Author: jsackmann

Jiri Lehecka’s Excess of Self-Restraint

Also today: January 18, 1924

Jiri Lehecka at the 2023 US Open. Credit: Hameltion

It’s been a wild 2024 so far for Jiri Lehecka. He took a set from Novak Djokovic at the United Cup, beat Jack Draper for his first career ATP title in Adelaide, and then, defending quarter-finalist points at the Australian Open, lost today in the second round to 91st-ranked Alex Michelsen.

Even before the roller-coaster January, it was clear that the Czech was someone to watch. Ranked 23rd on the ATP computer, he’s the fifth-best player on tour under 23. He scored two top-ten victories last year–over Andrey Rublev and Felix Auger-Aliassime–and outlasted Tommy Paul in a gripping third-round five-setter at Wimbledon. For a moment it seemed that Czech men’s tennis had fallen into an uncharacteristic lull; with Lehecka, Tomas Machac, and 18-year-old Jakub Mensik on the rise, the country’s fortunes are headed back in the right direction.

Lehecka’s signature skill is raw power. A feature on the ATP website last February highlighted his average forehand speed of 79.2 miles per hour, a rate that compares to the likes of Rublev, Auger-Aliassime, and Jannik Sinner. He’s so strong that he propels those rockets without even looking like he’s trying. Rublev signals that a big swing is coming with an emphatic grunt; upon ignition, Lehecka demeanor is barely distinguishable from the pre-match warmup.

Yet the eye-popping power hasn’t shown up on the statsheet. According to my forehand potency metric, FHP, Lehecka ranks near the bottom of ATP regulars. His FHP is only 1.4 per match, right behind Diego Schwartzman. Rublev’s FHP per match is ten times higher, at 14.7. Same shot–at least according to the radar gun–but very different results. Converting FHP to points won, Rublev’s forehand earns eight or nine points each match that Lehecka’s forehand does not.

The Czech’s groundstroke winners are some of the prettiest on tour: compact strokes resulting in lasers that opponents can only watch from afar. He can turn on a second serve as well as anyone. But more often, he plays like someone without those natural gifts. One of his favorite shots is the groundstroke from the middle of his court back up the middle, deep. That choice is never a liability, exactly: opponents can rarely respond with an aggressive shot of their own, due in part to Lehecka’s natural power. But it never generates winners, and it doesn’t appear to have positive follow-on effects, either. According to Match Charting Project data, after hitting a down-the-middle forehand, he wins points 47% of the time, roughly in line with tour average.

It isn’t just the forehand. Few ATPers hit so many balls down the middle. The following table shows most of the players ahead of him in the rankings, along with the rates at which they hit groundstrokes in general down the middle (All DTM), and how often they hit forehands down the middle (FH DTM):

Player              All DTM  FH DTM  
Alex de Minaur        35.8%   28.8%  
Jiri Lehecka          34.2%   27.9%  
Holger Rune           33.0%   26.9%  
Jannik Sinner         29.7%   25.7%  
Alexander Zverev      29.4%   28.8%  
Ugo Humbert           29.3%   27.2%  
Cameron Norrie        29.2%   22.8%  
Taylor Fritz          28.7%   26.8%  
Grigor Dimitrov       28.3%   20.5%  
Nicolas Jarry         27.8%   22.5% 

Player              All DTM  FH DTM  
Daniil Medvedev       27.5%   27.8%  
Karen Khachanov       27.0%   22.0%  
Adrian Mannarino      26.8%   25.0%  
Frances Tiafoe        26.7%   21.9%  
Stefanos Tsitsipas    26.4%   22.3%  
Novak Djokovic        26.0%   21.1%  
Carlos Alcaraz        26.0%   22.6%  
Tommy Paul            25.8%   20.3%  
Casper Ruud           25.5%   21.1%  
Andrey Rublev         24.3%   18.1%  
Hubert Hurkacz        21.0%   16.6%

Only de Minaur goes up the middle more often, and he is a very different kind of player. While fellow basher Sinner is near the top of the list, even he is five percentage points less likely than Lehecka to take the conservative route. Rublev earns his baseline success by going to the other extreme. The forehand-specific numbers tell a similar story, except that Zverev and Medvedev join Lehecka and de Minaur near the top.

In theory, a crush-it-deep-down-the-middle strategy could work, but there’s little evidence that it does. The typical tour player wins 46% of the points when they hit a forehand down the middle, versus 56% when they hit a forehand elsewhere. True, the direction of every shot isn’t entirely in their control: some of those down-the-middle forehands are recovery shots. But many more are in the hands of the player who hits them. Lehecka’s power should generate, on average, weaker replies, meaning that his flexibility to choose his next shot is greater than that of his peers.

Against Draper in the Adelaide final, the Czech took a few more chances. Only 30% of his groundstrokes went down the middle, and an awful lot of those were very deep. He won 54%–an unusually high rate–of points in which he hit a forehand or backhand down the middle. He also didn’t miss, committing just one unforced error in that direction for the entire match. Lehecka, similar to the tour as a whole, usually hits unforced errors on about one-tenth of their shots down the middle.

Those numbers sound unsustainable, and today’s match against Michelsen suggests that they were. The young American kept the pressure up, and Lehecka responded by reverting to form. 42% of his groundstrokes went down the middle, he missed one in ten of them, and all told, he won just 45% of those points. Trade in those numbers for his results from the Adelaide final, and the Michelsen match becomes a dead heat.

The Czech, in short, seems to be squandering his raw power. His ace rate is slightly below tour average, his first-serve win percentage even more so. There’s no guarantee that directing more groundstrokes–especially forehands–to the corners would be a net improvement, but the Rublev’s example indicates that there are immense potential gains in that direction.

It isn’t easy to achieve the proper balance between point-winning aggression and not-point-losing passivity. Lehecka has many more years to figure it out. Until he does, we can continue to marvel at the blistering forehands of a player outside the top 20.

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January 18, 1924: In or Out?

One hundred years ago this week, the governing bodies of tennis were busy determining who wasn’t allowed to compete.

Regional associations in the United States were mulling a proposed USLTA rule that would revoke the amateur status of players who earned money writing about the sport. This was much more than a formality: Bill Tilden and Vinnie Richards, two of the strongest men in the game, were among those who earned their livings as journalists. Tennis was only slowly adapting to marquee names who didn’t come from money: Richards had once been suspended for working too closely with a sporting goods company, and Tilden rarely saw eye-to-eye with the men who ruled the federation.

On January 15th, the California LTA endorsed the regulation. The West Coasters tended to be a little less stodgy than the more tradition-oriented East Coast bodies, so the announcement did not bode well for Tilden’s and Richards’s chances of continuing in the amateur ranks. Tilden was ready to call the bluff: The 1925 squad for the all-important Davis Cup would look awfully fragile if the moonlighting journalists weren’t on it.

Another, more concrete decision, came down on the 18th. Molla Mallory, the Norwegian-born American star and seven-time US champion, was ruled ineligible for the Paris Olympics that summer. Tennis was still part of the Games, though 1924 would be its last appearance for decades. The USLTA had asked the International Olympic Committee for clarification: Would Mallory, would had represented Norway in 1912, be able to suit up for her adopted country?

The answer that arrived was negative–and it was worse than that. She couldn’t play for the US, because of her earlier appearances for Norway. But since she was now an American citizen, due to her 1919 marriage to businessman Franklin Mallory, she couldn’t play for Norway either!

The second flap was soon forgotten. Two weeks later, a clarification came from the IOC that Mallory was eligible to represent Norway, as she had been born there. She competed for her native country, losing in the quarter-finals to 18-year-old American sensation Helen Wills. Her chances in the doubles didn’t amount to much, since the rest of the Norwegian team was unknown abroad. With Jack Nielsen, she won a round in the mixed before falling in straight sets to the eventual silver medalists, Richards and Marion Zinderstein.

Richards had to suspend his journalistic activities to compete in Paris, since the IOC already had a policy preventing athletes from getting paid for writing about the Games. He didn’t regret it, winning gold medals in both singles and doubles. Tilden, though, honored his writing contracts and skipped the event. Besides, he said, Davis Cup was more important. He’d rather save energy for that.

Tilden would win the staredown with the USLTA, and famous tennis names would feature as newspaper bylines for years to come. Within a decade, full-time newspapermen would joke that their jobs were in danger from all the competition. In reality, those same anonymous journalists were writing the words that went under the better-known bylines. Only a few star athletes, including Tilden, cranked out their own copy.

Ghostwriting, then, was one of the early ways for “amateur” standouts to cash in on their celebrity. And in part, it was the reason that 1924 was the sport’s last full appearance at the Olympics for six decades. The IOC feared that tennis, for all its pretense to the contrary, had become too professional. As such, it didn’t belong in the Games.

Decades later, players would seize control of their own fates, even earning the right to compete in the Olympics as professionals. By then, the issues pitting athletes against federations would be different, but the movement could trace its roots to Bill Tilden and his insistence that he be allowed to write about tennis for money.

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Can Lorenzo Sonego Hunt Down Enough Forehands?

Lorenzo Sonego at Monte Carlo in 2022. Credit: si.robi

This year, Australian Open broadcasts threw a screwball into their traditional post-match statsheet. In the addition to the usual numbers–winners, unforced errors, break points won, and so forth–the graphic shows something called “Hunting 3rd Shot Forehand.” I must have missed a memo. This is the first I’ve heard of such a thing.

A puff piece for the Tennis Australia data group offers something of a definition. The new stat measures “the times the server forehands their first post-serve hit, indicating their desire to dictate the point.” Um, ok. In other words, when the service return comes back, how often does the server hit a forehand with his next shot?

The intention behind the metric is straightforward. You hear a lot these days about the “plus-one”–the server’s second shot. While the serve is the most important stroke in tennis, the plus-one shot is the next-most crucial opportunity to attack. Both because it arises often, and because it offers a chance to define the direction of the rally, even if it’s not yet possible to put the ball away.

It is easier to dictate play with a forehand than a backhand; the potential trajectories of the stroke give a player more options. Beyond that, most men have better forehands than backhands. (The stat appears on broadcasts for both men’s and women’s matches, but today I’m going to talk about the men’s game.) If the goal is to command the rally with the plus-one shot, it’s better to hit a forehand than a backhand. A higher “Hunting 3rd Shot Forehand” number, then, is better.

The post-match graphic, with new stat second from the bottom

Before we go further: I simply can’t use this name. It’s long and confusing. (Is the player hunting for the forehand? For a winner? For a silly rabbit?) I’m going to call it “3rd Shot FH%” or “3F%” for short.

(And yes, I promise to get to Sonego eventually.)

