Category: 1974

Felix Auger-Aliassime’s Achilles Heel

Also today: February 8-10, 1974

Felix Auger-Aliassime in 2023. Credit: aarublevnews

There may not be a more beautiful serve in tennis. When Felix Auger-Aliassime is hitting his targets, returners don’t have a chance. Auger-Aliassime has been particularly deadly on indoor hard courts, winning four such championships in 2022, then defending his Basel title last October.

Before returning to the winner’s circle at the Swiss Indoors, the Canadian’s 2023 season was one to forget. He struggled with a knee injury that knocked him out of Lyon and most of the grass-court season, where he would otherwise have figured to thrive. Between Miami–where he last reached his career-best ATP ranking of 6th–and Tokyo, he won just two matches in a dozen starts. We can’t hold much of that against him; when it wasn’t the injury, it was the recovery or the rust.

But he hasn’t played like a top-tenner in 2024, either. He lost to Daniel Altmaier to open his campaign, got dragged into a five-hour slog by Dominic Thiem in Melbourne, and then fell yesterday in Marseille to Zhang Zhizhen. The Chinese man, who lost to 1,107th-ranked Sebastian Dominko in Davis Cup last weekend, isn’t the sort of player who should threaten the likes of Auger-Aliassime, especially on an indoor hard court. Marseille has a reputation as a relatively slow surface for an indoor event, but according to my numbers, it played almost exactly as fast as Basel did last year.

With such a serve, the rest of Felix’s game should fall into place. But it hasn’t, and even the Canadian’s service games can get messy. Zhang broke him three times in ten tries yesterday, and he came close to a fourth. Last week in Montpellier, Auger-Aliassime saved just one of six break points before squeaking past Arthur Cazaux. Apart from an occasional glut of double faults, the serve itself rarely fails him. He reliably sends in aces on at least one of ten service points. Nearly one-third of his serves don’t come back. So what’s the problem?

The Canadian charge

There’s a certain style of play that has become recognizably Canadian, by some combination of the influence of Milos Raonic and the natural development of players who grow up practicing indoors. While Auger-Aliassime, Denis Shapovalov, and Leylah Fernandez–like Raonic before them–rarely serve-and-volley, they often venture far inside the baseline after serving. The move puts them in excellent position to swat away weak replies, at the cost of getting exposed by a deep return.

(The move also calls to mind Evonne Goolagong, perhaps the most casual serve-and-volleyer in the game’s history. Martina Navratilova said of her, “She didn’t serve-and-volley; she would sort of saunter-and-volley.”)

If Felix’s aggressive court position pays off, it should show up in his second shot stats. This may sound familiar, because I talked about the same thing in my piece about Sebastian Korda earlier this week. Though Korda’s serve isn’t quite the weapon that Auger-Aliassime’s is, the two men are similar in that their overall results don’t seem to reflect the strength of their opening deliveries. Korda, for all of his power, hits a second-shot (plus-one) winner or forced error 17% of the time that a return comes back, almost exactly in line with tour average.

Auger-Aliassime is similarly punchless. I ran the numbers again, this time back to 2019 instead of 2020, to capture most of the Canadian’s career. The plus-one winner rates are a bit different, but not enough to alter the story. I’ve also included more players for comparison:

Player                 Plus-one winner%  
Milos Raonic                      24.4%  
Denis Shapovalov                  21.5%  
Matteo Berrettini                 19.5%  
Carlos Alcaraz                    19.1%  
Holger Rune                       18.6%
Lorenzo Sonego                    18.4%  
Stefanos Tsitsipas                18.2%  
Felix Auger-Aliassime             17.6%  
Sebastian Korda                   17.3%  
-- Average --                     17.2%  
Jannik Sinner                     16.8%  
Daniil Medvedev                   16.3%

Given the potency of his serve and the positioning risks he takes, Auger-Aliassime finds himself in the wrong section of this list. He’s not as one-dimensional as Raonic, and he’s less explosive (and erratic) than Shapovalov, but couldn’t he play more like Berrettini? You might argue that Felix’s ground game is better than the Italian’s, and he can thrive without forcing the issue so quickly. That may be true–I believe the Canadian and his team think this way–but the numbers don’t bear it out.

Over their careers, Auger-Aliassime and Berrettini have hit unreturned serves at exactly the same rate. Yet the Italian wins two percentage points more often on his second shot. The overall picture is even more dramatic: Berrettini’s career tour-level rates of 69% serve points won and 88% service games held are each better than Felix has posted in any single season. Berrettini’s forehand is better, sure, but I can’t believe that accounts for the entire difference. The Canadian’s wait-and-see approach too often turns into a ten stroke rally that ends in favor of the other guy.

The Achilles heel

I promised you a weak spot of mythological proportions, and you’re going to get it.

