that there was something to be exploited by skipping second serves altogether.
Collins almost presents such an opportunity. The following scatterplot shows each player in the WTA top 50 and how the double-first strategy would fare against them.
Returners to the right of the line–that is, everybody–are those who would do better against two first serves than against the status quo. Swiatek is an outlier here: Servers would fare almost exactly as well against her if they hit two first serves. Collins is next: Opponents would sacrifice only 0.5 percentage points of the serve win rate if they never hit a second serve.
In Miami, though, Collins’s second-serve return was even more fearsome than usual. Again, it would be difficult to predict specific matches when a double-first strategy pays off, but some of her opponents probably would have accepted more double faults if it meant watching fewer return winners come rocketing back. Here is the same graph, with bubbles added for each of Collins’s Miami matches and another for the average of her Miami opponents:
Sorana Cirstea is tucked in there behind Alexandrova; their service results against Collins were almost identical. Again, points to the left of the line indicate situations where the double-first strategy would have won more points than the way things actually went. It wouldn’t have been wise for Rybakina or Garcia, but Danielle’s other five opponents would have benefited.
The true solution to the Collins conundrum lies in between: some second serves, but more risk-taking all around. I outlined some of those tradeoffs when I wrote about Qinwen Zheng in January. Simply praying for more first serves doesn’t do the trick. With Danielle set to retire at the end of the season, the rest of the tour doesn’t have much time to figure it out.
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