The stat is not as straightforward as the intention behind it. The implication of 3F%, I think, is something like, “How hard did the player try to hit plus-one forehands?” A possible further implication is, “How well did the returner prevent his opponent from hitting plus-one forehands?” The second question prompts yet another: “How well did the server keep the returner from sending balls to his backhand?”

It may be possible to separate some of those questions, but there’s a lot more spadework to do before we get there.

What is normal?

(You might doubt whether I am well-situated to answer. Still, we soldier on.)

Your TV screen shows you some “Hunting 3rd Shot Forehand” numbers. Are they good?

The 3F% metric can be calculated from Match Charting Project data, so we have thousands of data points to draw upon. Based on men’s matches since 2014, the average 3F% is 64.7%. The middle third of player-matches falls between 59.3% and 70.9%. Take a little liberty with rounding, and we can say that “normal” is the range from 60% to 70%. Less than 60%, and you’re doing something wrong–or you’d rather hit your backhand, or your opponent had a day. More than 70%, and you were really getting things done in the plus-one department.

Some players consistently land at the far ends of the distribution. Here are career numbers for the top ten active players by this metric, along with 15 more names of interest:

Player                3F%  
Lorenzo Sonego      78.6%  
Rafael Nadal        77.7%  
Joao Sousa          77.6%  
Denis Shapovalov    77.1%  
Albert Ramos        76.0%  
Jeremy Chardy       75.7%  
Milos Raonic        74.6%  
Stefanos Tsitsipas  74.4%  
Casper Ruud         73.9%  
Grigor Dimitrov     73.9%  
* * * * * * * * * * * * *                    
Holger Rune         69.7%  
Dominic Thiem       69.3%  
Hubert Hurkacz      67.5%  
Carlos Alcaraz      67.2%  
Andrey Rublev       64.7%  
Jannik Sinner       62.6%  
Alex de Minaur      61.2%  
Stan Wawrinka       60.9%  
Andy Murray         60.0%  
Taylor Fritz        58.3%  
Diego Schwartzman   56.9%  
Novak Djokovic      56.2%  
Frances Tiafoe      55.8%  
Alexander Zverev    51.1%  
Daniil Medvedev     50.0%

There’s Lorenzo!

The top of the list gives you an idea of what sorts of game styles result in lots of plus-one forehands. Big serves help. Left-handedness works in your favor, perhaps since everyone trains so hard to return to a right-hander’s backhand side. Some clay-courters do well, as they are less likely to think of the serve as a point-ending shot on its own, focusing instead on how it can set up the point.

It also helps to try to hit plus-one forehands. Neither Zverev nor Medvedev seem to think in those terms, so their low 3F% ratings don’t reflect any lack of execution.

Does this even matter?

Some valuable on-screen real estate–and an enormous amount of coaching time–would be wasted if 3F% didn’t correlate with points won. Fortunately for the conventional wisdom, it does: A plus-one forehand is more likely to lead to a point for the server than a plus-one backhand is.

57.5% of plus-one forehands eventually turn into a point won, compared to 50.9% of plus-one backhands. That’s a ratio of 1.13, a number that will be more useful as a reference point in a moment.

The value of a plus-one forehand depends on the player. Matteo Berrettini wins 58.5% of plus-one forehand points but only 44.6% of plus-one backhands. That’s a ratio of 1.31, one of the highest of any active player. For him, 3F% certainly matters: All else equal, more plus-one forehand points leads to better results overall.

(A word of caution, though: The marginal plus-one forehand point–that is, the next return that he might have ran around to hit a forehand, but didn’t–might not have improved his results for the better. Presumably Matteo knows his own capabilities, and he hits forehands only on those points where they improve his odds of winning. The marginal plus-one forehand, for a player like him, is a fairly desperate foray into the doubles alley.)

For others, the plus-one choice barely registers. Zverev wins 56.7% of plus-one forehands and 52.8% of backhands, a ratio of 1.07. Every other top-tenner has a wider split, but there are more extreme examples. Adrian Mannarino wins more points behind his plus-one backhand than forehand, 55.4% to 52.3%.

Sonego, our 3F% champion, gains nearly as much from his plus-one forehands as Berrettini does. He wins 57.1% of plus-one forehand points, against 44.4% for backhands. It isn’t easy to find his backhand, but it’s worth the attempt.

What about first and second serves?

As far as I know, broadcasts don’t separate the “Hunting” metric into first and second serves. But they should! Early in the rally, the effect of the serve retains plenty of influence.

The following table shows some of the tour-wide averages I’ve discussed so far–3F%, plus-one forehand points won, and plus-one backhand points won–broken down into first-serve and second-serve points:

AVERAGES     3F%  FH W%  BH W%   
1st serve  71.1%  60.3%  53.9%  
2nd serve  55.2%  52.2%  48.1%
Total      64.7%  57.5%  50.9%

Bigger serves generate weaker (and less targeted) returns, which invite more forehands. Behind second serves, ATPers only manage to hit forehands on 55% of their plus-one shots. On the other hand, the gap in points won isn’t as wide.

A fascinating outlier is Andrey Rublev. He finds the forehand on over 80% of his first-serve points, one of the highest numbers on tour. Behind the second serve, though, he hits plus-one forehands only 43% of the time–one of the lowest! It’s no secret that his second serve is a liability, but such a gap still comes as a surprise.

Sonego is a more typical case: lots more plus-one forehands on the first serve than the second (83% to 71%), and a wide gap in the results between forehands and backhands regardless of which serve it supports.

Converting from the backhand corner

With a few exceptions like Mannarino, most players want to hit as many plus-one forehands as they plausibly can. If the return goes to their forehand corner, obviously they’ll hit a forehand. If the return comes back up the middle, it’s either a no-doubt forehand or an easy decision to take a couple of steps around the ball and avoid the backhand.

The real decisions happen when the return goes to the backhand corner. Now we’ve moved into true Match Charting Project territory. I don’t know if the Australian Open has the data to drill down this far; either way, it probably won’t show up on your TV screen. In this corner of the internet, though, we’ll dive in.

About one-quarter of in-play returns go to the server’s backhand corner. Ernests Gulbis set the standard for plus-one backhanding, running around just 2% of those balls. On average, players go for the forehand 26.6% of the time. Even Zverev and Medvedev go that route sometimes: 9% for the German and 8% for the Russian.

Here again, Sonego sets the standard. He runs around 49% of those returns, winning 53% of the resulting plus-one forehands versus 47% of the backhands he can’t avoid. No other active player creates so many forehand opportunities. Of retired players in the charting dataset, only Carlos Moya and Leonardo Mayer were more extreme.

Here’s the same tour-averages table as above, now limited to points with returns to the backhand corner:

BH CORNER    3F%  FH W%  BH W%  
1st serve  34.9%  61.3%  53.0%  
2nd serve  16.9%  52.3%  47.3% 
Total      26.6%  58.7%  50.0%

It’s possible that many players–though probably not Sonego–are leaving some points on the table here. I’m surprised to see that the gap in win percentages between plus-one forehands and backhand is bigger for backhand-corner returns than returns in general. Backhand-corner returns are somewhat similar to each other–certainly more similar than returns in general. Thus I would expect that players would find an equilibrium in which they ran around enough shots that their forehand and backhand winning percentages end up closer together. Perhaps some ATPers overestimate the quality of their backhands, or maybe they don’t want to look foolish taking a chance in the doubles alley. Or they might just know what they’re doing, and the guy typing on his laptop should shut up about it.

Hunting Alcaraz

Sonego beat Dan Evans in Melbourne yesterday, earning him a date on Thursday with second-seeded Carlos Alcaraz. While there’s more to the match than Sonego’s hunt to maximize his 3F%, the battle for the Italian’s plus-one court position will play a big part.

Alcaraz is a bit better than the typical tour player at landing his returns in the server’s backhand corner, something he does 30.8% of the time, compared to the norm of 27.0%. But it doesn’t make him particularly effective at avoiding his opponents’ plus-one forehand. They find the preferred shot 64.5% of the time, almost exactly tour average. The story is the same when we look at first and second serves separately: Carlitos neither prevents nor encourages plus-one forehands.

There are, naturally, returners who consistently limit plus-one options; others don’t have the skills to avert a barrage of forehands. Jenson Brooksby allows opponents plus-one forehands on just 57.7% of his returns; Andy Murray and (surprisingly?) Rublev keep opponents’ numbers down around 59%. At the other extreme, Cam Norrie allows servers to hit plus-one forehands almost three-quarters of the time. He’s one of many lefties who struggle by this metric: Since serve returns are disproportionately backhands themselves, left-handers must often go down the line to put a return in a right-hander’s backhand corner. Norrie finds that corner only one-fifth of the time.

Well-targeted returns are good; forcing servers to hit plus-one backhands pays dividends. Alcaraz, though, is proof that you can make your money on the fourth shot and beyond. Opponents hit plenty of plus-one forehands against him, yet no matter what they choose for the second shot, they struggle to win the point. First serves, second serves, plus-one forehands, plus-one backhands … Carlitos beats tour average by multiple percentage points in every category. This table shows the difference between how players fare against Alcaraz and the average level, in percentage points:

VS CARLOS  rel FH W%  rel BH W%    
1st serve      -6.9%      -2.5%  
2nd serve      -2.2%      -5.0% 
Total          -5.7%      -3.5%

In other words, a plus-one forehand is 5.7 percentage points less likely to turn out well against Alcaraz than it is against an average ATP player. That’s a hefty margin for something that accounts for nearly half of the typical player’s service points.

It’s fun to know that Sonego occupies the unique position that he does on tour, and it’s entertaining to see some of the far-fetched places from which he’ll smack an inside-out forehand. It might even be useful to see the Italian’s “Hunting” stat at the conclusion of tomorrow’s match.

Alas, “setting up the point” and “winning the point” are two different things. Sonego might hunt down enough forehands against Alcaraz to manage the first, but the second is a considerably bigger ask.

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The Manufactured Attack of Caroline Garcia

Caroline Garcia in 2019. Credit: Peter Menzel

Last night, Caroline Garcia scored what many fans saw as an upset, straight-setting two-time Australian Open champion Naomi Osaka. While Garcia was seeded 16th and Osaka is just beginning a comeback, no one ever knows quite what to expect when the Frenchwoman takes the court. The former champ, for her part, has always been at her best on big stages.

The result was almost pedestrian. Garcia turned in a performance that exemplified the tennis of her late 20s: Serving big, returning pugnaciously, taking risks, and–on the rare occasions that Osaka left her an opening–net rushing. Osaka served well, but the 16th seed out-aced her, 13 to 11. More than three-quarters of points were decided in three shots or less, and Garcia stole a few more of those from her opponent than Osaka did from her. In a contest defined by small margins–one break of serve and a tiebreak–that was all it took.