The story of yesterday’s loss to Zhang was captured, oddly enough, in one of the service games that Felix won. At 1-3 in the second set, he raced to 30-love with two points straight from the textbook: big serve to the backhand, shallow reply, swat away a winner. He scored another classic plus-one at 30-15.

The two points he lost, though, show what happens when someone reads the serve, or when he misses the first serve and doesn’t do much with the second. At both 30-0 and 40-15, Zhang took advantage of a second serve to put the return at Felix’s feet. The first time, the Canadian could only keep the ball in play, and he lost a six-stroke rally. Two points later, Auger-Aliassime unforced-errored the backhand plus-one. He secured the hold with a better second serve at 40-30, but he isn’t always so lucky.

When returns land in the service box, Felix’s results are strong, even if he isn’t as aggressive as Berrettini or his fellow Canadians. Here are several stats profiling what happens to those weak replies: plus-one winner rates (P1 W%), plus-one error rates (P1 UFE%), and overall point winning percentage:

Player                 P1 W%  P1 UFE%  Pt W%  
Milos Raonic             43%      12%    64%  
Denis Shapovalov         36%      16%    60%  
Matteo Berrettini        34%      14%    60%  
Holger Rune              32%      13%    61%  
Carlos Alcaraz           32%      12%    66%  
Felix Auger-Aliassime    31%      13%    62%  
Sebastian Korda          31%      14%    61%  
Daniil Medvedev          30%       9%    63%  
Stefanos Tsitsipas       29%      11%    62%  
Lorenzo Sonego           29%      13%    57%  
-- Average --            28%      12%    60%  
Jannik Sinner            28%      11%    63%

These numbers are from 2019 to present, so Raonic’s stats are probably a caricature of the tactics he used at his peak. Still, it seems like Auger-Aliassime ought to be ending a few more of these points immediately. Either way, there’s no reason to complain about his ultimate outcomes–he wins more of these points than Berrettini does, and almost as many as Daniil Medvedev or Jannik Sinner. (Side note: Holy Alcaraz!)

Here is the same set of stats for returns that are not so shallow, but are still closer to the service line than the baseline. (The Match Charting Project calls these “deep”–as opposed to “very deep” returns.)

Player                 P1 W%  P1 UFE%  Pt W%  
Milos Raonic             31%      12%    56%  
Denis Shapovalov         24%      16%    54%  
Holger Rune              23%      13%    60%  
Matteo Berrettini        20%      14%    54%  
Lorenzo Sonego           20%      14%    54%  
Stefanos Tsitsipas       20%      11%    58%  
Carlos Alcaraz           18%      13%    57%  
Sebastian Korda          17%      16%    55%  
Felix Auger-Aliassime    17%      13%    53%  
-- Average --            16%      12%    55%  
Daniil Medvedev          15%       9%    56%  
Jannik Sinner            14%      10%    56%

Take away a couple of feet of court position, and Auger-Aliassime’s results look awfully pedestrian. He still hits more plus-one winners than average, but barely, and at the cost of more errors. He wins fewer of these points than average, and fewer than anyone in this selected group of players. If we make the reasonable assumption that the returns coming back from Felix’s serves are weaker than average–even if they land in the same sector of the court–those middle-of-the-pack numbers look even worse.

I hope you’ve stuck with me, because you’re about to find out how to beat Felix. It’s not easy, but it worked for Zhang. Here’s how players manage against very deep returns–the ones that land closer to the baseline than the service line:

Player                 P1 W%  P1 UFE%  Pt W%  
Milos Raonic             15%      14%    47%  
Denis Shapovalov         12%      14%    50%  
Matteo Berrettini        12%      11%    52%  
Stefanos Tsitsipas       11%      10%    52%  
Holger Rune              11%      11%    51%  
Sebastian Korda          10%      10%    50%  
Lorenzo Sonego            9%      14%    53%  
-- Average --             8%       8%    51%  
Carlos Alcaraz            8%       7%    54%  
Felix Auger-Aliassime     7%       9%    47%  
Daniil Medvedev           6%       6%    54%  
Jannik Sinner             6%       7%    52%

Auger-Aliassime plays these points like he’s Medvedev, but his baseline game can’t support those tactics. He wins these points at the same rate as late-career, physically compromised Raonic.

This is, in large part, the cost of that aggressive court position. Some players, like Alcaraz, can get away with it. Raonic couldn’t, but he put away so many cheap points that he could live with the drawbacks. It’s exaggerating only a bit to say that Auger-Aliassime gets the worst of both worlds: He doesn’t pick up an unusually high number of freebies, but then he finds himself on the back foot whenever someone manages to land a deep return.