The strange thing is, Caro didn’t use to play like this. She plays shorter points than any other tour regular, an average of 2.9 shots per point in charted matches from the last 52 weeks. It isn’t just about her powerful first serve: Her return points end even sooner than her serve points do. Back in 2018, when she first reached her career-best ranking of 4th on the WTA computer, she was averaging over four shots per point, a rally length that would put her in the range of Jessica Pegula and Maria Sakkari: in other words, a very different sort of player.

Here is the evolution of Garcia’s rally length, shown as a rolling 10-match average, for the 84 matches in the charting dataset:

Last night’s rally length was a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it 2.5 shots, the second-lowest figure I have on record for Garcia. Only a match against Donna Vekic last year comes in slightly lower, though last week’s match in Adelaide against Jelena Ostapenko may have been even more extreme. Osaka’s big game helped keep the number down, but it takes two to so comprehensively avoid the long-rally tango.

Garcia’s first serve has always been a weapon. But her tactical approach behind it has fluctuated wildly. The career trend of her Aggression Score in rallies illustrates how she has careened from one extreme to another. Aggression Score is scaled so that the most passive players rate around -100 and the most aggressive around 100, though Ostapenko and others have pushed the maximum figures further into triple digits. Here is how Garcia’s score has changed over time, again as rolling ten-match averages:

I don’t think there any other player in tennis–man or woman, past or present–who has followed a path like this. As she established herself as an elite on tour, even as she rose into the top five, she became more and more conservative. For reference, players who posted scores around zero in 2023 were Sakkari and Martina Trevisan, hardly styles that will remind you of Garcia’s. Eventually she reversed course, not only regaining her former style but surpassing it, ranking among Liudmila Samsonova and Aryna Sabalenka as one of the most aggressive players on tour, a rung below the class-of-her-own Ostapenko.

Is it working?

The oddest thing about the multiple phases of Garcia’s career is that she has reached the No. 4 ranking with two different styles. In each of her first three charted matches after achieving the peak ranking in 2018, she posted negative rally aggression scores. In two matches against Sabalenka, she averaged 3.9 and 3.7 shots per point; against Karolina Pliskova in the Tianjin final, the typical point lasted 4.3 strokes. When she returned to the No. 4 ranking at the end of 2022, after years in the wilderness, she was frequently posting triple-digit aggression scores and average rally lengths below 3.

The main effect of Garcia’s current style is that it makes the most of her serve. From 2015 to 2017, she won just over 66% of her first-serve points, a mark that is good but sub-elite. She fell all the way to 62% in 2021 before the big shift; since then, she has won more than 70% of her first-serve points. She ranked fourth in that stat heading into the Australian Open, and she converted nearly 90% of her first serves against Osaka. Her success behind the second serve hasn’t shown the same improvement, but the overall picture is a good one: She won more total serve points in 2023 than ever before.

The return game is a different story. This is where even a casual viewer can’t miss Caro’s new tactics: She’s not afraid to stand well inside the baseline to return serve, and yesterday she net-rushed one Osaka serve, SABR-style. Measured by court position, if not by winners and error stats, Garcia is even more aggressive than Ostapenko.

At her best, the Frenchwoman posted acceptable return numbers, if not great ones. Her best single-season mark, winning 42.7% of her return points in 2017, put her in the bottom third of top-50 players. As she has upped the intensity of her attack, this key number has headed south:

In the last 52 weeks, she has won just 38.3% of return points, worst among the top 50 by two full percentage points. Among the top 20, no one else is below 42%. She can get away with it because her own serve is so rarely broken, but such ineffectual return results will make it difficult to mount another assault on the top five. Breaking serve so rarely dooms her to a career of three-setters and narrow decisions. Those sorts of results can sometimes be encouraging–as in her pair of recent three-set losses to Iga Swiatek–but have a knack for halting winning streaks, too.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Players don’t sign contracts agreeing to deploy the same tactics on both sides of the ball. Garcia won return games far more often in her less aggressive days, breaking 33% of the time in 2017 compared to a dreadful 23% last year.

Some of Caro’s 2017 skills are still in evidence. She is solid enough in long rallies that she doesn’t need to so actively avoid them: In the last year, she has won a respectable 48% of points that lasted seven or more strokes, and if you remove the two Swiatek matches, she breaks even. While the Osaka match was primarily determined by short points, Garcia won 17 of 29 (59%) that went to a fourth shot.

Without any major changes, Garcia will remain the sort of player who aggravates fans and opponents alike, a dangerous lurker capable of delivering upsets, inexplicable marathons, and lame early exits in equal measure. Like any hyper-aggressive player, Caro’s results can be seemingly random, with all the frustration that entails. Unlike Ostapenko, Sabalenka, and the many ball-bashers on tour, though, Garcia has chosen to play this way, rebuilding her game into something that the 2018 version of herself would hardly recognize. If she can somehow join her late-career serve to her earlier return-game tactics, the randomness will disappear, and Caro may make yet another appearance in the top five.

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The Improbable Rise of Emma Navarro

Also today: New stat leaderboards

Emma Navarro at the 2023 US Open. Credit: Hameltion

When Emma Navarro beat Elise Mertens for her first WTA title in Hobart on Saturday, it was only part of a natural progression. For more than a year now, she has shown a knack for winning, regardless of level, surface, or just about anything else. While most fans still don’t know her name, she’s up to 26th in the official rankings and 22nd on the Elo list.

The former collegiate champion–winner of the national title as a Virginia Cavalier in 2021–started her 2023 campaign just inside the top 150. She arrived at the brink of the top 100 with back-to-back ITF titles on clay in April, then cracked the top 60 with a grass-court final in Ilkley. Her first top-ten win came in September on hard courts, against Maria Sakkari in San Diego, and after a busy fall that included another two ITF titles, she broke into the top 40. She’s 8-1 so far in 2024; the only blip is a loss to Coco Gauff.

Altogether, that’s 72 victories since the beginning of last year. Not many women can boast so much success at the W25 level or higher in that span:

Player                   2023-24 Wins  
Arina Rodionova                    79  
Iga Swiatek                        73  
Emma Navarro                       72  
Oceane Dodin                       64  
Jessica Pegula                     62  
Julia Riera                        59  
Aryna Sabalenka                    59  
Martina Capurro Taborda            59  
Yafan Wang                         58  
Carlota Martinez Cirez             57

The remarkable part of Navarro’s rise is not the sheer quantity of positive results; it’s that she rose through the rankings so fast at the age she did. She first cracked the top 100 last May just before her 22nd birthday–hardly old by any rational standards, but nearly geriatric on the youth-driven WTA tour. The 25 players standing in front of Navarro in this week’s rankings broke into the top 100, on average, before their 20th birthday: The median is Aryna Sabalenka’s arrival at 19 years, 5 months. Late developers like Jessica Pegula, Barbora Krejcikova, and Navarro are exceptions to a long-standing rule.

It’s not unusual for a player to finally achieve a double-digit ranking when they are 21 or older, but it’s rare for a future star to do so–and now that Navarro is a tour-level title-holder ensconced in the top 30, she deserves that label. Since 1990, there have been 207 players who finished their age-21 season ranked between 101 and 200 without a previous appearance in the top 100. Only 25 of them reached #100 at the end of the following year; Navarro was only the fourth to crack the top 50.

Of those 200-plus players, only 35 of them ever achieved a top-40 ranking. (A few more, including Katie Boulter and Katie Volynets, could still join the group.) On average, it took them 1437 days–just short of four years–to do so. Navarro needed only 315 days, the second-fastest in the last 30-plus years. Here are the players who made the fastest move from the end of their age-21 season to the top 40:

Player                 Age 21  top 40 debut  Days  
Elise Mertens            2016    2017-08-28   245  
Emma Navarro             2022    2023-11-06   315  
Veronika Kudermetova     2018    2019-11-11   315  
Kurumi Nara              2012    2014-06-09   525  
Jamie Hampton            2011    2013-06-24   546  
Casey Dellacqua          2006    2008-07-28   581  
Tathiana Garbin          1998    2000-09-25   637  
Liudmila Samsonova       2019    2021-11-01   672  
Bethanie Mattek Sands    2006    2008-11-03   679  
Anne Kremer              1996    1999-04-12   833  
Jil Teichmann            2018    2021-04-26   847  
Zi Yan                   2005    2008-05-05   861  
Paula Badosa             2018    2021-05-24   875  
Yone Kamio               1992    1995-06-12   896  
Alison Riske Amritraj    2011    2014-06-09   896  
Johanna Konta            2012    2016-02-01  1127

It’s possible that Navarro could have been ready for the big time earlier had she not spent two years playing college tennis. Her sub-100 ranking at the end of 2022 was partly due to a limited schedule, as she played only a handful of tournaments before leaving school after the spring semester that year. But she wasn’t playing top-100 tennis when she did step on court: Elo ratings respond much more quickly to quality results (and do not reward quantity for its own sake), and her ranking by that algorithm, 148th, was virtually identical to her place on the official list.

Whatever the benefits and (temporary) costs of her stay at the University of Virginia, Navarro seemed to learn from the step up in competition–and quickly. She lost her first 11 matches against the top 50; in the last four months, she has won 5 of 6.

What works

The most memorable victory so far was Saturday’s triumph over Mertens for a debut WTA title. It was a grind, taking two hours, 50 minutes, and spanning 14 breaks of serve en route to a 6-1, 4-6, 7-5 finish. There was little first-strike tennis on display, as the average point ran to 5.5 strokes. 69 points required seven shots or more, and 37 reached double digits.

The battle for openings worked to Navarro’s advantage. In a sample of eleven previous matches logged by the Match Charting Project, she struggled in longer rallies, winning just 46% of points that reached a seventh shot compared to 49% overall. On Saturday, she reversed that trend in a big way, out-point-constructing her veteran opponent and winning a whopping 59% of the longer points. Of 84 charted Mertens matches, it was only the eighth time that she played at least 20 long points and won so few of them. Among the few players to beat her so soundly on rally tactics: Pegula and Simona Halep.

While Navarro’s results have steadily improved, her game plan is still recognizable form her days as a college champion. After defeating Miami’s Estrela Perez-Somarriba for the 2021 NCAA title, she described her approach: “I was able to dictate with my forehand and finish a lot of points with my backhand.” In Hobart, her backhand continued to populate the highlight reel, with seven clean down-the-line winners. But it was the forehand that opened the court in the first place.