That was the story of Zhang’s upset win yesterday. When the Chinese player hit a shallow reply, Felix won 11 of 15. When the return landed behind the service line, the success rate fell to just 8 of 25. It isn’t always that bad, and even when it is, a uptick in unreturned serves (or a strong return performance) can salvage the day. But opponents will only get better at reading the Canadian’s serve, and perhaps they will recognize that they needn’t attempt any heroics as long as they place the return deep in the court.

Auger-Aliassime isn’t going to wake up one day able to play like Medvedev, however much he might like to. He can, however, choose to play more like Raonic or Berrettini. His current approach is probably good enough for a long stay in the top 20: Elo ranks him 17th, at least until it updates with yesterday’s loss. But if he hopes to crack the top five, he’ll need to do more with the profits from that gorgeous serve.

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February 8-10, 1974: Sideshows take center stage

For a week in February 1974, the women’s tennis circuit had to make do without Billie Jean King. Fortunately, George Liddy was ready to pick up the promotional slack, and then some.

The Slims tour headed to Fort Lauderdale for an event on Chris Evert’s home turf–or, more accurately, her home Har-Tru. Billie Jean didn’t like her odds on clay in enemy territory, so it was a good time for a week off. In her absence, Evert provided the drubbings, Rosie Casals delivered the controversy, and–fulfilling what one newspaperman called Liddy’s “kinky dreams”–none other than Bobby Riggs showed up to sell more tickets.

The biggest story of the week took place off the court. Liddy was promoting more than just the S&H Green Stamps Tennis Classic; he also organized a track exhibition for the Friday night of the tournament. The big attraction was Riggs, who came to town for a much-ballyhooed race against famous miler Jim Ryun. (Earning a living as a professional track star could be complicated: Ryun had taken part in a tennis exhibition the previous June.) Ryun was a world-record holder and Olympic silver medalist, so in true Riggs fashion, some handicapping was in order. The 55-year-old hustler would get a half-mile head start.

Bobby was old, but he wasn’t that old. On February 8th, after a track clinic, a marching band, a pole-vault exhibition, and a 100-meter dash featuring some football players, the real business of the evening got underway. Riggs emerged, accompanied by a phalanx of young women and sporting a portable microphone to spice up the eventual television broadcast. He made a side bet with Rosie Casals and jokingly pleaded with organizers for an even bigger head start.

Ryun ran a respectable 4:03, but he never caught up with America’s most famous male chauvinist. Riggs ran his 890 yards in 3:22 for an easy victory.

“I’d say he needed another 200 yards,” Ryun said.

As for Riggs, he hadn’t been working out much since the Battle of the Sexes the previous September. His assessment: “I don’t think I’ve ever been this tired.”

* * *

Casals was tired, too. She had spent most of the week griping: The tour came back to Florida too often, she didn’t like to play on clay, it was cold and windy, and the crowd was partisan to the point of rudeness when she faced Jeanne Evert in the second round. Another of her complaints–about thoughtless scheduling–had merit. After a late-night doubles match on Thursday, she was first up on Friday’s order of play.

As if that weren’t enough, her routine defeat of Francoise Durr earned her a place in the semi-finals against Chrissie herself. “Nobody’s unbeatable,” Rosie said. But on Saturday, she salvaged just one game. Casals had to settle for a lesser prize–a local columnist declared her the champion of the press room.

The final had unexpected potential. Evert had been expected to run away with the title, and she hadn’t done anything to call that forecast into question. But second-seeded Kerry Melville looked like she might just make it close, allowing just two games to Nancy Gunter in her semi-final. Melville herself had said that the chance of anyone beating the home favorite in Fort Lauderdale were “very, very slim.” But after a near-flawless match, she felt differently: “If I play like I played today, I think I have a good chance of beating Chris.”

Alas, it wasn’t to be. At the hotel on Saturday night, Melville walked to the bathroom in the dark and fractured her toe. She withdrew, and the title went to Evert.

Liddy, though, had another ace up his sleeve. Riggs was already scheduled to play an exhibition match on finals day, against Miami Dolphins quarterback Bob Griese and wide receiver Ron Sellers. Bobby would play one-on-two, and the crowd would get the full raincoat-and-umbrella handicapping show. Everyone would go home with a smile on their face.

The biggest draw of the day, though, was Liddy’s last-minute replacement. Refunds were available, but only two ticketholders asked for their money back.

To play Evert, the promoter brought in none other than Althea Gibson, the two-time Wimbledon champion who had been the world’s best player in the late 1950s. Gibson had since earned her living as a golfer and made occasional attempts at a tennis comeback now that the sport had gone pro. At age 46, no one expected her to upset Chrissie, and she didn’t, winning just three games. But she impressed nonetheless.

“I don’t think there is anyone in women’s tennis today that serves it with that much pure power,” Evert said. “I was really surprised.” Althea wanted a rematch. After all, as one fan shouted during play, Gibson won more games off of Chris than Casals did.