She played, essentially, a clay-court match, using the forehand to create opportunities for the next ball. She hit winners with 7% of her forehand groundstrokes, slightly below tour average. But when she was able to hit a forehand, she won the point 62% of the time, an outstanding figure for a close match. One point serves as an illustration of the rest: At 2-all, 15-all in the third set, Navarro converted a return point with a down-the-line backhand winner on the 14th shot of the rally. After a deep forehand return, Navarro was forced to hit two backhands. When she was finally able to deploy the forehand on the 8th shot, she stabilized the point by going down the middle. The 10th shot took advantage of a let cord with a heavy crosscourt forehand, a weapon that worked in her favor on Saturday more than two-thirds of the time. Her next forehand went the other direction, creating the space for–finally–a backhand out of the Belgian’s reach.

While not every point was quite so tactical, point construction always lurked. Mertens frequently attempted a pattern where she would go the same direction with two consecutive groundstrokes then, having wrong-footed Navarro with the second of them, go for a winner. The sequence doesn’t work against a big swinger because the points don’t last long enough. That wasn’t a problem against the American, but Navarro’s resourcefulness nullified the tactic nonetheless. Unlike many players her age, Navarro is able to use slices off both wings to neutralize points, and she often did so on the second shot of Mertens’s would-be pattern. The Hobart champion hit 40 slices over the course of the match, ultimately winning the point on 20 of them. For a defensive shot, rescuing 50% of those situations counts as a victory.

There is little in Navarro’s game that advertises her as a world-beater: The weapons I’ve described work best as part of a carefully-managed package. She may prove to be most dangerous on clay, where aggressive opponents will have a harder time keeping points short. She might also develop yet another level. Twelve months ago, only a reckless forecaster would have predicted she could rise so high, so quickly. We still haven’t seen her peak.

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Deep leaderboards

Among the cult favorites on the Tennis Abstract site are the tour leaderboard pages, which contain nearly 60 sortable stats for the top 50 players on each circuit. Many of those stats aren’t available anywhere else, including things like average opponent ranking and time per match. It’s also possible to filter the matches for each calculation to determine things like the best hold percentages on clay.

Last week I introduced three new pages that extend the same concept:

Here’s just one example of what’s possible, the best WTA players outside the top 50 by ace percentage:

These are a great way to identify standout skills of lesser-known players. All of the leaderboards update every Monday.

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Jelena Ostapenko In the Hands of Fate

Also today: Deciding tiebreaks, a MCP milestone, and assorted links.

Jelena Ostapenko in 2023. Credit: Hameltion

If you’ve ever spent five minutes watching Jelena Ostapenko play tennis, you know she’s as aggressive as it gets. She swings for the fences and sometimes knocks them over. Get her on a hot streak, and opponents can only hope its ends before the handshake. When she’s off her game, spectators in the first few rows duck for cover.

What you might not realize is just how aggressive she is. A few years ago I tuned Lowell West’s Aggression Score metric so that the numbers fell in a range between 0 and 100. In theory, 0 is maximally passive; 100 is go-for-broke, all the time. Ostapenko’s career Aggression Score in rallies is 175.

This sort of extreme style lends itself to all sorts of narratives. She can beat anybody, any time, as she showed when she won the 2017 French Open as an unseeded player, and again last year when she upset Iga Swiatek at the US Open–her fourth win in as many matches against the Pole. That makes her a perennial dark horse pick at majors. Even though she hasn’t reached a semi-final since 2018, neither Iga nor Coco Gauff–who exited the Australian Open after an Ostapenko barrage last year–would like her find her in their section.

(Sorry Iga: Guess who you might face in the quarters!)

Hyper-aggressive players also appear to be works in progress. Especially early in Ostapenko’s career, commentators would talk about her stratospheric potential if she could only improve her footwork, or play a bit more “within herself.” That is, not quite so many winners, not quite so soon, more point construction, fewer unforced errors. But players rarely change much, and as they age, they are more likely to become more aggressive, not less. The Latvian is now 26 years old, beginning her ninth year on tour. What you see is what you get.

What you get, it turns out, is a lot of close matches. Ostapenko played 30 three-setters last year, including four in a row to reach the Birmingham final and another four straight to start the US Open. Alona’s apotheosis came at Indian Wells, when she faced fellow super-aggressor Petra Kvitova in the third round. Both women tallied exactly 75 points; Kvitova won, 0-6, 6-0, 6-4. Tennis ball fuzz could be seen floating over the desert for days afterward.

That particular scoreline was an oddity, but the margin of victory was not. Ostapenko’s tight matches are not a result of streakiness, flightiness, or anything of the sort. They are an unavoidable function of her game style. It’s almost impossible to hit lots of winners without also committing piles of unforced errors. (We’ll come back to that.) When you do both in such numbers, you personally account for a substantial majority of point outcomes. The winners and errors (very approximately) balance each other out, and unless your opponent does something remarkable–or remarkably bad–with the limited influence you leave her, you end up winning about half the points played.

No one takes the racket out of an opponent’s hand like Ostapenko does. Once the return is in play, the Latvian ends nearly two-thirds of points herself, with a winner or unforced error, or by forcing an error. No one else comes close. Drawing on Match Charting Project data, I’ve listed the active players who end the most rallies:

Player                 RallyEnd%  
Jelena Ostapenko           65.9%  
Petra Kvitova              61.6%  
Madison Keys               60.8%  
Liudmila Samsonova         60.0%  
Camila Giorgi              59.7%  
Aryna Sabalenka            59.7%  
Veronika Kudermetova       57.5%  
Danielle Collins           57.5%  
Ekaterina Alexandrova      57.2%  
Ons Jabeur                 56.8%  
Peyton Stearns             56.5%  
Caroline Garcia            56.2%  
Naomi Osaka                56.2%  
Varvara Gracheva           55.0%  
Iga Swiatek                55.0%

Here’s another way to look at Alona’s extreme position on this list. The only other woman to grade out so far from 50% is Madison Brengle, who ends fewer than 34% of rallies. Ostapenko’s power turns the rest of the tour into Brengle.

Give and take

Ending even 57% of points on your own racket requires a lot of big swings. When you aim for a line, you might feel confidence about your chances, but you are taking a risk. A few players, like Swiatek, can generate winners without paying the unforced-error penalty, but that takes an unusual combination of patience and power that most players do not possess.

The 66% of points that Ostapenko ends on her own racket divides into roughly 37% winners (and forced errors) and 29% unforced errors. That’s worse than Aryna Sabalenka, who hits nearly as many winners with only a 23% error rate, but compared to the tour as a whole, the ratio is a solid one. For every unforced error she commits, she ends 1.25 points in her favor. Average among players represented in the Match Charting Project is 1.16, and the true mean is probably lower than that, since the MCP is more heavily weighted toward the best players.

The ratio varies among players, but there is a fairly strong relationship. Here are the winner/forced error and unforced error rates–each as a percentage of all points where the return came back in play–for 140 current and recent players:

The correlation between the two rates (r2 = 0.3) would be even stronger if it weren’t for net-rushers like Tatjana Maria–and to some extent Leylah Fernandez–who force their passive opponents into more aggression than they would otherwise produce.

As Sabalenka shows, it’s possible to seize as many points as Ostapenko does without giving quite so many away, but even that may be a mirage: Sabalenka racks up winners behind an overpowering serve that the Latvian can’t match. If the plot above is any indication, it would be difficult to bring her error rate down without also sacrificing some winners, not to mention the élan that she has ridden to seven tour-level titles.

So we’re left with something of a paradox. A hyper-aggressive player has more control over her fate than her peers do, but that control comes at a cost of a towering error rate, which keeps matches close. One result is a week like this one in Adelaide, where Ostapenko has reached the final by slipping through perilously tight battles with Sorana Cirstea (51.7% of points won) and Caroline Garcia (50.2%). Both matches could’ve gone the other way, something that is true so often when the Latvian steps on court. My tactical advice for Daria Kasatkina in tomorrow’s final: Cross your fingers.

* * *

Deciding-set tiebreak records

AbsurDB asks:

[A]m I right that Hurkacz’s 15 deciding sets going into tie-breaks in one calendar year is a historical record in ATP (10 such tie-breaks won is also probably a record?)?

Indeed, both are records. According to my data, the previous records came from Ivo Karlovic’s 2007 season, when he reached 11 deciding-set tiebreaks, winning eight of them. Here are all the player-seasons with nine or more.

Player              Season  Dec TB  Record  
Hubert Hurkacz        2023      15    10-5  
Ivo Karlovic          2007      11     8-3  
John Isner            2011      11     4-7  
John Isner            2018      11     6-5  
Ivo Karlovic          2014      10     7-3  
John Isner            2017      10     5-5  
Kevin Anderson        2018      10     6-4  
Mark Philippoussis    2000       9     5-4  
Marat Safin           2000       9     5-4  
Ivan Ljubicic         2002       9     2-7  
Ivan Ljubicic         2007       9     8-1  
Ivo Karlovic          2008       9     5-4  
Sam Querrey           2018       9     1-8  
Borna Coric           2019       9     6-3  
Hubert Hurkacz        2022       9     3-6

(Yes, I checked before 2000, as well, but no one reached nine until Philippousis did so that year. The first player-season with eight deciding-set tiebreaks was Tom Gullikson’s, in 1984.)

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MCP Milestones

Earlier this week, the Match Charting Project recorded its two-millionth point:

The milestone match was the Auckland second-rounder between Ben Shelton and Fabian Marozsan, which I charted as a warm-up for my article on Wednesday. We’re not resting on our laurels, of course: We’ve added another five matches (and 800 or so points) in the 48 hours since.

Also worth mentioning is another round number we reached in the offseason: 1,000 different ATP players. Apart from the name syou’d expect, it’s a healthy mix of lower-ranked active players and former tour regulars. #1,000 was Martin Jaite, via his 1987 Rome final against Mats Wilander. We’ve also now charted 800 different WTAers.

We stand about 200 charts away from 13,000 matches overall: approximately 7,000 men’s and 6,000 women’s. 2023 was our most productive year yet, and 2024 would be a great time to start contributing.

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Assorted links

  • Earlier this week I appeared on Alex Gruskin’s Mini-Break Podcast, in which he got overexcited about a number of week one trends, and I tried to talk him down from all the ledges.
  • I wrote about how GPT4 helped me make Tennis Abstract’s new navbar, because you had to know I didn’t do it myself.
  • The tours have introduced a new policy on late matches. I’m underwhelmed: There are an awful lot of exceptions, and there’s no acknowledgement of the underlying problem of longer and longer matches.
  • Two student projects worth a look: Pramukh’s Evaluating Tennis Player Styles in Relation to Tour Averages, based on MCP data, and Amrit’s Aces over Expected model.
  • If you can’t wait until Sunday for grand slam tennis, here’s the Clijsters-Henin 2003 US Open final.

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What Is Ben Shelton’s Ceiling?

Also today: First serve stats, and new Tennis Abstract reports.

Ben Shelton. Credit: 350z33

Ben Shelton is one of the rising stars of men’s tennis, the most exciting young player this side of Carlos Alcaraz. He possesses a monster serve, he’s not afraid to unleash old-school tactics, and he wears his heart on his sleeve. It’s impossible to root against this guy.

Shelton is also, by the standards of the game’s elite, not a very good returner.

Any discussion of his potential has to come to terms with this most obvious limitation. His rocket of a lefty serve will never hold him back; indeed, it’s already earned him places in the US Open semi-finals and the Australian Open quarters. You don’t have to do much dreaming to see him going even further and winning a major outright. What’s tougher to forecast is the sort of sustained performance that would take him to the top of the rankings.

Last year, Shelton won 32.6% of his return points at tour level. Average among the top 50 was 37.1%, and the top four players on the circuit (and Alex de Minaur) all topped 40%. Of the top 50, only Christopher Eubanks, at 30.9%, came in below Shelton.

There’s plenty of time for Ben to improve, and I’ll get to that in a moment. But first, let me show you the list of the year-end top-ten players with the lowest percentage of return points won (RPW%) since 1991, when the ATP began to keep these stats:

Player              Season  Rank   RPW%  
John Isner            2018    10  29.4%  
Kevin Anderson        2018     6  33.7%  
Milos Raonic          2014     8  33.8%  
Andy Roddick          2007     6  34.0%  
Hubert Hurkacz        2023     9  34.3%  
Greg Rusedski         1997     6  34.5%  
Matteo Berrettini     2019     8  34.6%  
Ivan Ljubicic         2005     9  34.6%  
Hubert Hurkacz        2022    10  34.7%  
Greg Rusedski         1998     9  34.7%  
Stefanos Tsitsipas    2023     6  34.7%  
Mark Philippoussis    2003     9  34.8%  
Andy Roddick          2010     8  34.9%  
Pete Sampras          1996     1  35.3%  
Jo Wilfried Tsonga    2009    10  35.3%  
Goran Ivanisevic      1995    10  35.4%  
Andy Roddick          2009     7  35.5%  
Pete Sampras          2000     3  35.5%  
Pete Sampras          2001    10  35.6%  
Andy Roddick          2008     8  35.6%

In 33 years, out of 330 top-ten finishes, only one man has reached the threshold with a RPW% lower than Shelton’s last year. And it’s someone you can’t exactly pattern a career after: If you look up “outlier” in the dictionary, you find John Isner’s face staring back at you.

Even more striking to me is that no one has finished in the top five with a RPW% below 35%. Then comes another outlier, Pete Sampras and his 1996 campaign. If your goal is to finish a season at number one, you’ll usually need a strong return. Sampras and Andy Roddick are the only two men who have topped the rankings with a RPW% below 38%. Otherwise, you’ve got to ask yourself one question: Are you Pete Sampras?

Here are the lowest RPW% numbers for top-three finishers since 1991:

Player           Season  Rank   RPW%  
Pete Sampras       1996     1  35.3%  
Pete Sampras       2000     3  35.5%  
Andy Roddick       2005     3  36.0%  
Milos Raonic       2016     3  36.1%  
Andy Roddick       2003     1  36.4%  
Casper Ruud        2022     3  36.9%  
Pete Sampras       1999     3  37.3%  
Andy Roddick       2004     2  37.5%  
Boris Becker       1994     3  37.6%  
Michael Stich      1993     2  37.9%  
Pete Sampras       1998     1  38.0%  
Marat Safin        2000     2  38.1%  
Grigor Dimitrov    2017     3  38.2%  
Patrick Rafter     1997     2  38.2%  
Roger Federer      2009     1  38.3%

(Did you expect to see Casper Ruud on this list? I did not.)

Shelton’s serve means that he could reach the top without the return-game success of Alcaraz or Novak Djokovic. But if he wants to move beyond the fringes of the top ten, this second table shows the range he needs to aim for. Setting aside the hot-and-cold tactics of Pistol Pete (we’ll come back to that, too), we can simplify things and say that a would-be world-beater needs to get his RPW% up around 36% or 37%.

How much can a return improve?

Bettering your core stats is possible, but not easy. Another lefty, Feliciano Lopez, offers a cautionary tale. In his age-20 season, he won 31.7% of return points, not far below Shelton’s mark. Here’s how his career developed:

Lopez didn’t top 34% for more than a decade, and he only reached 35% when he was 34 years old. In seven of his ten seasons between the ages of 21 and 30, his return was no more than 1.5 percentage points better than that first season.

Here’s another one. Milos Raonic won 33.5% of his return points as a 20-year-old. He’s a better comp for Shelton, because Raonic’s serve was similarly effective as well. This graph shows how Raonic’s return evolved:

He barely improved on that 33.5% mark until 2016, when he peaked at number three in the ATP rankings, and he couldn’t sustain it. His career RPW% went into the books at 33.9%.

Many of you, I’m sure, are ready to object: Lopez was never the pure athlete that Shelton is! Raonic certainly wasn’t, and he played through one injury after another. Fair enough–if there are natural gifts that make it more likely that a player develops a tour-average return game after arriving on tour, Ben probably has them. Tough to argue with that.

Still, the numbers are brutal. There have been 99 players who racked up 20 or more tour-level matches in their age-20 season since 1991. 22 of them never improved–they never won return points at a higher rate than they did when they were 20. Of the lucky ones who managed to do better at some point in their careers, their peak was, on average, 1.7 percentage points higher than their age 20 number. For Shelton, that’s a peak RPW% of 34.3%, well below the targets established above.

Of that group of 99 20-year-olds, one out of ten improved (eventually) by at least ten percent–not percentage points–a gain that would move Shelton up to 35.9%, essentially the border of where he needs to be for a top-three finish. Let’s not understate the difficulty of the task. Players who reach tour level by age 20 are extremely promising, almost without exception, and Ben needs to put himself in the top tenth of that group.

It’s not obvious why boosting your return-game results is so difficult, or so rare. (It’s harder than improving serve stats, but that’s a topic for another day.) One factor is that as you climb the rankings, you face tougher opponents, so even if your game gets better, your stats appear to stagnate. The median rank of Shelton’s opponents last year was 54.5. The same number for Andrey Rublev is 40, and Daniil Medvedev’s was 27.

Another reason is that returning is a young man’s game. The skills that contribute to the service return–vision, reaction time, quickness, speed–peak early. I have no doubt that Lopez, Raonic, and just about everybody else on tour worked hard to get more out of their return over the years, but many of their gains simply cancelled out the losses they suffered from the aging process.

Beyond RPW%

Sampras was famous for tanking some return games, then going all-out late in the set. The energy-saving strategy was time-tested, going back another half-century to the “Big Game” theories of Jack Kramer and his mentor Cliff Roche. If you hold your serve (almost) every time you toe the line, you only need to break once–or win the tiebreak. Why waste the effort on every return point?

Shelton doesn’t go quite that far; he rarely looks apathetic on return. But he clearly gets energized when an opportunity presents itself, or when he decides it’s time to create one. If a player can consistently play better in big moments, his RPW% won’t tell the whole story. Nick Krygios did this on break points, though it wasn’t enough to get him into the top ten.

There’s some evidence that Shelton does as well. If he always played the same way–the level that earned him 32.6% of his return points–a simple model would predict that he would break serve 13.3% of the time. Instead, he broke 16% of the time, a rate that the model would have predicted for a returner winning 34.4% of points. Still not top-three territory, but getting closer.

Isner often overcame his return woes by securing more tiebreaks than his first-twelve-game performance would have suggested. He won more than 60% of his career breakers, coming close to a 70% mark in two separate seasons. Shelton might be using similar tactics, but he isn’t yet getting the same sort of results: He went a modest 18-16 in tiebreaks last season.

What about break points? This is one area where Sampras noticeably stepped up his game. From 1991 to 2000, he won 44 more break points than expected, based on his return-point stats on non-break points. It’s not a huge advantage–about one extra break of serve every 16 matches–but most players break even. This is one way in which Pete’s RPW% understated his effectiveness on return.

Here, Shelton really shines. My model suggests that he “should” have won break points at a 35.0% clip last year, since on average, players win break points more frequently than other return points. (Break points arise more often against weaker servers.) Incredibly, Ben won more than 41% of his break point chances. Instead of 96 breaks of serve, he earned 114. Since 1991, only a few dozen players have ever outperformed break point expectations by such a wide margin for a full season. Sampras never did, though he once got close.

If Shelton can sustain that level of break-point play, we might as well make room for him in the Hall of Fame right now. A modest improvement in RPW%, combined with reliably clutch performance in the big moments, would move him into the Sampras/Roddick range, where big servers can break serve just enough to catapult to the top of the rankings.

But… it’s a big if. Sampras averaged just four or five extra breaks per season, and he’s one of the all-time greats. In 2003, James Blake also exceeded break-point expectations by a margin of 18. The next year his score was negative 5. Across 2,600 pairs of player-seasons, there’s virtually no correlation between break point performance one year and the next. Shelton may defy the odds, just as Isner rewrote the book on tiebreak performance. But the smart money says that he won’t be so lucky this year.

Where does this leave us? If we’re optimistic about Shelton’s athleticism, commitment, and coaching team, there’s reason to expect that he’ll eventually win more return points–though probably not enough to reach the 36% threshold that usually marks off the top three. If he proves able to execute Kramer/Sampras/Kyrgios tactics under pressure, that might be enough to make up the difference. If he can do that, and he can remain as fearsome a server as he already appears to be, we might have a multi-slam winner, a top-three, maybe even number one player on our hands. The ceiling is high, but the ladder is steep.

* * *

First serve dominance

James Fawcette asks:

[At the United Cup] de Minaur lost only 1 point behind his first serve vs Djokovic, 33 of 34. Has anyone ever won every first serve point vs the then world number one in a completed match?

No!

Going back to 1991, when the ATP started keeping these stats, no one else lost only one, either. Here are the 18 matches in which a player lost three or fewer first-serve points against the world number one. In seven of the matches (noted with asterisks), all that big serving was for naught, and the favorite won anyway.