Rosie, though, could take one consolation from the finals-day slate. The crowd immediately took to Althea, the obvious underdog and a legend to boot. Finally, a stadium full of Florida tennis fans was cheering against an Evert.

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Dayana Yastremska’s Erratic Attack

Also today: February 2, 1974

Dayana Yastremska at the 2023 US Open. Credit: Hameltion

Power giveth, and power taketh away. Few women hit as hard as Dayana Yastremska does, and sometimes, when enough of her returns find the court, that translates into victory. She squeaked through Australian Open qualifying by winning three deciding sets against players outside the top 200, then demolished 7th seed Marketa Vondrousova and rode the resulting momentum all the way to the semi-finals.

Then, yesterday in Linz, she managed just two games against Donna Vekic. So it goes.

The Ukrainian is essentially Jelena Ostapenko lite, mixing a middling serve with monster groundstrokes and a do-or-die approach on return. I wrote a few weeks ago about how Ostapenko’s game style leaves her unusually susceptible to chance; that applies even more to her less accomplished colleague.

The good news for Yastremska is that momentum is temporary. She’ll have off days, like the 92-point flop against Vekic, and she’ll occasionally play a perfect hour, like the dismantling of Vondrousova. More often, though, she’ll pack it all into a single match. The 23-year-old’s stats from her third-round adventure in Melbourne against Emma Navarro make for a good illustration:

       SPW%  RPW%  Winners  UFE  
Set 1   64%   54%       12   11  
Set 2   50%   33%        6   15  
Set 3   73%   56%       15    8

I’ll bet you can tell which sets she won. It was a lopsided match, just not always in favor of the same player.

Typically, the wildest fluctuation came in Yastremska’s return numbers. Her serve is a weak point–she holds less than 60% of service games, worse than all but one other top-50 player–and it is no picture of consistency, either. But her return is a shot she can ride to a major semi-final. In the first five matches of her Australian Open campaign, she won 48% of return points, including 21 of 38 break point chances. Against Victoria Azarenka in the fourth round, Yastremska landed only 60% of her returns, but when she put the serve back in play, she won nearly three-quarters of the time. Almost one in six Azarenka service points ended with a Yastremska return that Vika couldn’t handle.

A few days later against Qinwen Zheng, the same attack proved to be too risky. The Ukrainian put just half of Zheng’s serves back in play. More than 20% of those returns ended the point, but against all of the free points she gave away, it wasn’t enough. Unlike the scattershot second set of the Navarro match, there wasn’t enough time to find the range before the contest was over.

The streaky slugger

After Yastremska’s eight straight wins from qualifying to the Australian Open semi-final, it’s tempting to call her a streaky player. Combine the big-picture run with narrow-focus ups and downs like the three sets of the Navarro match, and she looks like a kite blown around by the winds of chance at both the macro and micro levels.

I normally dismiss claims that any player’s results are particularly momentum-driven: While athletes aren’t robots, study after study suggests that if momentum (or “clutch” or “streakiness”) is real, it’s a minor effect, far more minor than commentators or the casual fan seems to believe. But after watching the Ukrainian’s three sets against Navarro, I had to test it.

Here’s a more precise hypothesis: Yastremska is more likely to win a game when she has won the previous game, compared to when she has lost the previous game. That isn’t the whole story of in-match streakiness, but for a single number, I think it gets to the core of the issue.

Result? True!

Player                 Change after Gm-W  
Alison Riske Amritraj             +11.9%  
Linda Fruhvirtova                  +9.7%  
Lesia Tsurenko                     +8.9%  
Irina Camelia Begu                 +8.7%  
Ajla Tomljanovic                   +7.1%  
Kaja Juvan                         +6.5%  
Polona Hercog                      +6.0%  
Yulia Putintseva                   +5.6%  
Shuai Zhang                        +5.4%  
Dayana Yastremska                  +5.3% 
--- 
Jelena Ostapenko                   +3.2%  
Iga Swiatek                        +1.6%  
-- Average --                      +1.0%  
Aryna Sabalenka                    +0.3%  
Elena Rybakina                     -0.8%  
Coco Gauff                         -1.2%  
Caroline Garcia                    -3.3%

Among the 102 women with at least 20 charted matches since 2017, Yastremska ranks in the top ten, winning games more than 5% more often than average when she has won the previous game. She out-momentums her fellow hyper-aggressor Ostapenko by a modest amount. Another slugger, Aryna Sabalenka, seems to be impervious to previous results, even more so than the slightly streaky average player.

(The exact metric compares games-that-follow-games-won to games-that-follow-games [that is, games that don’t begin a set] within the same match, and excludes tiebreaks. Winning a match 6-0 6-0 isn’t “streaky” by this measure, because it’s impossible to know whether the result is due to a lopsided matchup [or injury] or to momentum–the winner went 10 for 10 in games that followed games won, and 10 for 10 in games that followed any game. With this metric, a streaky player is one who wins 10 of 20 total games in a match including, say, 7 of 10 games that follow other games won.)

So Yastremska is a little tougher to beat when she’s on a roll. She’s really hard to derail if she has just won a game and you have the misfortune of serving. Here is the same metric, only limited to winning percentage in return games:

Player             After Service Hold  
Katerina Siniakova             +13.4%  
Dayana Yastremska              +13.3%  
Lauren Davis                   +13.0%  
Linda Fruhvirtova              +12.2%  
Tatjana Maria                  +11.2%  
Alison Riske Amritraj          +10.8%  
Marta Kostyuk                  +10.3%  
Anhelina Kalinina               +9.9%  
Yulia Putintseva                +9.6%  
Qinwen Zheng                    +8.8% 
--- 
Jelena Ostapenko                +2.7%  
Iga Swiatek                     +2.6%  
Aryna Sabalenka                 +2.2%  
-- Average --                   +1.0%  
Coco Gauff                      -1.3%  
Caroline Garcia                 -4.9%

Yastremska’s success in return games skyrockets after she has held serve. Maybe she feels especially confident after getting through a service game; maybe a hold is a sign that her whole game is clicking. Whatever the reason, she rides this particular type of momentum as much as anyone, trailing Siniakova at the top of the list by a meaningless 0.031 percentage points.

You might suspect–or at least, I initially suspected–that streakiness is related to slugging. It’s easy enough to invent a story to link the two: Big hitting is risky; winners and errors come in batches. But no, there’s virtually no correlation, positive or negative, between these measures of streakiness and any of the metrics I use to quantify aggression. Grinders like Yulia Putintseva share the top of the list with Yastremska, while attackers like Caroline Garcia appear at the other extreme.

For the Ukrainian, it seems, the ups and downs are here to stay. Until she gets more out of her serve, she’ll continue to get dragged into three-set battles against opponents much further down the ranking list. As long as she doesn’t miss too many returns, she’ll keep herself in position to win. The losses will sometimes be ugly, but the victories–like the games that contribute to them–will compensate by coming in batches.

* * *

February 2, 1974: Five-dollar words

My favorite moments in early-1970s tennis came when Billie Jean King got feisty. I don’t mean the take-this-fight-to-Congress, crusading Billie Jean, though there was plenty of that. On the rare occasions when an opponent pushed Madame Superstar to the brink, she could get downright nasty. Pity the poor linesmen.

Fifty years ago today, King faced longtime friend, doubles partner, and punching bag Rosie Casals in the semi-finals of the Virginia Slims of Washington. It was the marquee match of the week, with all of the tour’s other stars absent. Chris Evert and Nancy Richey were taking the week off, Evonne Goolagong was chasing appearance fees on the other side of the globe, and Margaret Court was pregnant. Billie Jean took it upon herself to keep the crowds happy: She went to three sets in the opening round against Kerry Harris, then delivered a 6-0, 6-1 masterclass to win her quarter-final against the 17-year-old Kathy Kuykendall.

Some fans griped about the ticket prices: five bucks for the King-Casals semi and six dollars for the evening session, which featured Australians Kerry Melville and Helen Gourlay in the other semi-final. The 2,800 locals who showed up for the afternoon match, at least, got their money’s worth.

Casals rounded into form just in time, having struggled a bit to recalibrate her game as the tour seesawed between indoor and outdoor events. Her athletic net game outpaced King’s own attack throughout the first set, leading Billie Jean to find a scapegoat among the officials. She berated the service line judge, even threatening to quit; Casals had to calm her down and convince her to stay. (Rosie quipped later that she deserved 60% of the prize money for keeping her pal on court.) After the Old Lady vented her wrath at the chair and two separate linesmen, she settled for moving the offending service line judge to the net cord.

“What this game needs are professional linesmen,” King said. “We’re years behind the times. There are too many questionable situations for a bunch of amateurs to try to master. I’ve suffered through 21 years of bad line calls, and I’m fed up.”

Tennis officiating was certainly a mixed bag. A few months earlier, at the men’s season-ending Masters event in Boston, a last-minute strike forced organizers to pluck fans from the crowd to call the lines.

But not everyone believed that Billie Jean’s reaction was warranted, or that it was triggered by what King called her own “low boiling point.” Melville and Gourlay played their match with the same crew and had no problems. “Most of this arguing with linesmen is done for tactical reasons,” Melville said. “It helps intimidate them. You can get away with it over here, but not in Australia.”

The offending service line judge, Stew Saphier, had a few words of his own. Nothing like this had ever happened to him before, and he wasn’t embarrassed by it. Why not? “Because I was correct in all my calls.”