Tournament         Rd   Winner      Loser       Lost     
2024 United Cup    QF   de Minaur   Djokovic       1     
1992 Tour Finals   RR   Ivanisevic  Courier        2     
1993 Osaka         QF   Courier     Raoux          2  *  
1993 Tour Finals   RR   Sampras     Bruguera       2  *  
1996 Dusseldorf    RR   Kafelnikov  Sampras        2     
2000 Miami         SF   Kuerten     Agassi         2     
2002 Hamburg       QF   Safin       Hewitt         2     
2008 Indian Wells  SF   Fish        Federer        2     
2011 Tour Finals   RR   Ferrer      Djokovic       2     
1992 Paris         QF   Becker      Courier        3     
1992 Brussels      R16  Courier     Leconte        3  *  
1996 Tour Finals   SF   Sampras     Ivanisevic     3  *  
2000 Scottsdale    R16  Clavet      Agassi         3     
2002 Rome          R32  Moya        Hewitt         3     
2008 Halle         SF   Federer     Kiefer         3  *  
2008 Olympics      R64  Federer     Tursunov       3  *  
2010 Tour Finals   F    Federer     Nadal          3     
2018 Canada        R32  Nadal       Paire          3  *

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New toys

Yesterday I added two new features to Tennis Abstract. First, there’s a list of today’s birthdays:

Second, there’s a “Bakery Report” (one each for men and women) with comprehensive stats on 6-0 and 6-1 sets won and lost:

The birthday list will update daily, and the bakery report will refresh every Monday, expect in the middle of grand slams.

Enjoy!

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How Grigor Dimitrov Unbalanced Holger Rune in Brisbane

Grigor Dimitrov. Credit: Bradley Kanaris / Getty

Grigor Dimitrov was long known as “Baby Fed,” but yesterday, Holger Rune was the one trying to do a Roger Federer impression. Facing break point at 3-all in the second set, Rune kicked a second serve wide, got a cross-court slice reply, then ran around his backhand to smack an inside-in forehand: a high-risk, high-reward shot, especially if you aim for the line. Rune went big and he pulled it wide. That was the only break of the match.

The 20-year-old had already missed one of those in the same game: The first error dug him a 15-40 hole. Over the course of the match, he attempted seven inside-in forehands, a shot that usually wins him two out of three points. Against Dimitrov, he blew four of them.

The errors are a symptom of one of something separating Rune from the top of the game. In his eagerness to maintain an aggressive position at the baseline–a willingness that defines his style and, in fairness, often pays off–he tries a bit too hard. He swings to end points in three shots that probably need to go five. He keeps a toe on the baseline when he ought to be one step further back.

This isn’t a secret, and Dimitrov exploited it. The Bulgarian landed 82% of his returns behind the service line, compared to a tour average of 70%. 39% of Dimitrov’s returns fell in the back quarter of the court, beating the 28% that players typically face. In rallies, the veteran kept pummeling Rune’s feet, prioritizing depth over direction.

The strategy worked. Take the other pivotal juncture of the match, early in the first-set tiebreak. Serving at 0-1, Rune pushed Dimitrov off the court with an inside-out forehand, which came back as a deep slice. Nothing special, but as Rune stepped back to accommodate it, he hit an equally indifferent reply. Dimitrov came back with another middle-deep backhand and Rune hit the tape with as pedestrian an error as you’ll ever see. At 0-2, Rune’s plus-one forehand forced Dimitrov deep and set up the point for an easy finish–or so he thought. Dimitrov managed to get his defensive forehand deep enough that Rune stepped in–his back foot on the baseline–and the result was another miss that would leave a club player berating himself.

On both points, a slightly more conservative court position, or a better last-minute adjustment step, would have let Rune continue the rally with his opponent on the run. Most players tread more carefully in tiebreaks. Instead, he missed twice and fell to 0-3. He got one point back but couldn’t close the entire gap and lost the first set, 7-6(5).

Middle-deep mediocrity

Yesterday wasn’t the first time that Rune misreads a neutral opportunity as a chance to go big. His own-the-baseline strategy is a mixed bag, the best example of which is how he responds to service returns that land at his feet. The Match Charting Project codes every return by direction (cross-court, middle, or down-the-line) and by depth (shallow–in front of the service line, deep–behind it, or very deep–in the back quarter of the court). Dimitrov placed 13 of his returns in the middle-deep region, and Rune saved just 5 of those points.

When a return lands middle-deep, the point is fully up for grabs. Counting both first- and second-serve points, the server wins roughly 49% of the time from that position. (Once a deep return is in play, any lingering effect of a big serve is mostly erased.) A top player should do better, but Rune does not. Here are the career outcomes of those points for the current ATP top four, plus the two Brisbane finalists:

Player             W/FE%   UFE%  PtsWon%  
Novak Djokovic      6.8%   7.1%    53.8%  
Jannik Sinner       5.7%   6.0%    51.6%  
Daniil Medvedev     5.3%   5.9%    50.6%  
Carlos Alcaraz      8.0%   6.2%    50.1%  
Grigor Dimitrov     9.6%   7.9%    49.6%  
--Average--         7.4%   8.7%    48.9%  
Holger Rune        11.5%  10.9%    48.0%

Rune is much more aggressive than his peers in these situations. It may feel like it pays off, since he ends more points with winners (or forced errors) than unforced errors. But the bottom line tells another story: He wins fewer points than average, and trails the best players in the game by a sizeable margin. As Djokovic, Sinner, and Medvedev can tell you, from a neutral position, immediate outcomes don’t matter as much as point construction.

It’s the same story later in the rally. Dimitrov won those two crucial tiebreak points by putting his second shot near the baseline. The serve return isn’t unique: Any stroke that lands in the middle-deep region turns the point into a 50-50 proposition. The above table showed how players fare from that position on the plus-one shot. Here are the numbers for everything after that:

Player           Winner%   UFE%  PtsWon%  
Carlos Alcaraz      8.2%  12.8%    55.3%  
Grigor Dimitrov     6.6%   6.3%    54.7%  
Novak Djokovic      6.2%   8.0%    54.6%  
Jannik Sinner       7.2%  10.5%    52.3%  
Daniil Medvedev     4.7%   6.8%    52.0%  
--Average--         7.1%  10.2%    49.3%  
Holger Rune         9.4%   9.7%    49.0%

The order changes, and Rune’s aggression doesn’t stand out like it does earlier in the rally. But the message is the same, only with a wider margin. Given the mix of players represented in the Match Charting Project, “average” is better than tour average, but it’s still a number Rune needs to surpass.

The second table, finally, brings us back to Dimitrov. If he hadn’t played yesterday, I wouldn’t have thought to include him on the list with the top four, but in this type of situation–one that demands both patience and tactical soundness–he rates with the best in the game.

Faced with an over-aggressive, slightly erratic opponent, the 32-year-old took advantage and turned in a workmanlike performance. That isn’t a dig: Dimitrov didn’t need fireworks, just steadiness. By my count, he racked up just 10 unforced errors to Rune’s 29, and just one of them–serving for 4-0 in the tiebreak–came a critical moment. It’s nothing so flashy as the “Baby Fed” moniker once promised, but Dimitrov’s mature game has gotten him up to 7th place on the Elo list, and a return to the official top ten is not far away.

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Angelique Kerber in the New World

Angelique Kerber in 2020. Credit: Rob Keating

Angelique Kerber’s return to the tour has, so far, been a rocky one. She began Germany’s United Cup campaign with a narrow defeat to Jasmine Paolini, in which the Italian earned 21 break points against the German’s serve. Kerber took a set from the free-swinging Caroline Garcia but lost in three. Today, Maria Sakkari blew her off the court, winning nine games in a row before Kerber got on the board and split the remaining six.

The United Cup, in its new design, is not an easy place to make a comeback: The German faced top-30 players all three rounds. (Compare that to the tour event in Brisbane, where fellow returnee Naomi Osaka scored an opening-round victory against a player ranked 83rd.) Kerber surely didn’t expect to dominate immediately. It’s hard to get rolling again after an 18-month layoff, and she hasn’t been a truly elite player since early 2019. She turns 36 years old this month, a tough age even for players with three majors to their credit.

The Garcia match, in particular, highlighted another dimension of the challenge. The tour that Kerber rejoins is different from the one where she collected so many laurels. Angie is the very definition of a counterpuncher, a clever defender who uses anticipation and racket control to convert her opponent’s pace into winners of her own. It’s tough to counterpunch against someone like Garcia, who aims to end the point with nearly every shot.

The reckless Frenchwoman is hardly alone. Based on data from the Match Charting Project, here is the average rally length on the WTA tour since 2013:

It looks a bit fluky, but it’s noteworthy to find a peak in 2016, Kerber’s best year. Rally length has been essentially flat since 2021, perhaps since 2019 if we set aside the Covid-affected 2020 season. The German is plenty familiar with the landscape, having competed on tour until Wimbledon in 2022, but she developed her game back when the power of Serena Williams was an outlier. Now, Serena’s late-career bashing is the model for a new generation.

There are a number of ways to illustrate the trend. While the year-to-year differences are minor, the arrows all point in the same direction. In 2016, 49.6% of points were decided in three shots or less. Last year, it was 53.0%. (In 2021 and 2022, it was a bit higher still.) At Kerber’s peak, nearly 24% of points lasted at least seven strokes. Last year that figure had declined to 20.8%.

This is probably worse news for someone like Caroline Wozniacki than it is for Kerber. Woz keeps points alive and waits for errors, skills that Garcia (or Aryna Sabalenka, or Elena Rybakina, or dozens more players she might draw in the first round of the Australian Open) render meaningless. While Angie isn’t going to pile up aces–she’s hit a grand total of two in three United Cup matches–she is fully capable of redirecting a serve for a return winner, as she did a couple of times against Sakkari. Still, the shorter the point, the less likely that Kerber finds an opportunity to work her magic.

Throughout her career, the German lefty has rarely had a problem picking spots to end points with winners or forced errors. Match Charting data shows that 6% of her groundstrokes go for winners, right in line with tour average.

The catch, though, is when she hits them. Kerber is one of 58 players for whom the Match Charting Project has recorded at least 2,000 winners and forced errors since 2013. Only four of those players unleash their winners later in the rally. The average shot number of Kerber’s point-enders is 4.9–bad news in an era when nearly two-thirds of points are finished in four shots or less.