Whatever the cause of King’s outburst, the day ended as it usually did. After dropping a 7-5 first set to Casals, she came back to win, 6-2, 6-0. The next day, she dispatched Melville 6-0, 6-2, completing the rare feat of a tournament victory that included a 6-0 set won in every match. She was now 14-1 on the young season, her only loss coming in the previous week’s final against Evert. Past her 30th birthday, more famous than ever, she still had plenty of battles ahead.

* * *

Meanwhile, in Ohio…

The men competing at the 1974 Dayton Pro Tennis Classic didn’t draw much in the way of crowds, but tournament organizers slapped together a sure-fire attraction: an exhibition match between Bobby Riggs and Cincinnati Reds star Pete Rose. 4,000 fans turned out for the famous court hustler and baseball’s “Charlie Hustle.” It was clear what they came for: Half of them left before the next regulation match got started.

“This is a disgrace for tennis,” said Yugoslavian veteran Boro Jovanovic. “People don’t come out to see us all week, then they come out for something like this.”

Rose insisted that Riggs play him “straight,” but after three games of running the outfielder ragged with all the spin that a 55-year-old arm could muster, the clowning began. Riggs donned everything from baseball catcher’s gear to a dress, and he eventually set out beach chairs and carried a briefcase to further aid his opponent’s cause. Final score: five games to two, Riggs.

Bobby recognized that rematches with King and Court were off the table and that neither Evert nor Goolagong were likely to accept a challenge. “I’d like to play women from all the world,” he said, naming Casals as potential foe. In the meantime, he’d take on all comers. With his Battle-of-the-Sexes celebrity still going strong, he knew people would show up to watch.

Click here for other posts about the 1974 season. Or here for dispatches from 1924.

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Qinwen Zheng’s Serve Under Construction

Also today: The odds of a 42-point tiebreak; January 19, 1974

Qinwen Zheng in 2023. Credit: Hameltion

Qinwen Zheng is one of the top prospects in the women’s game, up to 14th on the WTA ranking list at age 21. She won her first tour-level title in Palermo last summer, then upset Ons Jabeur en route to a quarter-final showing at the US Open. After topping Barbora Krejcikova for a second title in Zhengzhou, she reached the final at the WTA Elite Trophy, falling in a two hour, 52-minute final to Beatriz Haddad Maia.

With yesterday’s upsets of Elena Rybakina and Jessica Pegula at the Australian Open, Zheng’s draw opened up. With only one other seed in the second quarter, she’s the heavy favorite to earn a semi-final date with Iga Swiatek. Potential is poised to become reality.

It’s never been difficult to dream big on the Chinese woman’s behalf. Her service motion–once she gets past a hitchy toss–is a photographer’s dream, and she takes advantage of her five-foot, ten-inch frame to send first serve after first serve into the corners. When she hits a target out wide, returners are lucky to get a racket on the ball, let alone put it back in play. Her forehand is equally powerful.

The results bear out the devastation wreaked by her first delivery. Here are last year’s WTA top ten in first-serve percentage:

Player               1stWon%  
Qinwen Zheng           73.7%  
Elena Rybakina         73.6%  
Aryna Sabalenka        72.8%  
Caroline Garcia        72.5%  
Liudmila Samsonova     71.5%  
Iga Swiatek            70.0%  
Petra Kvitova          69.8%  
Belinda Bencic         69.5%  
Petra Martic           69.5%  
Ekaterina Alexandrova  69.4%

Pretty good company, huh? Her forehand grades well, too. According to Match Charting Data, Zheng hits more winners, induces more forced errors, and commits fewer unforced errors with that shot than the average player on tour. Her forehand potency (FHP) per match over the last 52 weeks is 10.8, placing her in the top ten among tour regulars, just behind Haddad Maia and Madison Keys.

That’s the good news. If you’re going to have just two world-class weapons, those are the ones to pick. They’ve served her well so far: If she justifies her seed and reaches the final four in Melbourne, she could crack the top ten.

The rest of Zheng’s game is–let’s be optimistic here–a work in progress. Today I want to look specifically at her serve as a whole; we’ll save her not-as-problematic backhand for another day.

When the 21-year-old lands her first serve, as we’ve seen, good things happen. She hits more aces than almost anyone on tour, and about half of her first-serve points end with either an unreturned first serve or a plus-one winner. The problem is, she doesn’t make many first serves, and when she misses, her second serve is as erratic as her first serve is imposing.

The average top-50 player on the WTA tour makes about 62% of her first serves. In 2023, Zheng succeeded just 51.8% of the time, almost three full percentage points below anyone else.