Here are the twelve players in the dataset whose winners occur latest in the rally:

Player                Avg Winner Shot#  
Daria Kasatkina                    5.1  
Viktorija Golubic                  5.0  
Yulia Putintseva                   5.0  
Carla Suarez Navarro               4.9  
Angelique Kerber                   4.9  
Sloane Stephens                    4.9  
Agnieszka Radwanska                4.9  
Simona Halep                       4.8  
Svetlana Kuznetsova                4.7  
Anastasija Sevastova               4.6  
Caroline Wozniacki                 4.6  
Su Wei Hsieh                       4.6

This isn’t a table where you want to find your name north of Wozniacki’s. It’s possible to survive on today’s tour playing this way, as Daria Kasatkina has proven, but it is much less likely to translate into a major title. Wimbledon champ Marketa Vondrousova didn’t miss the list by much, coming in at 4.4, but her aggression varies wildly from one match to another. Iga Swiatek and Coco Gauff appear closer to the middle of the pack, at 4.2, and Aryna Sabalenka ranks as the fourth most aggressive of the 58, at 3.4.

At the risk of belaboring the point, here’s another way of seeing the difference between Angie’s style and the brands of tennis that currently top the rankings. The following chart shows what percent of Kerber’s winners (and forced errors) happen at each point in the rally, compared to the same figures for Swiatek and Sabalenka:

The “1st shot” and “6th+” columns are virtual mirror images of each other. Even that understates the difference between the veteran and the two youngsters, because a point-ending serve from Kerber is more likely to be at least partially the fault of the returner–those errors are conventionally scored as forced regardless of the strength of the serve.

I don’t want to say that Kerber can’t succeed on her return to the circuit, but it’s clear that she faces a challenge. The tennis world of the mid-2010s is long gone, and even if she regains the form that took her to number one in 2016, it may not give her the same results in 2024. A new era requires a new Angie; we’ll see if she can produce one.

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Hubi’s Three-Set Magic

Also today: Torben Ulrich (1928-2023); What is this?

Hubert Hurkacz: Let’s play three!

Hubert Hurkacz started the 2024 season right where he left off. In the round-robin stage of the United Cup, he played two singles matches, beating Thiago Seyboth Wild and losing to Alejandro Davidovich Fokina. Both matches went to a third set.

No one played more deciding third sets in 2023 than Hurkacz. Out of 55 best-of-three starts, he went the distance 32 times. That’s more three-setters–and a higher rate of them (58%)–than any player-season this century. On average, about 35% of ATP matches go three. Since 2000, only 16 players have posted a full season where they went to a third set more than half the time.

This is new territory for the 26-year-old from Poland. He reached a decider in only 35% of his three-setters in 2021, then increased that clip to 45% in 2022. The main difference between his 2022 and 2023 seasons was that his already small margins shrunk even further. He won matches at almost the same rate both years, even though he broke a bit less often and was less effective with his second serve in 2023. He converted his three-setters at exactly the same rate (62.5%) in both seasons. Hurkacz’s edge was still enough to keep him in the top ten, but only because he was willing to play so much tennis.

It’s a bit fluky to pile up so many three-setters, but we can get a hint at some trends by looking at the list of similar warriors:

Year  Player                  Bo3  Deciders   Dec%  
2023  Hubert Hurkacz           55        32  58.2%  
2018  John Isner               40        23  57.5%  
2022  Taylor Fritz             55        31  56.4%  
2010  John Isner               48        27  56.3%  
2019  Nikoloz Basilashvili     43        24  55.8%  
2014  Guillermo Garcia Lopez   42        23  54.8%  
2019  Fernando Verdasco        42        23  54.8%  
2018  Robin Haase              46        25  54.3%  
2009  Julien Benneteau         48        26  54.2%  
2005  Jurgen Melzer            39        21  53.8%  
2007  Dmitry Tursunov          41        22  53.7%  
2017  Jack Sock                51        27  52.9%  
2011  Stan Wawrinka            40        21  52.5%  
2013  John Isner               52        27  51.9%  
2017  Albert Ramos             54        28  51.9%  
2018  Joao Sousa               45        23  51.1%  
2000  Fernando Vicente         47        24  51.1%  
2013  Robin Haase              49        25  51.0%  
2003  Gaston Gaudio            55        28  50.9%  
2006  Dmitry Tursunov          61        31  50.8%

There are plenty of clay-court grinders on the list; that doesn’t really apply to Hubi. What pops out to me are the three appearances of John Isner. While Hurkacz isn’t as one-dimensional as Big John, he has the same sort of profile. Only four other players in the current top 50–none of them in the top 15–break serve as rarely as he does. When breaks are scarce, sets go to tiebreaks and matches go three. An incredible 14 of Hubi’s 32 three-setters went to a sudden-death tiebreak. He won ten of them.

None of this is sustainable. In one sense, that’s bad news: If Hurkacz somehow lands in 14 more deciding-set tiebreaks this year, he’ll end up closer to 7-7 than 10-4. On the other hand, three-set stats are just trivia–exhausting trivia, at that. There wasn’t much to separate his top-line 2022 and 2023 results, and he’s surely be happy with another top-ten finish regardless of whether he needs to play 30-plus deciding sets to get there.

If Hubi does force so many third sets, is he likely to keep winning so many? That’s a more complicated question.

What is a good three-set record?

This is a great example of what’s missing from the tennis discourse. People talk about three-set records all the time, especially on broadcasts whenever two players head for a deciding set. We expect that top players win more one-set shootouts than journeymen do, but how many more? For a fringe top-tenner like Hurkacz, is 62.5% good? Great? Boringly in line with expectations?

What makes this tricky is that, anecdotally, there are so many different types of three-setters. Last year, Hurkacz went three with four different players ranked outside the top 100. We’d expect him to win those; it’s a bit disappointing he didn’t win them even more quickly. Hubi also went to three deciders against a number one: two with Carlos Alcaraz, one with Novak Djokovic. We wouldn’t expect him to win those (and he didn’t), but simply taking a set is a moral victory. Any list of 32 three-setters is going to include a bunch of matches that should never have gotten that far. There might be 32 different levels of expectations, if we want to break it down that far.

We don’t need to make it that complicated. What I want is a shorthand way of looking at a player’s three-set record and knowing whether he’s likely to keep it up.

It turns out that you get pretty close with a simple formula. Tour regulars–defined here as players with at least 50 ATP main-draw matches in a season–tend to win between 50% and 60% of their third-set deciders. (On average, they clean up against lower-ranked players with less time on tour, as you’d probably expect.) We can estimate what a player’s three-set record “should” be as follows:

Three-set win% = 45% + (20% * Two-set win%)

That’s it. A player’s winning percentage in straight-set matches is a decent approximation of their current level: While it’s possible to luck into a two-set victory, it’s unusual. Here’s what the model implies as likely three-set records at various skill levels:

Two-set W%  Three-set W%  
40%                52.9%  
50%                54.9%  
60%                56.9%  
70%                58.8%
80%                60.8%

Three-set records are rarely so extreme as two-set records. Djokovic, for instance, went 20-2 (!) in two-setters last year. The model predicts that he would win 63% of his three-setters. In reality he went 11-4 (73%), outperforming the estimate but still coming in much closer to 50%, as logic would suggest. Three-setters tend to occur between more closely-matched players, and once the outcome comes down to a single set, luck plays a larger part. Deciding sets aren’t as coin-flippy as tiebreaks, but as Hurkacz’s 14 third-set shootouts remind us, the margins can be equally slim.

So, back to Hubi. Last year, he won 70% of his two-setters. A typical performance for a player like that would be a three-set winning percentage of 58.8%–a 19-13 record in deciders instead of his actual 20-12. Odd as his 2023 season was, he won the close ones about as often as he should have. Even if luck turns against him, he could finagle another top-ten finish with a stronger performance at the majors–but that’s a subject for another day.

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Torben Ulrich (1928-2023)

Torben Ulrich in 1957

In 1955, Torben Ulrich invited a couple of visiting South African tennis players, Gordon Forbes and Abe Segal, to come see his band at a jazz club in Copenhagen. Ulrich, manning the clarinet chair, sat out the first several numbers. Forbes wanted to see his friend in action and encouraged him to join in.

“I must wait,” Ulrich said, “until something happens inside me. So far nothing very much has happened.”

The red-headed, bearded Dane died last month at the age of 95. In his near-century on earth, a whole lot happened. Yet he always operated on his own timetable. He once walked off the court when an opponent wouldn’t stop lobbing. (“I had asked him nicely several times to stop it, but he told me to mind my own business.”) Gene Scott told another story:

There was this recent time in Richmond. There was this girl who was wearing a very short miniskirt. The whole house, including the players, could not keep their eyes off of her. Now, Torben is getting ready to serve when he suddenly freezes in midair, then walks over to the stands. Everybody is wondering where he’s going. He stops behind the girl and quickly drops a ball down her back. I know of no other player who has ever coped with a distraction in such a gentle, colorful way.

Forbes recalled a club member who was impatient for Ulrich to vacate a practice court:

‘Have you been playing long?’ [the member] said.

‘As long as I can remember,’ said Torben.

‘How much longer will you play?’ asked the member.

‘We may go on for many years,’ said Torben.

Ulrich did, indeed, go on for many years. He won his first tournament, the Danish Nationals, in 1948, when he was 19 years old. Three years later he picked up his first international singles title in Antwerp. He remained capable of top-level tennis for another two decades after that.

“Over the years, it seems he has never lost the key,” a fellow player told Sports Illustrated in 1969, when Torben was 40 years old. “When it looks like he is ready to come apart, he comes up with that one big match. He remains respectable.”

Ulrich was never a top-tenner; he failed to reach the quarter-finals of a major in 43 tries. Yet he piled up dozens of smaller tournament victories in singles, doubles, and mixed. He contested over 100 Davis Cup rubbers for Denmark, many of them alongside his younger brother, Jørgen.

The Dane was perhaps more at home in the world of art. At various times, he wrote poetry and music criticism, painted, and made films. This side of him had a greater influence on his legacy. His son, Lars, was a promising junior tennis player, but he was probably made the right decision when he shifted his focus to music and co-founded the band Metallica.

Torben, it seemed, was as happy with one pursuit as any other. He was a seeker–it didn’t much matter what. Tennis, with its whirlwind schedule and ever-changing mix of fellow-travelers, fit the bill.

He didn’t care about results. Once, he told Forbes that he didn’t win. “I simply played in the usual way,” he said. “It was my opponent who lost.”

Perhaps Ulrich’s career-best result came at the 1968 US Open, where he upset 15th seed Marty Riessen before falling to John Newcombe in a fourth-round nailbiter, 5-7, 4-6, 6-4, 10-8, 6-4. Newk’s serve could overpower a much younger man, but it was no match for Torben’s mind. “What is speed?” he mused. “If I am concentrating properly, really seeing, a big serve will be coming at me in slow motion.”

The match could have gone either way. At a crucial moment, Ulrich flubbed an easy volley when a butterfly darted in front of his face. Was he distracted? He silenced the press with a question of his own: “Was I then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or am I now a butterfly dreaming I am a man?”