Making matters worse, her second-serve results are nearly as bad. The average top-50 WTAer wins 47% of her second-serve points. Zheng won 45.5%, a mark that places her in the bottom third of that group. Among the current top 20, only Jelena Ostapenko and Daria Kasatkina win fewer second-serve points. It’s even worse against a strong opponent. She hung onto just 20% of second-serve points against Swiatek in the United Cup this month, 24% versus Rybakina in Beijing, and a mere 26% against Liudmila Samsonova in Montreal. Zheng’s primary weapon makes her look like an elite server, but the overall picture is more mundane. Her first serve sets her on a level with Rybakina, but she barely holds serve as often as Petra Martic.

What is to be done?

This seems like it should be fixable, especially in so young a player. It’s certainly easy to dream. Imagine the seemingly-modest scenario in which Zheng manages to land her first serves and win second-serve points at the rates of an average top-50 player while maintaining her dominance on firsts. She would then win 63.5% of her service points. Only Swiatek and Sabalenka do better.

Easier said than done, of course. A good first serve is no guarantee of a strong second. On the women’s tour, there almost zero correlation between first-serve and second-points won.

Still, this seems like partly a tactical failure, not entirely a gap in her skillset. If Zheng can win nearly 74% of her first-serve points when she misses almost half of the time, what would happen if she served a bit more conservatively? Perhaps she could make 57% of her first serves and still win 72% of them? If so, that would be a bit better. Could she make 62% of first serves–the tour average rate–and win 70% of them? That would be better still.

Once we assume that these tradeoffs are feasible, the whole thing starts to sound like less of a tactical question and more of a pure math problem. I’m not sure that it is: Players practice various types of “first serves” and “second serves,” not every theoretical delivery on the continuum between them. Maybe a thoughtful veteran could tweak things to increase or decrease her first-in percentage at will, but I’m skeptical that a young player could do th esame. At the very least, it’s a project that would take some time.

Still, it’s worth working out whether Zheng could get more bang for her serve-talent buck. In 2009, Dutch researchers Franc Klaassen and Jan R. Magnus (henceforth K&M) published a paper in the Journal of Econometrics that proposed to answer this sort of question. They worked out the usual relationship between serving risk (how many first serves in, how many double faults) and reward (rate of first- and second-serve points won). My friend Jeff McFarland converted their rather complex algorithm to a spreadsheet, which is why I’m able to publish this today, and not in March. Thanks Jeff!

The following table shows Zheng’s actual 2023 results along with her model-optimized rates:

         1stIn%  1stWon%    DF%  2ndWon%   SPW%  
Actual    51.8%    73.7%   6.0%    45.5%  60.1%  
Optimal   60.5%    70.9%   8.8%    47.5%  61.7%

K&M’s formula estimates that Zheng could get close to a tour-average level of first serves in and still win about 71% of them, a success rate that would keep her in the top five. The more surprising output is that she could do better by taking more chances on her second serve. (This is a kind of light version of the oft-discussed argument that a player should just hit two first serves. The algorithm recommends some degree of this for most pros.) By adopting the more risky second-serve approach, she would in theory win 47.5% of those points despite the increase in double faults.

Altogether, those changes would increase her total service points won from 60.1%–12th among the current top 50–to 61.7%, which would rank her fifth.

Another way of looking at the potential gain is in points per thousand. For every thousand service points played, the fully-optimized version of Zheng would win about 16 more than she does now. If her return game remained the same, that’s an improvement of eight points per thousand overall. A few years ago I stumbled on a neat rule of thumb, that an improvement of one point per thousand translates into a gain of one place in the rankings, except near the very top. If that held in this case, the re-imagined Zheng would be on the cusp on the top five.

Again, this is all theoretical. I have no idea whether a big server could consciously execute a decision to take slightly fewer chances on the first and more on the second, or whether her results would follow the model if she did.

But! This is a potential route to a jump up the rankings without reworking groundstrokes, getting fitter or stronger, or even gaining experience. It’s probably not easy, but it’s likely simpler than the alternatives. As it stands now, Zheng’s second serve–and the frequency she’s forced to hit it–is going to hold her back. Solve that problem, and much of her obvious potential is unlocked.

* * *

The odds of a 42-point tiebreak

“10-point tiebreak, my ***.” Credit: @hardpicstennis

Yesterday, Elena Rybakina and Anna Blinkova played a 42-point tiebreak. It’s the longest breaker in grand slam singles history. Blinkova won it, 22-20.

What are the odds?

Let’s start with simply getting to 9-all. We’ll assume that Rybakina and Blinkova were playing at the same level. Yes, Rybakina was a heavy favorite entering the match, and she won a few more points than Blinkova to get to 6-4, 4-6, 6-all. But the margin was narrow, and the math is simpler if we assume they are equal. They won serve points throughout the match at about a 59% rate. Since players tend to be more conservative during tiebreaks, returners fare better, so we’ll say that whoever is serving had a 55% chance of winning the point.

I ran a Monte Carlo simulation to find the odds of reaching 9-all. Here are those probabilities, along with odds at various other levels of serve dominance:

SPW   Reach 9-all  
55%         10.0%  
60%         10.3%  
65%         11.2%  
70%         12.5%  
80%         17.0%

Roughly speaking, there was a one-in-ten chance that yesterday’s breaker would reach 9-all.

From there, the math is simpler. There are two ways to get from 9-all to 10-all: both women could win their service points, or both could win their return points. Serving at 55%, the chances that one or the other occurs are 50.5%. The same logic applies to the step from 10-all to 11-all, 11-all to 12-all, and so on. So for Rybakina and Blinkova, getting from 9-all to 20-all was roughly equivalent to flipping a coin eleven times and getting heads every time–a one-in-two-thousand shot.

To reach 20-all, then, players need to get to 9-all, then trade points another eleven times. For servers at 55%, that’s a one-in-ten shot followed by a one-in-two-thousand shot, or one in twenty thousand–a 0.005% likelihood–altogether.

Here are the equivalent numbers for servers at various levels:

SPW   Reach 9-all  Reach 20-all  that's 1 in…  
55%         10.0%        0.005%         18357  
60%         10.3%        0.008%         12916  
65%         11.2%        0.014%          7086  
70%         12.5%        0.031%          3201  
80%         17.0%        0.244%           409

You might remember the 24-22 tiebreak that Reilly Opelka won against John Isner in Dallas a couple of years ago. The probabilities are dramatically different depending on how serve-dominant the players are, so the Rybakina-Blinkova result was considerably more far-fetched than what Opelka and Isner produced. Adjusting for the fact that the Dallas tiebreak was first-to-seven and assuming that both players won 80% of serve points (an estimate on the low side), this method gives us a one-in-2,192 chance of that tiebreak reaching 22-all.

There are various ways to tweak the numbers. It might be the case that players perform better facing match point; if so, it’s a bit more likely that they’d reach this sort of outrageous score. Maybe it’s appropriate to give Rybakina a modest edge over Blinkova; if we did that, the odds of drawing even so long would be lower. One-in-18,357 isn’t exactly right, but it gives us a rough idea of just how unusual yesterday’s feat truly was.

* * *

January 19, 1974: Sanctioned

Four months from its proposed opening day, things finally started to look up for World Team Tennis. On January 18th, the USLTA officially sanctioned the league in exchange for a $144,000 fee. Another chip fell the next day, when American co-number one Jimmy Connors signed with the Baltimore Banners.

WTT still had several hurdles to clear. The British LTA continued to object to the league’s attempted takeover of so many weeks of the summer calendar. The ILTF, as well, had yet to give their okay. The ATP, still a nascent players’ union, also held back. A few top men–John Newcombe, Ken Rosewall, and now Connors–had thrown in their lot with the upstarts, but until the union made its stance clearer, the WTT ranks remained dominated by women stars.

Across the country, those women were making the case that they’d be able to draw sufficient crowds on their own. Also on January 19th, the first event of the 1974 Virginia Slims circuit came to a close. 6,000 fans packed San Francisco’s Civic Auditorium to watch Chris Evert take on Billie Jean King for the title. Another 2,000 were turned away at the gates. Traffic was jammed for blocks in every direction, and ticket scalpers worked the rows of stalled motorists.

The Slims tour had been dominated by Margaret Court in 1973, with Billie Jean hampered by injury and Evert competing on a separate tour sponsored by the USLTA. This year, Court was absent, pregnant with her second child. If San Francisco was any indication, the Australian would hardly be missed. The federation had made peace with the one-time rebels of the Slims tour, and now Gladys Heldman’s women-only circuit was the only game in town. Billie Jean was healthy (and the ultimate marquee draw, after defeating Bobby Riggs), and Evert provided new blood.

Chrissie also provided fresh motivation for the Old Lady. King had hinted that she would dial back her tournament commitments in 1974, but she wasn’t one to back down from a challenge. Playing no-ad games for the San Francisco title, Billie Jean kept her younger opponent under constant pressure. Five times Evert reached sudden-death point on her serve; five times she saved it. King finally pulled ahead to take the first set, winning the tiebreak, 5-2. Evert mounted a comeback from 0-4 in the second, but Billie Jean halted her momentum when she chased down a drop shot that Chris didn’t think she could touch.

“She was very gutsy and I once thought I had no chance,” King said after the match. “And thank God for giving me a pretty good pair of wheels on that particular shot.”

Billie Jean was thrilled at both the result and the sellout crowd. Nothing pleased her more than a successful women’s tour–except, of course, for a successful women’s tour with herself on top.

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