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What is this?

After the Tennis 128 in 2022 and 1973 Redux last year, my plan is to return to contemporary tennis, with the usual hefty dose of analytics.

My goal is to write as much as possible about the game between the white lines, as opposed to forecasts, ratings, previews, business, and–heaven forbid–tennis personalities and politics.

I will also continue to look back to events from 50 years ago–and 100, and perhaps the occasional non-round number. 1974 was every bit as fascinating a season as 1973. I won’t do 100-plus installments, as I did last year, but I’ll revisit various pivotal moments as their anniversaries roll around, especially to commemorate the birth of World Team Tennis this summer.

You can expect to find a new post a couple of times a week, probably more often during the majors. Your suggestions for topics are always welcome. Comments are open (provisionally! I cannot emphasize enough how provisionally!), and I’ll add a “suggestion box” to the sidebar one of these days.

If you want to keep up with everything I’m doing here, please subscribe. Links to new article will also appear on the Tennis Abstract home page. I can’t promise I’ll always post links on Twitter.

Happy new year!

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The Most Exclusive Clubs In Tennis

The new Big Two?

Tireless podcaster Alex Gruskin likes to talk about what he calls the “top-ten, top-15, top-20, and top-25 clubs.” He works out the membership of each one by consulting the Tennis Abstract ATP and WTA stats leaderboards, which display dozens of metrics for each of the top 50 ranked players on both tours.

To qualify for Alex’s “top ten club,” a player needs to be in the top ten in both hold percentage and break percentage–in other words, to be an elite server and returner. Even cracking the top 25 club is no easy task. In 2023, only 11 men were better than half of the top 50 on both sides of the ball. It’s more common to excel at one or the other. In 2022, the best returner (Diego Schwartzman) ranked 50th out of 50 on serve, and the best server (Nick Kyrgios) came in 40th on return.

The top-25 club is a high standard, and the top-ten club is a stratospheric one. This year, only three men–Novak Djokovic, Jannik Sinner, and Carlos Alcaraz–made the cut, and Alcaraz almost missed it, ranking 10th in hold percentage. Daniil Medvedev almost qualified, but he trailed Alcaraz by 0.7% in hold percentage and came in 11th in that category.

Three top-ten clubbers is, as it turns out, an unusual showing. In the 33 seasons for which we have the necessary stats to calculate hold and break percentage (back to 1991), only 13 men have ever managed the feat. Many of them did it several times, so there are a total of 49 player-seasons that qualify. For the two-plus decades between 1991 and 2011, there were only two seasons in which more than one player reached both top-ten thresholds. In 1992, the entire tour fell short.

By “club” standards (and most others), Djokovic’s 2023 season was particularly impressive. Alex usually classifies players into round-number clubs, occasionally giving credit to a near-miss who makes, for instance, the “top 26” club. We can extend the concept a bit further and place every season into its best possible club: If a player ranks in the top three by both hold and break percentage, he’s in the “top-three” club; if he ranks among the top four in both, he’s in the “top-four club,” and so on.

In 2023, Novak led the tour in hold percentage and was bested by only Alcaraz and Medvedev in break percentage. Thus, he’s a member of the top-three club. More exclusive categories are hard to find. Here’s the complete list of top-three clubbers since 1991, along with their ranks in hold percentage (H% Rk) and break percentage (B% Rk):

Year  Player          H% Rk  B% Rk  CLUB  
2023  Novak Djokovic      1      3     3  
1999  Andre Agassi        3      1     3  
1995  Andre Agassi        3      3     3

That’s it.

Sinner’s 2023 campaign was also sneakily great. He finished a deceptive fourth on the official ATP points table, but by ranking fifth in hold percentage and fourth in break percentage, he joined an absurdly elite group of top-five clubbers: only Djokovic, Agassi, Rafael Nadal, and Roger Federer.

Here’s the full list of top-ten club seasons since 1991:

Year  Player            H% Rk  B% Rk  CLUB  
2023  Novak Djokovic        1      3     3  
1999  Andre Agassi          3      1     3  
1995  Andre Agassi          3      3     3  
2021  Novak Djokovic        4      3     4  
2013  Rafael Nadal          4      1     4  
2008  Rafael Nadal          4      1     4  
2002  Andre Agassi          4      3     4  
2023  Jannik Sinner         5      4     5  
2019  Rafael Nadal          5      1     5  
2017  Rafael Nadal          5      2     5  
2015  Novak Djokovic        5      1     5  
2014  Novak Djokovic        5      2     5  
2012  Rafael Nadal          5      1     5  
2007  Rafael Nadal          5      2     5  
2006  Roger Federer         2      5     5  
2003  Andre Agassi          5      3     5  
                                            
Year  Player            H% Rk  B% Rk  CLUB  
2022  Novak Djokovic        6      4     6  
2013  Novak Djokovic        6      2     6  
2021  Daniil Medvedev       7      4     7  
2020  Rafael Nadal          7      2     7  
2019  Novak Djokovic        7      2     7  
2012  Novak Djokovic        7      2     7  
2011  Novak Djokovic        7      1     7  
2010  Rafael Nadal          2      7     7  
2008  Novak Djokovic        7      4     7  
2004  Roger Federer         2      7     7  
2021  Alexander Zverev      8      7     8  
2020  Daniil Medvedev       8      8     8  
2018  Novak Djokovic        8      5     8  
2016  Novak Djokovic        8      2     8  
2015  Roger Federer         4      8     8  
2005  Roger Federer         2      8     8  
2001  Andre Agassi          8      3     8  
1998  Marcelo Rios          8      2     8  
1991  Stefan Edberg         4      8     8  
                                            
Year  Player            H% Rk  B% Rk  CLUB  
2022  Daniil Medvedev       8      9     9  
2020  Andrey Rublev         9      5     9  
2018  Rafael Nadal          9      1     9  
2017  Roger Federer         2      9     9  
2009  Andy Murray           9      2     9  
2007  Roger Federer         3      9     9  
2000  Andre Agassi          8      9     9  
2023  Carlos Alcaraz       10      1    10  
2020  Novak Djokovic       10      4    10  
2019  Roger Federer         3     10    10  
2013  Roger Federer         7     10    10  
1998  Andre Agassi         10      3    10  
1994  Andre Agassi         10      5    10  
1993  Thomas Muster        10      4    10

The list is heavily weighted toward the Big Three and the current era. Whether it’s surface speed convergence or something about the players themselves, it’s tougher to reach the top with a lopsided game these days. Stefan Edberg was a top-eight clubber in 1991 (and might have been as good for several seasons before that), but Pete Sampras didn’t get anywhere close. His best showing by this metric came in 1997, when he cracked the top-14 club. Andy Roddick never even cleared the top 30.

Finally, here are the 15 men who reached both top-30 thresholds in 2023:

Year  Player            H% Rk  B% Rk  CLUB  
2023  Novak Djokovic        1      3     3  
2023  Jannik Sinner         5      4     5  
2023  Carlos Alcaraz       10      1    10  
2023  Daniil Medvedev      11      2    11  
2023  Andrey Rublev        17     11    17  
2023  Karen Khachanov      18     16    18  
2023  Alexander Zverev     15     18    18  
2023  Grigor Dimitrov      19     15    19  
2023  Taylor Fritz          6     19    19  
2023  Casper Ruud          21     17    21  
2023  Holger Rune          20     21    21  
2023  Frances Tiafoe        9     26    26  
2023  Ugo Humbert          29     23    29  
2023  Roman Safiullin      30     24    30  
2023  Sebastian Korda      14     30    30

Women’s clubs

The WTA gets the short shrift on topics like these, because much less historical data is available. I only have the necessary stats back to 2015, and even that season is incomplete.

Still, that doesn’t make some recent individual performances any less impressive. Iga Swiatek’s effort in 2023 predictably stands out: She came in third behind Aryna Sabalenka and Caroline Garcia in hold percentage, and she trailed only Sara Sorribes Tormo and Lesia Tsurenko in break percentage. By finishing third in both categories, she–like Djokovic–is a member of the top-three club.

Depending on how you define a full-season, Iga might be the first ever woman to reach such a standard, at least in the nine-year span for which we can do the math. Here is the full list of top-ten clubbers back to 2015:

Year  Player             H% Rk  B% Rk  CLUB  
2016  Victoria Azarenka      2      1     2  
2023  Iga Swiatek            3      3     3  
2022  Iga Swiatek            5      1     5  
2019  Serena Williams        1      6     6  
2015  Serena Williams        1      7     7  
2016  Serena Williams        1      8     8  
2016  Angelique Kerber      10      6    10

Azarenka’s run in 2016 was really a partial season: She hurt her knee and didn’t play again after retiring from her first-round match at the French. Her first four months of tennis put her on the path toward a historic campaign, but we’ll never know how it would have turned out. Those 29 matches can’t really be set along the same measuring stick as Iga’s 75-plus in each of the last two years. Serena’s three entries on this table were almost as abbreviated, but again we’re reminded of the limited data. Surely the list would be much longer, with many more instances of the Williams name, if we had better data.

Anyway, all hail the great Iga. May her reign last until Sabalenka figures out how to become a top-ten returner.

At least this year, it was slightly harder to crack the top-25 and top-30 clubs in the women’s game than it was in the men’s. Here is the full 2023 women’s list down to the top-32 threshold, which allows us to include a few names of interest who missed out on the top 30:

Year  Player               H% Rk  B% Rk  CLUB  
2023  Iga Swiatek              3      3     3  
2023  Cori Gauff              13      8    13  
2023  Jessica Pegula          16      5    16  
2023  Madison Keys             6     16    16  
2023  Barbora Krejcikova      12     18    18  
2023  Victoria Azarenka       19     17    19  
2023  Aryna Sabalenka          1     20    20  
2023  Marketa Vondrousova     22      6    22  
2023  Karolina Muchova         8     22    22  
2023  Leylah Fernandez        20     27    27  
2023  Jelena Ostapenko        28     12    28  
2023  Marie Bouzkova          29     21    29  
2023  Caroline Dolehide       23     30    30  
2023  Elina Svitolina         31     24    31  
2023  Beatriz Haddad Maia     18     31    31  
2023  Ons Jabeur              32      9    32  
2023  Belinda Bencic           5     32    32

More than ever, a well-rounded game is a necessity for players who hope to reach the top. For fans, “clubs” like these are a useful way to think about which stars are getting the job done on both sides of the ball.

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I’ll be writing more about analytics and present-day tennis in 2024. Subscribe to the blog to receive each new post by email: