Category: Match charting

Joao Fonseca and Damage Down the Line

Joao Fonseca doing what he does best

Joao Fonseca made easy work of last week’s Next Gen Finals. He went undefeated against the world’s best under-21s, dropping just one set in best-of-five semi-finals and finals. The youngest player in the field, he joins Jannik Sinner and Carlos Alcaraz as 18-year-old champions in the seven-year history of the event.

There’s no secret to Fonseca’s success. He already possesses a devastating forehand, a shot with power that invites comparisons to fellow South Americans Juan Martin del Potro and Fernando Gonzalez. Outrageous as it sounds, Fonseca’s might turn out to be even better. The Brazilian has a more compact stroke, making his forehand more flexible–and perhaps ultimately more reliable–than the long-levered Delpo motion.

In his round-robin match against Jakub Mensik, the TennisTV broadcast flashed a stat meant to indicate one way Fonseca excels:

The TennisTV commentators were flabbergasted by these numbers: They’d never seen anything like it. Hugh, responsible for the screenshot here, got straight to the point. If a player with a forehand like Fonseca’s can consistently send the ball to his opponent’s weaker side, it’s game over.

The easiest direction to hit a groundstroke is back the way it came. That’s how we end up with protracted cross-court rallies. It takes impeccable timing to react to a elite-level cross-court forehand and change direction. (Pros drill that specific sequence, but no amount of practice makes it easy.) Down-the-line shots are doubly difficult because the net is higher as it nears the posts. The timing needs to be near-perfect, and there’s a smaller margin for error.

Here’s another way to get a sense of the dangerous risk level of down-the-line groundstrokes. Novak Djokovic, king of the down-the-line backhand, doesn’t hit that many of them. The inherent limitations of tennis rackets and the dimensions of the court are unforgiving. Fonseca, if he can really hit more than half of his forehands down the line, could defy those limitations.

Fact-check

Normally, I’d give you all sorts of numbers to help anchor Fonseca’s stats. How much does his 56% clip exceed tour average, or compare to someone like Sinner? That’s my goal, but first, we need to get into the weeds a bit.

The Match Charting Project has 14 Fonseca matches in the database, including all five of his NextGen Finals contests. Here’s the breakdown of groundstroke direction for the Mensik match:

This is… not the same as the broadcast graphic. We should expect minor differences, both because the 44/56 stat was shown midway through the match, and because reasonable people can disagree about how to classify shots that don’t obviously belong to a specific category. But that’s not what’s going on here. There’s virtually no way to take these numbers and conclude that Fonseca hit more than half of his forehands down the line.

What’s more, Fonseca’s forehand-direction profile is rather pedestrian. That’s not to say that his forehand is ordinary, just that he aims in the same directions as his peers. Here is Joao’s forehand-direction distribution, based on those 14 charted matches, compared with tour average:

DIRECTION      Fonseca  Average  
Cross-court        40%      39%  
Middle             20%      22%  
Down the line      10%      11%  
Inside-out         26%      24%  
Inside-in           4%       4%

Ho-hum, right? Maybe he hits a few more inside-out forehands instead of going back up the middle. Even there, the two-percentage-point gaps between Fonseca and tour average could be an artifact of the matches we’ve charted. The Brazilian’s forehand does plenty of damage, but as a function of how he hits it, not where.

More weeds, sorry

I should probably let the discrepancy go, but let’s give it another minute. I don’t think the broadcast graphic was wrong, but it’s clearly measuring something different than what I count for the Match Charting Project stats. Maybe there’s some important subset of forehands that Fonseca is unusually likely to hit down the line?

One of the more difficult–and damaging–specific shots is the forehand down the line from the forehand corner. The MCP divides the court into three sectors by width: to the (right-hander’s) forehand corner, down the middle, and to the backhand. Maybe Fonseca particularly likes to change direction when he sees a ball in his own forehand corner?

A bit, but not by much. Here are the direction frequencies for Fonseca’s forehands from his forehand corner, for both the Mensik match and the average of his charted matches, along with the frequencies for his opponents:

             To FH  Middle    DTL  
vs Mensik    58.1%   22.6%  19.4%  
Fonseca Avg  49.0%   23.6%  27.5%  
Opp Avg      45.7%   30.9%  23.4%

Nothing really dramatic here, and he went down the line less often in the Mensik match than his typical opponent does.

What about when Fonseca gets a ball down the middle? We saw in the MCP stats above that he hits a lot of inside-out forehands. That includes shots from the middle to the backhand side of a right-handed opponent. Here is the same group of frequencies for the same sets of matches, this time excluding left-handed opponents because they will naturally make different choices from the middle of the court:

              To FH  Middle    DTL  
vs Mensik     29.7%   25.7%  44.6%  
Fonseca Avg   39.7%   20.0%  40.3%  
(RH) Opp Avg  34.2%   25.4%  40.4%

There’s a few more down-the-line shots in the Mensik match. But over 14 matches, Fonseca differs from his opponents only in hitting fewer balls back up the middle.

Maybe you’ve already worked out the underlying discrepancy. Since the 44/56 split adds up to 100%, there’s no “down the middle” category in the broadcast stats. The graphic splits forehands into two buckets, not three. That’s not how I think about tennis, and I suspect it’s not how you do, either. They would have done better to label the columns “to the forehand” and “to the backhand,” or something along those lines. It’s not unusual at all to hit 56% of one’s forehands to the opponent’s backhand side. But a lot of those “to the backhand” shots are not what anybody would normally call “down the line.”

The Fonseca difference

It’s not about tactics, it’s good old-fashioned power and precision. Fonseca’s forehand isn’t innovative, and it doesn’t need to be. If he hits his shots in more or less the same directions that his peers do, he’s probably doing something right. It means that at age 18, he has already internalized pro tactics. The difference is that he’s hitting those forehands harder, and he’s often landing them closer to the lines, something hinted at by his low rate of down-the-middle forehands.

He already shows up near the top of my Forehand Potency (FHP) leaderboard–though I’ll give you some caveats in a minute:

Rank  Player              FHP/100  
1     Andrey Rublev          14.0  
2     Jan-Lennard Struff     11.6  
3     Joao Fonseca           11.3  
4     Stefanos Tsitsipas     11.0  
5     Carlos Alcaraz         10.8  
6     Rinky Hijikata          9.7  
7     Jannik Sinner           9.4  
8     Casper Ruud             9.2  
9     Juncheng Shang          8.6  
10    Novak Djokovic          8.6

FHP combines forehand winners and errors, along with shots that lead to both opponent errors and winners on the player’s next shot. Given the vagaries of estimating the effect of one shot on others, Fonseca effectively sits in a tie for second place, as good or better than everyone except for Andrey Rublev. Which, I’d say, checks out.

The caveats lie in the dataset. The Brazilian has faced only one top-20 opponent, and that was a possibly-unmotivated #20 Arthur Fils last week. The charting data on which FHP numbers are based includes all the NextGen Finals matches, along with some Challenger-level matches and some early rounds at ATPs. After all, he’s 18 and that’s all he’s played. Point being, an 11.3 FHP/100 (per 100 forehands) against that level of competition probably isn’t is good as Alcaraz’s 10.8 or Sinner’s 9.4, amassed against foes like each other.

But don’t take that adjustment too far. Fonseca scored a 11.0 against Fils in Rio, when he was barely 17 and a half. Facing Botic van de Zandschulp in a Davis Cup tilt, he registered a whopping 16.7 FHP/100. The Dutchman is hardly easy pickings: When Sinner played van de Zandschulp twice early in the season, he managed just 1.2 and 7.1 on the same metric.

Damage (not just) down the line

Fonseca doesn’t hit an unusual number of forehands down the line, but when he does, opponents barely stand a chance. Among the 200-plus players with as many down-the-line forehands in the MCP database as Fonseca has, he ranks sixth in points won when he hits the shot. Admittedly, it’s an odd list:

Rank  Player                   W/FE%   UFE%  inPtsWon%  
1     Juncheng Shang           33.6%  13.1%      66.4%  
2     Nishesh Basavareddy      29.4%  10.3%      65.1%  
3     Luca Van Assche          22.9%  11.0%      62.4%  
4     Hyeon Chung              30.1%  19.9%      61.8%  
5     Bjorn Borg               26.3%   7.3%      61.6%  
6     Joao Fonseca             31.1%  17.6%      61.3%  
7     Rafael Nadal             28.9%  12.8%      61.2%  
8     Camilo Ugo Carabelli     10.3%   9.6%      60.9%  
9     Corentin Moutet          29.4%  15.6%      60.6%  
10    Zhizhen Zhang            22.8%  15.9%      60.3%  
11    Guillermo Garcia Lopez   20.3%   5.9%      60.1%  
12    Roberto Carballes Baena  10.1%   5.8%      59.7%  
13    Carlos Alcaraz           26.7%  14.3%      59.7%  
14    Grigor Dimitrov          23.8%  13.4%      59.3%  
15    Juan Martin del Potro    26.8%  12.7%      59.2%  
                                                        
      Average                  20.1%  15.2%      53.4%

The 2024 Next Gen field is bizarrely well-represented, with Shang, Basavareddy, and Van Assche leading the way. Is this the age of the deadly down-the-line forehand? Some of the same caveats apply here as with the FHP list: The youngsters have played a different sort of opponent than Nadal, Alcaraz, or (!) Borg. The clay-courters on the list also make for awkward comaprisons. For dirtballers, the down-the-line forehand is a way to build points, not end them.

It’s clear that Fonseca loves this play. He ends points in his favor (with a winner or forced error) more than anyone on this list except for Shang.

Here’s the scary thing: A few clay-court matches are severely dragging down the Brazilian’s numbers. On hard courts, he moves up to second on the list, winning 68% of points in which he hits a down-the-line forehand. The shot ends points outright an incredible 48% of the time. Delpo’s numbers, though of course against stronger competition, pale in comparison, at 60% and 39%, respectively.

Some of the difference between Fonseca and the field is that his forehand is great, period. If you’ve got an extra ten miles per hour that the average player doesn’t, that’s going to show up in every direction, not just one. And for the most part, that’s what we see in Joao’s points won when hitting each category of forehand:

FH Pts Won     Fonseca  Tour  
Cross-court        58%   54%  
Middle             52%   46%  
Down the line      59%   53%  
Inside-out         57%   57%  
Inside-in          54%   59%

He’s better than average in all but the rarest of the five forehand directions. Even that isn’t really a negative: On hard courts he does better than tour average with the inside-in forehand.

The eye-catcher on that chart is 52% of points won when hitting a down-the-middle forehand. The typical player is likely to lose a point when hitting that shot. That’s not necessarily because down-the-middle forehands are bad, but because if you need to hit one, the point probably isn’t going your way. Unlike the other categories of forehands, it’s usually a defensive shot.

Of the 220-plus players with as many down-the-middle forehands as Fonseca in the MCP database, only 23 win more than half of those points. The Brazilian ranks fourth by points won when hitting down-the-middle forehands. It’s another oddball list, with Pablo Andujar, Tim Smyczek, Gilles Simon, and Carlos Berlocq rounding out the top five. (Yes, really.) To the extent we can group them together, those four men played a different brand of tennis, winning points with conservative shots as they wore down their opponents.

The more telling stat is that Fonseca actually ends points by clubbing forehands down the middle. The average player hits a winner or induces a forced error with less than 2% of these strokes. Joao comes in at 6.4%, better than anyone else in the dataset:

Rank  Player               W/FE%  inPtsWon%  
1     Joao Fonseca          6.4%      52.8%  
2     Fernando Gonzalez     6.0%      43.2%  
3     Christopher Eubanks   5.7%      38.8%  
4     Thanasi Kokkinakis    5.0%      46.1%  
5     Tomas Machac          4.9%      43.8%  
6     Nicolas Jarry         4.7%      41.7%  
7     Alexei Popyrin        4.4%      41.8%  
8     Sam Querrey           4.3%      41.8%  
9     Max Purcell           4.0%      38.5%  
10    Lorenzo Sonego        3.9%      46.0%  
11    Matteo Arnaldi        3.8%      49.5%  
12    Lucas Pouille         3.4%      42.9%  
13    Jan-Lennard Struff    3.3%      45.6%  
14    Matteo Berrettini     3.3%      42.1%  
15    John McEnroe          3.3%      44.0%  
16    Otto Virtanen         3.2%      35.8%  
17    Boris Becker          3.2%      44.1%  
18    Nick Kyrgios          3.2%      43.2%  
19    Roger Federer         3.2%      47.6%  
20    Carlos Alcaraz        3.2%      50.2%

When you can end points with your forehand twice as often as Federer did, you’re doing something right. The only players even close to the Brazilian’s winner rate end up losing far more points, probably because they need to take many more risks to get that small sliver of positive outcomes.

One more time for the road: Fonseca’s numbers are probably inflated due to his level of competition. In 2025, we’ll see how his forehand holds up against the elites. If we revisit these numbers twelve months from now, he’ll probably come down a notch. But raw power plays at every level. No matter who stands across the net, Fonseca’s forehand is fearsome–in all directions.

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Does Mpetshi Perricard’s Backhand Even Matter?

Giovanni Mpetshi Perricard in Basel, playing a longer rally than usual.
Credit: Skyscraper2010

The story of last week’s tournament in Basel was the blistering service performance of Giovanni Mpetshi Perricard. The six-foot, eight-inch Frenchman racked up 109 aces in five matches, including more than one-third of his service points in Sunday’s final against Ben Shelton.

Mpetshi Perricard is a big server straight out of central casting. He can nail the corners at 150 miles per hour; on Sunday he hit one second serve at 146. He puts plenty of mustard on his groundstrokes as well. He often plays a high-risk brand of baseline tennis, recognizing that with a serve like his, he only needs to break once or twice–or just pick off a couple of return points in the tiebreak.

The Frenchman’s rapid rise through the ranks also fits his style. For a big server, wins can come in batches, when conditions–or, simply, tiebreak luck–are on his side. After an unexpected breakthrough on clay in Lyon, Mpetshi Perricard upset Sebastian Korda (in four tiebreaks!) and reached the second week at Wimbledon. Basel played faster than any tour event this year, and he took advantage. In between, he suffered through a 1-7 stretch in which he lost five straight tiebreaks and saw his double-fault rate balloon into double digits.

Much of Mpetshi Perricard’s future success will depend on his ability to handle these ups and downs. So far, he has struggled a bit to avoid the bad patches that spell doom for one-dimensional players. In his limited tour-level action, he has won more service points (70.2%) than anyone except Jannik Sinner. Yet five men hold more reliably than the Frenchman does, even after an unbroken week in Basel. The successes of Milos Raonic and John Isner–and even Shelton last year–come from playing better than usual under pressure, something Mpetshi Perricard has yet to consistently demonstrate.

I do love talking about servebots serving service aces. But while everybody raves about the GMP serve, I keep thinking about the backhand.

On the one hand

Mpetshi Perricard is now the fourth-highest ranked man with a one-handed backhand. His shot is nothing like the graceful, big-backswing, Federer- and Gasquet-inspired strokes of Grigor Dimitrov and Lorenzo Musetti. He often does little more than set up the racket to block the ball back. Strong as he is, the resulting flat shot can be much more than a mere defensive maneuver.

A few generations ago, it was standard to see big servers with one-handers. Think Richard Krajicek or Greg Rusedski; you might even put Pete Sampras in that category. More recently, Ivo Karlovic sported a one-handed backhand, though he mostly hit slices. Christopher Eubanks fits a broadly similar mold. Now, though, one-handers are dying breed, with just nine representatives in the top 100 of the ATP rankings.

Unlike Musetti or Stefanos Tsitsipas, Mpetshi Perricard isn’t likely to inspire the next generation of one-handed stars. No one is going to call this guy a throwback. On a good serving day, the Frenchman’s highlight reel features barely any groundstrokes at all.

What, then, do the numbers say? Is the Mpetshi Perricard backhand any good? Would he be better off with a two-hander like Raonic’s, Isner’s, or Reilly Opelka’s? Or, to return to the question I started with: For someone who specializes in ending rallies before they begin, does his backhand even matter?

Safely hidden

When the Frenchman’s game plan is working, his backhand is tucked away, out of sight. No backhands are necessary when the serve doesn’t come back, and when he controls the point, he prefers the forehand. Setting aside service returns, few players avoid their backhands as scrupulously as Mpetshi Perricard does.

The average ATPer hits 44% of their groundstrokes from the backhand side. Here are the most backhand-shy men with at least 15 matches in the Match Charting Project database, along with some other big servers of note:

Player                      BH/GS  
Ivo Karlovic                30.1%  
Jack Draper                 32.5%  
Ryan Harrison               35.2%  
Thiago Monteiro             35.5%  
Giovanni Mpetshi Perricard  35.5%  
Jaume Munar                 36.1%  
Vasek Pospisil              36.4%  
Alejandro Tabilo            37.1%  
Alexei Popyrin              37.3%  
Guido Pella                 37.4%  
Ben Shelton                 37.6%  
Maxime Cressy               37.9%  
…                                  
Christopher Eubanks         38.9%  
Matteo Berrettini           41.1%  
Milos Raonic                42.9%  
-- Average                  44.0%  
John Isner                  44.3%  
Reilly Opelka               45.6%  
Greg Rusedski               46.2%  
Nick Kyrgios                46.8%  
Pete Sampras                47.7%  
Richard Krajicek            48.3%  
Goran Ivanisevic            51.1%  
Mark Philippoussis          52.1%

Backhands per groundstroke is not the easiest stat to parse, because it is the product of so many different factors. Nearly everyone would like to keep their number low, so it’s partly a function of footwork and anticipation. (And sheer willingness to hit forehands from outlandish positions.) But it is also influenced by opponents, who will work more or less hard to find the backhand. Mpetshi Perricard’s place on this list, then, could be telling us various things. He hits his forehand when he can, and his movement is good enough to make it happen. Opponents might not be trying as hard as they could to force a backhand.

Yet another factor is how comfortable the player is with their slice. GMP hits his quite a bit, meaning that he unleashes the flat one-hander that much more rarely. The typical tour player hits their flat or top-spin backhand on 35% of groundstrokes. The Frenchman comes in at 25%, not as often as his most extreme peers, but in line with other big servers:

Player                      not-slice-BH/GS  
Ivo Karlovic                           6.1%  
Daniel Evans                          11.6%  
Milos Raonic                          20.2%  
Maxime Cressy                         20.4%  
Matteo Berrettini                     21.3%  
Grigor Dimitrov                       22.7%  
Corentin Moutet                       23.3%  
Christopher Eubanks                   23.6%  
Giovanni Mpetshi Perricard            25.2%  
Alexei Popyrin                        26.3%  
...
Bernard Tomic                         27.9%  
John Isner                            28.0%  
Ben Shelton                           28.5%  
Reilly Opelka                         31.5%  
-- Average                            34.7%

All of this is to say: Mpetshi Perricard hardly leans on the flat backhand. His serve keeps point short, and his preferences are for other shots. In the 138 points of the Basel final, he hit only 28 flat backhands, six of them on service returns.

Backhand impact

When the Frenchman is forced to hit a backhand (or chooses to–anything’s possible, I guess), the results aren’t great. When he goes for the flat backhand, he wins 43% of points, compared to a tour average of 49%. He takes more risks than his peers, but not overwhelmingly so: 9% of his one-handers end in a winner or forced error, while 12% are unforced errors. (Tour norms are 8% and 9%, respectively.)

These outcomes aren’t as extreme as his preferences. Of about 200 players with as many non-slice backhands in the MCP database, Mpetshi Perricard’s 43% comes in 21st from the bottom. Compared to other big servers, that win rate is positively respectable:

Player                      W/FE%   UFE%  inPointsWon%  
John Isner                   6.9%  12.8%         35.8%  
Milos Raonic                 7.3%  12.5%         40.4%  
Matteo Berrettini            4.8%  10.4%         42.5%  
Andy Roddick                 5.5%   7.8%         42.6%  
Felix Auger-Aliassime        6.0%   9.9%         43.4%  
Giovanni Mpetshi Perricard   8.9%  12.6%         43.5%  
Ben Shelton                  6.2%  11.1%         43.8%  
Nick Kyrgios                 7.9%  10.7%         43.9%  
Kevin Anderson               7.6%  11.0%         44.1%  
Hubert Hurkacz               6.2%  10.0%         45.6%  
-- Average                   7.3%   9.0%         48.6%  
Jack Draper                  6.5%   5.7%         49.1%

Against this group, the Frenchman’s winner (and forced error) rate really stands out. Given the outcomes when he doesn’t go for it, it’s possible he should be even more aggressive than he already is. Master tactician Milos Raonic took a similar tack, piling up as many unforced errors as GMP does, but without quite as many winners.

The picture is less rosy when we look at slice backhands. As noted, Mpetshi Perricard hits a lot of them–close to one-third of his groundstrokes from that wing. When he does, he wins 33% of points, compared to 42% for his peers. Only a handful of players have posted such low slice-backhand win rates, and they are mostly the names you would expect:

Player                      W/FE%   UFE%  inPointsWon%  
John Isner                   1.5%  11.1%         27.3%  
Christopher Eubanks          1.6%  10.7%         30.2%  
Kevin Anderson               3.2%   6.5%         31.4%  
Nicolas Jarry                4.0%  13.2%         32.7%  
Ivo Karlovic                 3.5%  12.0%         32.8%  
Giovanni Mpetshi Perricard   3.1%   3.9%         33.1%  
Ben Shelton                  2.0%   7.1%         33.3%  
...
Nick Kyrgios                 4.2%   6.1%         35.6%  
Felix Auger-Aliassime        3.6%   8.2%         38.1%  
Hubert Hurkacz               2.7%   3.9%         38.1%  
Milos Raonic                 4.7%   9.4%         40.3%  
Matteo Berrettini            2.8%   9.0%         41.5%  
-- Average                   3.3%   5.4%         41.6%

The Frenchman doesn’t miss much. Why just keep the ball in play, though, if you’re likely to lose the point anyway? By hitting so many slices, Mpetshi Perricard makes his flat-backhand numbers look better, but he probably doesn’t pick up any points by making the trade. Prolonging the point is a good strategy if you’re Casper Ruud–or, really, about 80% of the guys on tour. But if you play like GMP, it’s better to go big.

This is one way in which the one-hander may cost him. The two-handed backhand is particularly valuable in its ability to block overpowering shots without retreating to a fully defensive mode. While players with one-handers try to achieve the same thing with a slice, the stats tell us that it’s a poor imitation. The Frenchman’s in particular isn’t doing him any favors.

So, does it even matter?

Mpetshi Perricard doesn’t hit that many backhands, and he isn’t that much worse than average when he does. But, the margins in tennis are small, and the margins for big servers are smaller still. In 26 tour-level matches this year through the Basel final, GMP won exactly 50% of his points. (Not 50.1%, not 49.9%–50% on the dot.) Five players in the top 20 win 50.8% or less. That’s how close the Frenchman is to an even bigger breakthrough.

My backhand potency (BHP) stat quantifies the impact that each player’s (non-slice) backhands have on their broader results. The stat measures how often a shot ends the point in either direction, as well as what happens on the shot after that. Based on the matches we’ve charted this year, GMP’s BHP per 100 backhands stands at -4.3, one of the lower numbers on tour for players with at least 10 charted matches from the last 52 weeks:

Player                      BHP/100  
Nicolas Jarry                  -6.9  
Felix Auger Aliassime          -4.6  
Tallon Griekspoor              -4.6  
Flavio Cobolli                 -4.3  
Giovanni Mpetshi Perricard     -4.3  
Alexei Popyrin                 -4.2  
Dominic Thiem                  -4.1  
Botic Van De Zandschulp        -3.5  
Matteo Berrettini              -3.1  
Ben Shelton                    -2.4  
Stefanos Tsitsipas             -2.4

What does this mean for the bottom line? -4.3 BHP is equivalent to about -3 points per 100 backhands. Since he doesn’t hit many backhands, that’s about -1.1 per 100 points.

My best estimate, then, is that if we magically replaced the Frenchman’s backhand with a neutral one–say, that of Arthur Fils–he’d pick up 1.1 more points per 100. Instead of winning 50% of points at tour level, he’d win 51.1%. That isn’t good enough to crack the top 10, but it would probably get him into the top 20.

Quantifying the impact of slices is tougher, because the more conservative shot is less likely to end the point immediately, or even on the next shot. If we figure that Mpetshi Perricard’s slice is roughly the same distance below average as his flat backhand, that’s another 0.5 or 0.6 points per 100 he could gain by acquiring a tour-average shot. Daniil Medvedev has hung in the top five in the ATP rankings while winning 51.9% of points. Stringing all of these assumptions together, we can start to see how a capably-backhanded GMP could reach that level.

The bad news for the Frenchman is that climbing the ranks is hard. Mpetshi Perricard is the worst returner in the top 50, and it isn’t even close. He breaks in about 10% of his return games; no one else is below 14%. Earlier this year, I wrote about the similar challenges facing Ben Shelton: Historically, a lot of players have arrived on tour with big serves, huge potential, and tons of hype. Few of them have been able to shore up their weak points enough to crack the top ten, let alone achieve greater feats.

The good news: There is so much room for improvement. Even without polishing the strokes themselves, it’s possible that a more aggressive set of tactics could win him a few more points on return. In yesterday’s loss to Karen Khachanov, the Frenchman won the first set despite picking off just two of 37 return points. One-dimensional servebot or not, he can learn to do better than that.

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More About Drop Shots: Alexander Bublik Edition

Alexander Bublik in 2022. Credit: Getty

If Carlos Alcaraz is the prince of the drop shot, Alexander Bublik is the court jester. We learned this week that Bublik hits droppers more than any other tour regular, about once every 14 points. That’s three times as often as tour average. No one else goes to the well more than once per 19 points.

Persistence aside, Sasha’s results are mixed: He wins about 45% of those points. That’s unimpressive compared to the ATP norm of 54%, and it’s particularly weak next to Alcaraz’s mark of 62%. Assuming that drop shots are, on average, hit from a neutral rally position, one in which each player has a 50% chance of winning the point, Bublik costs himself 3.3 points per thousand with his drop shot. In the last decade, only Benoit Paire has been worse.

On the other hand, the number rests on a big assumption. Alcaraz excels from the baseline; Bublik relies more on his serve. For any given situation–say, 5th stroke of a second-serve point, ball coming to the backhand side–Carlitos probably has a better chance of winning it, drop shot or not. Indeed, based on Match Charting Project data, Alcaraz wins 52% of points from that position. Bublik manages only 46%.

That’s typical. Here are the six situations in which Bublik hits the most drop shots, broken down by whether he is the server or returner, whether it’s a first- or second-serve point, the stage of the rally, and whether he’s faced with a forehand- or backhand-side shot. The table shows the probability that he wins the point if he doesn’t hit a drop shot:

Sv/Ret  Serve  Shot  Side  Exp W%  
Sv      1st    3rd   FH     57.4%  
Ret     2nd    4th   BH     42.8%  
Sv      2nd    3rd   FH     48.2%  
Sv      1st    3rd   BH     51.6%  
Ret     2nd    4th   FH     42.5%  
Sv      2nd    3rd   BH     46.1%  
Ret     1st    6th+  FH     42.2%

Only two of these scenarios favor Sasha: Plus-one forehands and plus-one backhands behind a first serve. Just about anything else and he’s the underdog.

Here are the same six situations, with expected point winning percentages for Alcaraz:

Sv/Ret  Serve  Shot  Side  Exp W%  
Sv      1st    3rd   FH     60.7%  
Ret     2nd    4th   BH     51.5%  
Sv      2nd    3rd   FH     57.3%  
Sv      1st    3rd   BH     54.1%  
Ret     2nd    4th   FH     53.6%  
Sv      2nd    3rd   BH     50.7%  
Ret     1st    6th+  FH     55.1%

When Carlitos opts for a drop shot, he’s trading in what’s already a positive expectation for one that he hopes is even rosier.

Repeat this exercise for every situation in which Bublik has hit a drop shot, take a weighted average, and we find that had he not hit drop shots, he would have won 46.5% of those points. With that in mind, his 45.4% drop-shot winning percentage doesn’t look so bad.

The recalculation doesn’t tell us that Bublik’s drop shot is good, but it does make the tactic look more viable. We’re assuming that in the aggregate, all shot opportunities with the same profile (i.e. second-serve point, ball to the backhand for the fifth shot of the rally) are about the same. That’s just an approximation, so a gap of one percentage point could occur because Sasha chooses lower-percentage moments to hit the drop. There’s even a sliver of evidence that he does so: Eight of his charted drop shots are backhands on the seventh shot of the rally or later of his own first-serve points. Those sound like desperate efforts to finish a point he’s given up on, and sure enough, he lost all eight. Take those out of the equation, and his win percentage on drop shots is exactly the same as when he hits something else.

Drops in expectation

Go through the same exercise for every player, and the drop-shot leaderboard takes on a different look.

Some players, like Kei Nishikori and Nicolas Jarry, win a very high percentage of drop shot points and exceed expectations by a wide margin. Others, like Alcaraz, see less of a benefit from their drop shot, in part because their other options are so good. Still others, like Daniil Medvedev, win more than half of drop-shot points, but because of the rest of their game and the moments they choose to deploy the drop, they may be sacrificing some points when they do so.

Call the new stat Drop Shot Wins Over Expectation, or DSWOE: the ratio of drop-shot success rate to non-drop-shot winning percentage, taking into account the situations in which the player chooses the drop.

Among the 60 players with the most charted points since 2015, here’s the top of the list–the men who gain the most per drop shot–along with a few notable names in Bublik’s section of the list, plus the most extreme laggards:

Player                       Drop W%  Exp W%  DSWOE  
Nicolas Jarry                  65.3%   50.4%   1.30  
Lucas Pouille                  60.3%   48.1%   1.25  
Kei Nishikori                  68.1%   54.5%   1.25  
Sebastian Baez                 63.2%   50.9%   1.24  
Richard Gasquet                60.7%   50.0%   1.22  
Kevin Anderson                 53.8%   44.6%   1.21  
Reilly Opelka                  52.1%   43.5%   1.20  
Marton Fucsovics               58.2%   49.5%   1.18  
Alejandro Davidovich Fokina    59.3%   50.7%   1.17  
Roger Federer                  59.5%   51.4%   1.16  
Robin Haase                    54.7%   47.8%   1.14  
Frances Tiafoe                 54.6%   48.0%   1.14  
Pablo Carreno Busta            58.9%   52.2%   1.13  
Dominic Thiem                  57.1%   50.7%   1.13  
Carlos Alcaraz                 62.1%   55.7%   1.12  
Rafael Nadal                   61.5%   55.4%   1.11  
Andy Murray                    55.7%   50.5%   1.10  
…                                                    
Holger Rune                    51.4%   51.3%   1.00  
Grigor Dimitrov                47.7%   47.9%   0.99  
Alexander Bublik               45.4%   46.5%   0.98  
Daniil Medvedev                53.0%   54.8%   0.97  
Novak Djokovic                 50.8%   52.9%   0.96  
…                                                    
Stan Wawrinka                  45.3%   48.9%   0.93  
Milos Raonic                   38.0%   41.3%   0.92  
Benoit Paire                   42.9%   46.8%   0.92  
Tommy Paul                     47.0%   51.5%   0.91  
Aslan Karatsev                 39.0%   49.9%   0.70

Surrounded by names like Rune and Djokovic, Bublik doesn’t seem so bad. Alcaraz, on the other hand, doesn’t stand out as much. He and list-neighbor Rafael Nadal are outrageously good in rallies whether they hit a drop shot or not. Even a world-class drop shot is only so much better than a standard Rafa or Alcaraz topspin groundstroke.

Tour average is around 1.05, meaning that the typical player does a bit better when they hit a drop shot than they would have had they chosen a different shot in the same situation. That tells us something that we probably suspected: Players are generally good at choosing the right moment to unleash the drop.

With this more fine-grained notion of expectations, we can re-calculate the number of points per thousand that each player gains or loses from drop shots. It is a function of both success rate (relative to expectations) and frequency. Nishikori and Jarry get great results from the drop but employ it rarely; men like Alcaraz and Sebastian Baez gain more points overall because they hit droppers so much more often.

Here are the players who gain the most points, along with the five tour regulars at the bottom of the list:

Player                       Freq%  W% - Exp%  DPOE/1000  
Sebastian Baez                3.9%      12.3%        4.8  
Alejandro Davidovich Fokina   5.2%       8.5%        4.5  
Lucas Pouille                 2.9%      12.2%        3.5  
Carlos Alcaraz                5.4%       6.4%        3.4  
Richard Gasquet               2.8%      10.8%        3.0  
Robin Haase                   3.9%       6.9%        2.7  
Kei Nishikori                 2.0%      13.6%        2.7  
Frances Tiafoe                3.2%       6.6%        2.1  
Pablo Carreno Busta           2.8%       6.7%        1.9  
Nicolas Jarry                 1.2%      14.9%        1.8  
Fabio Fognini                 3.7%       4.7%        1.8  
Andy Murray                   3.3%       5.2%        1.7  
Dominic Thiem                 2.6%       6.4%        1.7  
Marton Fucsovics              1.9%       8.7%        1.7  
Roger Federer                 2.0%       8.1%        1.6  
…                                                         
Novak Djokovic                3.3%      -2.1%       -0.7  
Alexander Bublik              7.2%      -1.0%       -0.8  
Lorenzo Musetti               5.1%      -2.3%       -1.2  
Aslan Karatsev                1.2%     -10.9%       -1.3  
Benoit Paire                  5.4%      -3.9%       -2.1

Five (or 4.8) points per thousand might not sound like a lot, but it represents the difference between Baez having a place in the top 20 and residing well outside of it. Alcaraz still grades well here, if not as much as he did before making all of the adjustments. Bublik scores closer to neutral too. His drop shot is probably more useful for earning him highlight-reel screentime than it is for winning points, but it isn’t hurting him that much.

Side matters

Armed with these adjustments, we can compare each player’s forehand and backhand drop shots, as well. Bublik has a fairly wide split. He wins just over 50% of points when he hits a forehand drop shot, next to only 39% behind a backhand drop shot. His expectations when faced with a backhand are worse in general, but not that much worse. His forehand drop shot success rate is two percentage points better than if he went with a standard groundstroke, while his backhand drop shot is five points worse.

So Sasha, if you’re reading this: We all love your drop shots. But maybe take it easy with the backhands.

The best forehand drop shots, compared to how the player would have fared with a different shot, belong(ed) to Kevin Anderson, Sebastian Baez, Lucas Pouille, Marton Fucsovics, and Nishikori, with Roger Federer not far behind. The most effective backhand droppers are those of Jarry, Reilly Opelka, Pouille, John Isner, and Richard Gasquet. “Expectations” is the key word for Opelka and Isner: They didn’t win a lot of points once a rally was underway, so a moderately good drop scores very well by comparison.

Here is the field of 60 regulars from the last decade. As usual, top right is good, bottom left is… yikes, Aslan Karatsev.

There are innumerable way to divide these numbers even further, and I know you’re tempted. But with drop shots, there is only so much data. Some of the outliers here, like Jarry and Anderson, are probably a bit aided by luck. Men who don’t hit many drop shots might only have a few dozen attempts on their weaker side. The standouts probably are better than average, but limits of our data lead us to overstate their advantage.

At least with the forehand/backhand division, adjusted for how players would have fared with something other than a drop shot, we can get some hints as to how our faves can improve their games. Taylor Fritz has a strong backhand, and I doubt the points he’s losing with his backhand drop shot are making it any more effective. Alexander Zverev isn’t doing himself any favors with his occasional forehand droppers. Karatsev, well… not everyone can excel at everything.

Bublik, despite his negative numbers in the aggregate, has an effective forehand drop shot. With the power of his serve and forehand, he’ll continue to earn plenty of opportunities to use it. If he resists the urge to showboat on his backhand side, the court jester of the drop shot could continue to show off his touch and still earn a more coveted position in the tactic’s royal house.

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Effects and After-Effects of the Carlos Alcaraz Drop Shot

Also today: Wild cards and doping bans; Miami preview podcast

Carlos Alcaraz in the 2022 US Open final

It is not easy to analyze the drop shot. Players don’t hit it very often, they sometimes hit it from very favorable or very unfavorable circumstances, and the goal of the shot sometimes extends beyond winning the point at hand. We can point to someone who hits droppers well and seems to win a lot of points doing so, but how much is the skill really worth?

Carlos Alcaraz is the poster boy for the modern drop shot. He loves to hit it–possibly too much–and when he executes, it’s one of the most stunning shots in tennis. At the business end of his Indian Wells campaign last week, he went to the well seven times against Alexander Zverev, ten times against Jannik Sinner, and three more in the final against Daniil Medvedev. He won 11 of those 20 points. That doesn’t sound so impressive, but Alcaraz could hardly complain about the end result.

To get a grip on drop shot numbers, we have a lot of work to do. What is a good winning percentage? Do any players suffer because they hit the drop shot too much? Is there a lingering effect from disrupting your opponent’s balance? Finally, once we have a better idea of all that, how does Alcaraz stack up?

Drop shot basics

To keep the data as clean as possible, let’s be specific about which strokes we’re looking at. While one can hit a drop shot in response to another drop shot (a “re-drop”), and it’s possible to hit a drop shot from the net in reply to a short volley or half-volley, those aren’t typically what we’re referring to. There are probably players (starting with Alcaraz!) who are better at that sort of thing than their peers, but those low-percentage recoveries aren’t today’s focus.

In this post, when I say “drop shot,” I mean a drop shot from the baseline, excluding all shots from the net, including responses to earlier drops.

The Match Charting Project gives us over 4,600 men’s matches to work with since 2015. Those 750,000 points include almost 35,000 drop shots. That works out to a drop shot in about 4.6% of points. Or from the perspective of a single player, it’s 2.3%, 1 out of every 44 points. The player who hits the drop shot ends the point immediately (via winner or forced error) about one-third of the time, and 19% of the droppers miss for unforced errors. Overall, the player who hits the drop shot wins the point 53.8% of the time.

From the 60 players with the most charted points to analyze, here are the 15 who win the highest percentage of points behind their drop shots:

Player                       Drop Point W%  
Kei Nishikori                        69.6%  
Richard Gasquet                      66.2%  
Nicolas Jarry                        65.3%  
Sebastian Baez                       63.2%  
Carlos Alcaraz                       62.1%  
Rafael Nadal                         61.3%  
Lucas Pouille                        60.3%  
Roger Federer                        59.7%  
Alejandro Davidovich Fokina          59.3%  
Roberto Bautista Agut                58.9%  
Marton Fucsovics                     58.2%  
Pablo Carreno Busta                  58.1%  
Jannik Sinner                        57.7%  
Dominic Thiem                        57.5%  
Andy Murray                          56.7%

Alcaraz does well here! Despite the presence of Kei Nishikori at the top, the list is heavily skewed toward clay-courters. Drop shots are a more central tactic on clay than on other surfaces, which works in both directions: Clay-courters are more likely to develop good drop shots, and players who have dangerous droppers are more likely to succeed on dirt.

Another skill that contributes to a spot on the list is good judgment. Nicolas Jarry doesn’t hit many drop shots, so he is probably picking the ripest opportunities when he does. There’s almost zero correlation between frequency of drop shots and drop shot success rate. Call it the Bublik Rule. From the same group of 60 tour regulars, here are the top 15 ranked by frequency:

Player                       Drop/Pt  Drop Point W%  
Alexander Bublik                7.2%          45.4%  
Benoit Paire                    5.4%          41.7%  
Carlos Alcaraz                  5.4%          62.1%  
Alejandro Davidovich Fokina     5.2%          59.3%  
Lorenzo Musetti                 5.1%          50.7%  
Holger Rune                     4.8%          50.9%  
Sebastian Baez                  3.9%          63.2%  
Robin Haase                     3.9%          55.1%  
Fabio Fognini                   3.7%          54.7%  
Matteo Berrettini               3.5%          52.0%  
Nick Kyrgios                    3.3%          54.9%  
Andy Murray                     3.3%          56.7%  
Novak Djokovic                  3.3%          50.4%  
Botic van de Zandschulp         3.2%          51.4%  
Frances Tiafoe                  3.2%          54.1%

Bublik may be turning things around: In the Montpellier final last month, he attempted 18 droppers and won the point 14 times. For a consistent high-frequency, high-success combination, though, we’re back to Alcaraz. Only Carlos, Alejandro Davidovich Fokina, Sebastian Baez, and Andy Murray (barely) appear on both lists.

Here are all 60 players in graph form. The top right corner shows players who hit a lot of drop shots and win most of those points. The closer to the bottom, the lower a player’s success rate; the closer to the left, the fewer droppers he attempts:

As a percentage of all points played, Bublik wins the most behind his drop shot. But it comes at a cost, since he hits so many of them, often sacrificing points because of it. If we assume that each drop shot is struck from a precisely neutral rally position, meaning that the would-be dropshotter has a 50% chance of winning the point, Bublik is losing points by going to the drop shot so often.

That’s a big assumption, and it probably isn’t exactly true for Bublik, or for anyone else. But if we stick with that for a moment, we can combine frequency and success rate into one number. Take the difference between success rate and 50% (that is, the gain or loss by opting for a drop shot), multiply that by frequency, and you get the percent of total points that the player wins by choosing the drop. The resulting numbers are small, so here’s the top ten (and bottom five) list showing points gained or lost per thousand:

Player                       Drop Pts/1000  
Carlos Alcaraz                         6.5  
Sebastian Baez                         5.2  
Alejandro Davidovich Fokina            4.9  
Richard Gasquet                        4.5  
Kei Nishikori                          3.8  
Lucas Pouille                          3.0  
Pablo Carreno Busta                    2.3  
Andy Murray                            2.2  
Roberto Bautista Agut                  2.2  
Rafael Nadal                           2.0  
…                                           
Jo Wilfried Tsonga                    -0.8  
Feliciano Lopez                       -1.3  
Aslan Karatsev                        -1.3  
Alexander Bublik                      -3.3  
Benoit Paire                          -4.5

Reduced to one number, Alcaraz is our dropshot champion. Six points per thousand doesn’t sound like a lot, but to invoke the familiar refrain, the margins in tennis are small. Beyond the top five or ten players in the world, one single point per thousand is worth one place on the official ranking list. Stars of Alcaraz’s caliber are separated by wider gaps, but it’s still a useful way to gain some intuition about the impact of these apparently miniscule differences.

The after-effect

In the hands of someone like Carlitos, the drop shot is a reliable way to win points. But the impact can go further than that. All sorts of tactics–drop shots, underarm serves, serve-and-volley–can theoretically be justified by some longer-term effect. If your opponent is camped out six feet behind the baseline and you want him somewhere else, a drop shot will surely give him something to think about.

This is hard to quantify, to put it mildly. How long does the effect of a drop shot last? Does it decay after each successive point? Does it disappear at the end of a game? On the next changeover? Ever? Jarry might need to hit the occasional drop shot to remind his opponent that he can do it, but Alcaraz doesn’t even need to do that. Everybody knows he’ll dropshot them, so he’s probably in his opponent’s head even before he hits the first drop shot of a match.

The evidence is unclear. About two-thirds of drop shots are hit by the server. I looked at the results of points immediately after a point with a drop shot, points two points later, and all the points that followed within the same game. When the server hits the drop shot, his win percentage on those subsequent points is worse than his win percentage on other points throughout the match–that is, non-dropshot points that didn’t follow so closely after he played a dropper:

Situation          Win%  
Next point        63.3%  
Two points later  62.6%  
Same game         62.5%  
All others        64.2%

I suspect that the dropshot effect (if there is one) is swamped by all the other influences at work here. Droppers typically occur in longer rallies, which might tire the server. The server might go for a drop shot when he runs out of ideas, another thing that might go through his mind as he prepares for the next point. This seems to work against Alcaraz more than other servers:

Situation          Win%  
Next point        62.0%  
Two points later  62.1%  
Same game         63.2%  
All others        65.0%

The same pro-returner bias appears when we look at the results when it is the returner who goes for the drop shot. After seeing the numbers above, it’s tough to say that hitting a drop shot causes the higher success rate on subsequent points, but it is nonetheless a striking effect, especially for Carlitos:

Situation      Alcaraz W%     Tour W%  
Next point          44.0%       38.3%  
Two points later    41.8%       37.6%  
Same game           41.5%       37.9%  
All others          40.1%       35.8%

Whatever the mechanism here, it goes beyond “drop shot good, opponent confused.” More research is needed, and camera-tracking data would help.

Regardless of the after-effects (or lack thereof), the stats support the common contention that Alcaraz possesses a world-class drop shot. He might use it too often in some matches, and certainly there are individual situations in which he should have done something else. In the aggregate, though, the tactic is working for him. It produces more value than any other player’s dropper has done in the last decade. Tennis analytics is hard, but goggling at the game of Carlos Alcaraz is easy.

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Wild cards and doping suspensions

Simona Halep returned to action this week, thanks to a Miami wild card granted immediately after her doping suspension was reduced. Halep is well-liked, and there were few objections to her appearance in the draw. But Caroline Wozniacki, while careful to say she wasn’t specifically targeting Halep, said that she was against dopers getting post-suspension wild cards.

We’ve done this before. In 2017, Maria Sharapova returned from 15-month ban and immediately got a wild card to enter Stuttgart. The tennis world spent a few weeks in a dither about whether she’d get one to the French Open, too. She didn’t.

I wrote about the Sharapova situation at the time. I argued that Sharapova ought to get those opportunities. The reason I gave at the time was that it was better for the sport: She was one of the best players in the game, and fields would be more competitive with her than without her. Another reason is that without wild cards, it’s a long road back. Unranked after more than a year on the sidelines, a player needs to enter qualifying at ITFs, wait two weeks for those points to go on the official rankings (assuming they win!), and then use those rankings to enter (slightly) stronger events, with entry deadlines several weeks in advance of the tournaments themselves.

Climbing back up the ladder can take months. Is that part of the penalty? Is a 15-month suspension supposed to be 15 months of no competition, followed by 3-6 months of artificially weak, poorly remunerated competition? In team sports, this isn’t an issue, because coaches can put returning players in the lineup as soon as they’re ready.

As usual, the problem is that tennis doesn’t have unified governance. None of the various bodies in charge have an applicable policy. Sharapova was fine, and Halep will be fine, because stars get wild cards (if not as many as they would like), while lower-ranked players are stuck heading to Antalya to rack up ITF points. The discrepancy is particularly glaring in a case like that of Tara Moore, who missed 19 months but has been fully exonerated.

The WTA is apparently considering granting special rankings to players who have been cleared of doping charges or had their bans reduced, essentially treating them as if they are returning from injury. That’s better than nothing, but it wouldn’t address the more common scenario illustrated by Sharapova’s return.

I would go further and grant special rankings to any player returning from suspension. The term of the suspension is the penalty, period. Even better, and fairer to the field as a whole: Grant those special rankings in combination with a policy that restricts wild cards. For instance, Halep could have eight or ten entries into tournaments on the basis of her pre-suspension ranking, but no wild cards for her first year back. That way, individual tournament directors don’t need to re-litigate each doping ban, players have a predictable path to follow post-suspension, and superstars aren’t given any special advantages.

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Miami preview podcast

I had a fun conversation yesterday with Alex Gruskin, talking about my recent Iga Swiatek piece and previewing the men’s and women’s draws in Miami. Click here to listen.

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Yuan Yue Will Return Your Serve Now

Yuan Yue at Wimbledon last year. Credit: si.robi

Here’s an impressive stat for you: Last week in Austin, champion Yuan Yue won more than half of the return points she played. In fact, had she picked up just one more point against Wang Yafan’s serve in the quarter-finals, she would have won at least 50% of return points in each of the five matches she played.

This isn’t earth-shaking stuff: There are about a dozen tournaments every year where the champion wins more than the 51% of return points than Yuan did in Texas. Iga Swiatek won 56% at the French; Aryna Sabalenka cleared 52% in Australia. Lauren Davis won 53% in Hobart last year. The average single-match loser on the WTA tour loses about half of their return points, so it’s not far-fetched that a titlist would rack up these numbers for five or six days running.

Still, this is Yuan Yue we’re talking about. Not only was the 25-year-old Chinese woman a longshot to win the title–it was her first on tour–she has hardly established a reputation as a steady returner. A dangerous one, perhaps: In last year’s Seoul final against Jessica Pegula, Yuan turned one out of six of the American’s deliveries into a return winner or forced error. But the overall results weren’t so impressive, as she won fewer than 40% of return points in the match. For all of those big swings, there were lots of swings and misses. Out of five matches in an otherwise encouraging week in Seoul, she won more than 46% of return points only once.

The game Yuan brought to Austin was something different. Like San Diego champ Katie Boulter, she took fewer risks than usual, trusting that she could win points a shot or two later. Facing Pegula, and in another losing effort to Emma Navarro in the Hobart semi-finals, Yuan’s average return point lasted four strokes. Against Wang Yafan on Friday, return points took six. Yuan hit just three return winners in that match; in the final against Wang Xiyu, she didn’t hit any. Presumably she’s ok with that.

The magnitude of Yuan’s achievement isn’t quite the same as Boulter’s: The Brit beat five opponents ranked in the top 40, and Yuan didn’t face anyone in the top 60. Yet the week marks a major step forward. The 25-year-old cracked the official top 50, and Elo now rates her as the second-best Chinese woman on tour. If she continues to put returns in play the way she did in Austin, she could climb even higher.

One more ball

Returns in play are good, but they come at a cost. Do you aim to stay in as many points as possible, accepting that a lot of your returns will be weak, or do you swing big, piling up errors in exchange for a handful of return winners and better odds when your returns find the court?

While the pros and cons are different for every player, no one escapes the tradeoff. Even across players, there is a persistent negative correlation between returns in play and in-play returns won. If you make more, you win fewer of them. The following plot shows those two numbers for every woman with at least five matches in the Match Charting Project dataset from the last 52 weeks:

The best place to be is the upper-right corner, with a lot of returns in play and a lot of those points won. Except… that sector is mostly empty. The women who get the most serves back–Kasatkina, Avanesyan, Sorribes Tormo–win those points at an average rate. Even that success rate is boosted a bit by the slower courts where those players tend to succeed. By contrast, the players who win the most in-play return points–Swiatek, Ostapenko, Yastremska–achieve that by missing a lot, or by being an all-time great. Even Swiatek doesn’t put an above-average number of returns in play.

With our new sense of what these numbers mean, let’s take another look at Yuan’s step forward. The limited data at hand includes five of her matches from before this week, which we can compare to the quarter-final and final from Austin. Here’s the same graph, but with points added for Yuan’s sample of previous matches (Yuan-Prev) and for the two in Austin (Yuan-ATX):

Um, yeah. Wow. There are caveats, of course: It’s just two matches, and neither Wang is a particularly stellar server. (On the other hand, Yuan’s previous opponents were middling servers as well.) If this shift is even a little bit sustainable, Yuan will no longer be just a fringe figure on tour.

Runaway momentum

While we’re extrapolating from too-small sample sizes, I’ll give you another one, one that doesn’t paint such a rosy picture for last week’s champion.

Break points go to the returner more often than return points in general, because more break points are generated against weaker servers (or by stronger returners, or both). The women currently ranked in the top 50 win 44.4% of their return points, and they convert 46.3% of break points.

Yuan, in 33 tour-level matches since this time last year, has won 44.3% of her return points, but only 43.2% of her break point chances. A gap of three percentage points (between 43% and the expected 46%) is statistical shorthand for too many missed opportunities. I checked those numbers only because the Austin champ, in both the quarters and the final, showed signs of letting momentum get away from her. Against Wang Yafan, she got broken right after securing the first set, then struggled to regain the advantage. In the final, she served for the title at 5-2 in the second set, dropping serve twice before finishing the job in a tiebreak.

As I say, these are small samples. We tend to ascribe too much importance to hot and cold streaks–they would arise even if every point were decided by a roll of the dice. (I suffered through an epic Chutes and Ladders slump yesterday, probably because of the clutch play of my four-year-old opponent.) Still, there’s some evidence that Yuan struggles under pressure, even if she overcame it several times last week.

In this context, there’s a bit of negative spin we can put on all those returns in play. I’ve written before that momentum (and clutch, and streakiness, all that stuff) is tough to measure in tennis because the structure of the sport is anti-streak. If you hit a good serve in the deuce court, you have to hit one in the ad court. Four aces in a row? Congrats, you get to do something else now–you might even have to sit down for a couple of minutes. And that’s to say nothing of your opponent’s ability to give you shots other than the ones you’re hitting well.

But against her compatriots last week, Yuan inadvertently created conditions in which streaks could take root. All those returns in play–combined with a fair number of longer points that developed on her own serve–reduced the separation between serve and return. From 5-2 in the second set of the final, Yuan’s backhand went awry, and there was little she could do to avoid it. Her own serve wasn’t imposing enough to end points quickly, and she was out of the habit of taking big cuts on return. It was easy to get into a rut.

The momentum eventually shifted, of course. Yuan won 12 of the last 15 points of her quarter-final, and in the final, she won 10 of 12 points from 5-6 in the second set to reach 6-1 in the tiebreak. She pried herself out of one pattern and immediately found a different one, one that still largely avoided short points but ended in her favor. Yuan’s conservative returning paid off on paper, but the unending string of long(ish) points may have made it harder for her to regain control on the few occasions that she lost it.

Yuan’s fellow champion last week, Katie Boulter, already stumbled at her next obstacle, losing a straight-setter yesterday in Indian Wells to Camila Giorgi. Yuan’s first test in the desert is Varvara Gracheva, a middling server who could prove susceptible to the Chinese woman’s improved game. Next up would be a tantalizing second-rounder with China’s number one, Qinwen Zheng. Zheng’s intimidating–if erratic–serve could tell us a lot more about just what Yuan is now capable of.

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Surface Sensitivity and Ugo Humbert’s Serve

Ugo Humbert in 2023. Credit: Hameltion

Let’s start off with a couple of puzzles. I realize they aren’t the sort of things that keep most of you up at night, but they were odd enough to drive me to a flurry of coding, data analysis, and now blog writing.

On Wednesday, Ugo Humbert lost his first-round match in Rotterdam to Emil Ruusuvuori. It marked an unceremonious end to a hot streak for Humbert: He not only won the title in Marseille last week–launching himself into the Elo top ten–but he strung together 31 consecutive holds. 1,000 kilometers north, on a different indoor hard court, he got broken twice by a man ranked outside the top 50.

That’s the first puzzle: Why did the Frenchman lose? Again, it’s not that odd, as my Elo ratings gave Ruusuvuori a one-in-three shot to pull the upset. But it’s a match that Humbert should have won.

Head-scratcher number two: Why does Humbert always lose to Ruusuvuori? Wednesday’s decision marked their fifth meeting, and the Finn is undefeated. While the outcome is always close–Rotterdam was their fourth deciding set, and the other match went to two tiebreaks–the results are starting to get boring. Ruusuvuori is a solid player, and he is consistently able to blunt the Frenchman’s serve. But five in a row?

The answer to both mysteries is the same, and it’s more satisfying than I expected. Rotterdam is unusually slow for a hard court, especially indoors. Like most (or perhaps all) of the previous Humbert-Ruusuvuori venues, it plays slower than tour average. Just as important, Humbert’s game is unusually sensitive to surface speed. While that isn’t always true of big servers, he stands out as a fast-court specialist. We couldn’t have confidently predicted a Finnish upset, but we could have guessed that the Marseille champion would find this week’s tournament tougher going.

Rotterdam, it’s slow

The last time I published surface speed numbers, in late 2019, Rotterdam rated as the slowest indoor hard court on tour. Adjusting for the mix of players at the event, there were 10% fewer aces at the tournament than expected. It was a sharp decline from 2017 and 2018, when the venue sported more typically speedy indoor conditions.

Since then, the results have remained similar. Last year, the rate was 5% lower than expected, roughly tied with Stockholm as the slowest indoor surface on tour. Marseille, by contrast, gave players 12% more aces than usual.

There are limitations to using aces as a proxy for surface speed; I use aces because it’s the most relevant data that is widely available. Still, while you can quibble about the methodology or about a specific tournament’s place on the list, the overall rank order seems about right. Aces–adjusted for each event’s field–tell you much of the story.

With a growing mass of Match Charting Project data, we can do a little better. We have shot-by-shot logs for over one thousand matches since 2021. To compare conditions, I used my Serve Impact metric, which estimates how many points a player wins, directly or indirectly, because of his serve. It counts aces, other unreturned serves, and a fraction of the service points that take longer to decide. Depending on your motivation in measuring court speed, this isn’t perfect either: It doesn’t directly tell you anything about bounce height, for instance. But if you want to know what sort of players a tournament favors, Serve Impact gets you close.

By this more sophisticated metric, Rotterdam is… still slow. The venue takes away 4% of the points a player typically earns from his serve. Marseille and Montpellier each swing 7% in the other direction, Stockholm and Vienna provide a modest 3% boost, and Basel adds 8% to the server’s punch. With the exception of the short-lived tour stop in Gijon, Rotterdam has been the slowest indoor hard court of the 2020s. Even the clay in Lyon plays faster.

Here are the Serve Impact adjustments for the tournaments best represented in the dataset. Higher numbers mean faster conditions with more points decided based on the serve:

Tournament            ServeImpact  
Stuttgart                    1.29  
NextGen Finals               1.20  
Tour Finals                  1.16  
Wimbledon                    1.11  
Shanghai Masters             1.11  
Halle                        1.10  
Queen's Club                 1.08  
Basel                        1.08  
Washington                   1.08  
Dubai                        1.07  
                                   
Tournament            ServeImpact  
Antwerp                      1.05  
Gstaad                       1.05  
Australian Open              1.04  
Davis Cup Finals             1.04  
Cincinnati Masters           1.04  
Paris Masters                1.03  
Vienna                       1.03  
Miami Masters                1.02  
Madrid Masters               1.01  
US Open                      1.01  
                                   
Tournament            ServeImpact  
Canada Masters               1.00  
Rotterdam                    0.96  
Indian Wells Masters         0.95  
Rome Masters                 0.92  
Acapulco                     0.87  
Barcelona                    0.87  
Roland Garros                0.83  
Monte Carlo Masters          0.83

Average Serve Impact is around 34%, so the 4% hit in Rotterdam knocks that down to about 32.6%. Humbert has an above-average serve, so the slow-court penalty is greater still. He isn’t going to win any awards for rallying prowess, especially against someone as sturdy as Ruusuvuori, so the points that he doesn’t secure with his serve will disproportionately go against him.

The first three meetings in the Humbert-Ruusuvuori head-to-head were on clay, at Roland Garros, Madrid, and Rome. The fourth came on grass, at ‘s-Hertogenbosch. It rates a bit faster from 2021-23 than Halle or Queen’s Club by the Serve Impact metric, though it rated as the slowest grass court on tour last year by my older ace-rate algorithm. Maybe it was less server-friendly in 2023, just in time for Humbert to be flummoxed once again.

Surface sensitivity

We tend to take for granted that players are suited to conditions in predictable ways. Big servers like fast surfaces, right? Broadly speaking, yes, but it’s not a hard-and-fast rule. Bounce height makes a difference, footwork matters, and some players are just more comfortable on some surfaces than others.

Armed with surface speed ratings, this is something we can test. If a player is particularly sensitive to conditions, each tournament’s Serve Impact rating should have a predictable influence on his match outcomes. I tried that for all tour regulars, controlling for player strength by using overall Elo ratings at the time of each match.

The resulting numbers are an abstraction on top of an abstraction, so they’re a bit difficult to get your head around. I’ve tried to simplify matters by rendering them in terms of Elo points. A player who is very sensitive to surface and does better on hard courts is, effectively, a better player in faster conditions. The ‘Sensitivity’ numbers given here are the benefit–denominated in Elo points–of each single percentage point that a surface is faster than average. For players who like it slow, negative numbers express the same idea, the Elo-point advantage of a one-percentage-point slowdown.

Here is the list of all players with at least 100 tour-level matches since 2021, plus Rafael Nadal:

Player                       Sensitivity  
Tallon Griekspoor                   11.1  
Ugo Humbert                          9.5  
Richard Gasquet                      9.1  
Novak Djokovic                       8.7  
Adrian Mannarino                     7.9  
Sebastian Korda                      4.9  
Jordan Thompson                      4.3  
Matteo Berrettini                    4.0  
Aslan Karatsev                       3.6  
Tommy Paul                           3.4  
Marcos Giron                         2.9  
Marton Fucsovics                     2.9  
Marin Cilic                          2.6  
Felix Auger-Aliassime                2.1  
Hubert Hurkacz                       1.7  
                                          
Player                       Sensitivity  
Frances Tiafoe                       1.6  
Carlos Alcaraz                       1.4  
Emil Ruusuvuori                      1.3  
Brandon Nakashima                    1.3  
Cristian Garin                       0.6  
Alexander Zverev                     0.5  
Alexander Bublik                     0.5  
Ilya Ivashka                         0.0  
Arthur Rinderknech                  -0.1  
Taylor Fritz                        -0.3  
Jan Lennard Struff                  -0.3  
Lorenzo Sonego                      -0.4  
Mackenzie Mcdonald                  -0.5  
Andy Murray                         -0.9  
Grigor Dimitrov                     -1.1  
                                          
Player                       Sensitivity  
Roberto Bautista Agut               -1.2  
Alex de Minaur                      -1.2  
Karen Khachanov                     -1.4  
Jannik Sinner                       -1.4  
Yoshihito Nishioka                  -1.5  
Miomir Kecmanovic                   -1.9  
Andrey Rublev                       -2.2  
Daniel Evans                        -2.2  
Cameron Norrie                      -2.5  
Holger Rune                         -2.9  
Roberto Carballes Baena             -3.0  
Botic van de Zandschulp             -3.1  
Daniil Medvedev                     -3.4  
Denis Shapovalov                    -3.5  
Sebastian Baez                      -3.7  
                                          
Player                       Sensitivity  
Laslo Djere                         -4.1  
Dusan Lajovic                       -4.1  
Pablo Carreno Busta                 -4.4  
Jaume Munar                         -4.6  
Fabio Fognini                       -4.8  
Nikoloz Basilashvili                -4.9  
Casper Ruud                         -5.0  
Diego Schwartzman                   -5.4  
Francisco Cerundolo                 -5.9  
Alexei Popyrin                      -6.4  
Albert Ramos                        -6.8  
Rafael Nadal                        -9.9  
Alejandro Davidovich Fokina        -10.1  
Stefanos Tsitsipas                 -10.2  
Lorenzo Musetti                    -11.2

There’s Ugo! He’s not quite as surface sensitive as Tallon Griekspoor, but a couple of points is within the margin of error. A sensitivity rating of 9.5 means that Humbert is about 100 Elo points worse in Rotterdam than he is Marseille, as long as I’ve accurately estimated the server-friendliness of the respective playing conditions. Ruusuvuori may also like it faster, but only marginally so; he’s effectively neutral.

Keen-eyed readers may have noted that I earlier referred to “overall” Elo. I’m not using surface-specific Elo ratings here, because I don’t want to adjust for surface twice. Surface-specific ratings already capture some of this: Humbert’s hElo (for hard courts) is 120 points higher than his cElo (for clay courts), which tallies reasonably well with these more fine-grained distinctions. What hElo and cElo can’t tell us, though, is how much his (or anyone else’s) performance will vary on the same surface, depending on the conditions at each specific venue.

It’s easy to get lost in the weeds of Elo-based forecasting calculations, but it’s important to remember they are just tools to help measure a real-world phenomenon. Not every big server is equally at sea on clay; some dirtballers are less dependent on slow conditions than others. Small differences in surface speed are, for most matchups, a minor consideration. But for some players, conditions matter a lot. Ugo Humbert likes his surfaces fast, as much as almost anyone else on tour. In Rotterdam, the conditions did not cooperate.

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Welcome to the Show, Luciano Darderi

Luciano Darderi in 2023. Credit: jmmuguerza

Italian tennis hardly needs any more prospects, but Luciano Darderi has announced himself as yet another young player to watch. The Argentinian-born right-hander turns 22 today, three days after securing his debut ATP title. He came through qualifying in Cordoba, and in just his third appearance in a tour-level main draw, knocked out the 2nd, 4th, and 7th seeds en route to the championship.

Darderi is a supercharged clay courter, comfortable on dirt yet possessing a serve and forehand that will play on faster surfaces. He cracked 25 aces in the Cordoba main draw, plus another 11 in qualifying. On Sunday, fellow qualifier Facundo Bagnis got barely half of Darderi’s first serves back in play. Against Sebastian Baez in the semi-finals, the Italian ended 22 points with a forehand winner or forced error and, as we will see, held his own from the baseline against one of the game’s most stubborn defenders.

Though the magnitude of Darderi’s breakthrough came out of nowhere, he has been inching toward a double-digit ranking for some time. He reached 13 Challenger quarter-finals last year, advancing to three finals and collecting a pair of titles. He finished the year ranked 128th and gained 60 places with the victory in Cordoba, ensuring he’ll have plenty more chances to prove his mettle on tour.

He hasn’t hesitated to take advantage, dropping just three games in beating Mariano Navone in Buenos Aires yesterday. The victory extended the Italian’s winning streak to eight and shows just how fast he is developing, having lost to Navone in a bruising Challenger final just a few months ago.

It won’t always be so smooth for Darderi: The hard-court skew of the top level of the circuit may not prove hospitable to a youngster who has played 84% of his career matches on clay. Even with the right weapons in hand, it will take some time to become more than just a dark horse on the Golden Swing. But that’s all in the future: Darderi’s 22nd birthday is an ideal opportunity to dig into the upsets that lifted him from Challenger warrior to the top 100.

Bullying the little guy

The defining win of the Italian’s week in Cordoba was the semi-final. Baez struggled at the end of 2023, but he is always a tough out on clay, especially coming off a third-set-tiebreak victory in Davis Cup. At just five-feet, seven-inches tall, the Argentinian relies on speed and defense, neutralizing the weapons of larger men. It doesn’t always work–his serve puts him at an immediate disadvantage, and he can become overly aggressive and error-prone to compensate–but he doesn’t give much away.

Despite his size, Baez doesn’t mind going toe-to-toe with an opponent’s best shot. In 19 clay-court matches tracked by the Match Charting Project since the beginning of 2022, Baez’s opponents have hit forehands–excluding service returns–as 61% of their baseline shots, compared to a tour-wide clay-court average of 55%. Thomaz Bellucci found the forehand 72% of the time against the Argentinian; Tallon Griekspoor clocked in at 71%.

Both lost. No matter what the shot, if you find yourself in a rally with Baez, your odds aren’t good. When you hit a forehand after the service return, your chances of winning the point are 45%; with a backhand, your chances are 44%. (Tour averages on clay are 53% and 47%, respectively.) Some individual cases are downright comical. In the 2022 Bastad quarter-finals, Dominic Thiem won just 27% of points when he hit a forehand. When the two men met again in the Kitzbuhel final last year, Thiem relied a bit more on his backhand. Alas, he won only 14% of points when he hit one of those.

Darderi ran around a few backhands to find his bigger weapon, but he generally refused to take the bait. He waited for his spots to attack one of the toughest men on tour to be patient against. This table details the results he got from his forehands and backhands in the semi-final:

                   FH/GS  FH W%  FH Wnr%  FH UFE%  
Darderi vs Baez    55.4%  50.6%    12.2%     8.5%  
Average vs Baez    60.6%  45.2%    10.4%    12.0%  
                                                   
                   BH/GS  BH W%  BH Wnr%  BH UFE%  
Darderi vs Baez    44.6%  48.5%     6.1%     6.8%  
Average vs Baez    39.4%  43.8%     6.3%    10.3%

The Italian hit fewer forehands than the usual Baez opponent, and it won him more points, in part thanks to hitting winners at a higher rate and coughing up fewer unforced errors. His backhand numbers were favorable as well, perhaps in part because he set up for backhands in places where other opponents would go for an inside-out forehand. He was particularly stingy with free points on that wing.

Despite possessing the bigger gun, Darderi let his opponent make the mistakes. Baez obliged, piling up 32 unforced errors, including an uncharacteristic 11% of his backhands. Winning percentages of 50.6% and 48.5% hardly make for good headlines, but coupled with a big serve, they are enough to beat Baez. Few players on tour have been able to manage the same.

Tailored attack

The classic clay-court baseline weapon is the inside-out forehand, a salvo that might not end the point, but will pull the opponent out of position and leave the court open for a finishing blow. Darderi can win matches with that shot, as he did in the final against Bagnis. His left-handed opponent kept sending balls to his backhand corner, and the Italian ran around a lot of them. More than half of Darderi’s forehands in the final were inside-out, and he won the point 78% of the time he hit one. The match wasn’t close.

As we’ve seen, though, manufacturing forehands against Baez is a trap. The Argentinian can blunt the angle and absorb the pace, and meanwhile, his opponent is out of position. When Thiem had his terrible day in Bastad, he hit 62 inside-out forehands, only 16 of them in points that he won. (He typically wins more than half, as does the tour as a whole.) Whether by preparation or intuition, Darderi took those chances much less often, and far less frequently than he would against Bagnis. Just one in six of his forehands were of the inside-out variety, and he won just shy of half those points.

Instead, with Baez accustomed to playing defense on the backhand side, Darderi attacked to the forehand. While he didn’t go crosscourt particularly often, he hit hard when he did. 22% of his crosscourt forehands ended the point in his favor with a winner or forced error. That shot can be a slightly favorable play against Baez–opponents win 47% of those points, compared to 45% for forehands overall–but only Nicolas Jarry has cleaned up against Baez in this category the way that Darderi did. It’s way too early to draw any conclusions about how the Italian’s game will fare on tour, but when you share the top of a forehand leaderboard with Jarry, you’re doing something right.

A big serve and a forehand isn’t enough: Nearly everybody has those, even if Darderi’s forehand has a bit of extra mojo. Upsetting the forehand-neutralizing Baez, especially in between victories against less complicated opponents, is a sign that the Italian has resources between his ears as well. Every week, it seems, Italian tennis looks a little bit better.

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Elena Rybakina and the Value of Average

Also today: Ugo Humbert in the (Elo) top ten; South American Davis Cup hard courts

Elena Rybakina at the 2023 US Open. Credit: Hameltion

Never underestimate average. Establishing oneself on the top level of the pro tennis circuit is extraordinarily difficult; proving that any particular skill is average among one’s tour-level peers is even harder. Most players are better than the norm in some categories, worse in others. Anyone who can beat the middle of the pack in every department is virtually guaranteed to be a superstar.

Average is Elena Rybakina’s secret weapon. You probably didn’t know she needed one, because she has a very effective, very evident non-secret weapon: an unreadable bullet of a first serve. In the last year, over 43% of her first serves have gone unreturned. No one else on tour comes within three percentage points of that, and only five other women top 35%. On a good day, the serve can put a match out of reach nearly on its own. When she faced Aryna Sabalenka in Beijing last fall, 65% of her first serves didn’t come back. Most women barely manage to win that many first serve points, let alone decide them with one stroke.

I’ll come back to the serve in a moment, because it is so remarkable, and it would be strange to talk about Rybakina without discussing it. But what makes her a contender every week–not to mention a champion in Abu Dhabi yesterday–is the way that the rest of her game doesn’t hold her back. Among the other women who end points with more than 35% of their first serves, you’ll find a long list of weaknesses. Qinwen Zheng doesn’t put nearly enough of them in the box. Donna Vekic and Caroline Garcia struggle to break serve. Liudmila Samsonova doesn’t break much, either, and her mistakes come in excruciating, match-endangering bunches.

Lopsided player profiles make sense. Only a few people have the combination of natural gifts and discipline to develop a dominant serve. Tennis skills are correlated, but not perfectly so. Someone who serves like Vekic can often learn good-enough groundstrokes and secondary shots. But players with one standout skill are unlikely to be solid across the board. Just because someone is top ten in the world in one category, why would we expect them to rank in the top 100 by a different measure?

Rybakina has reached the top–or close, anyway–by coupling a world-class serve with a set of skills that lacks defects. (You can nitpick her footwork or technique, but none of that holds her back when it comes to winning enough points.) After we review the devastation wrought by her serve, we’ll see just how average she otherwise is, and why that wins her so many matches.

First serves first

I’ve already given you the headline number: Since this time last year, 43.4% of Rybakina’s first serves haven’t come back. That’s one percentage point better than Serena Williams’s career rate. Serena’s numbers are based on matches logged by the Match Charting Project, a non-random sample skewed toward high-profile contests against strong opponents, so I’m not ready to say outright that Rybakina is serving better than Serena. But I’m not not saying that–we’re within the margin of error.

Some back-of-the-envelope math shows what kind of gains a player can reap from the best first serve in the game. Rybakina makes about 60% of her first serves–lower than average, but probably worth the trade-off. (And improving–we’ll talk about that in a bit.) When the serve does come back, she wins about half of points, roughly typical for tour players. All told, 43% of her serve points are first-serve points won. Tack on about half of her second serve points–she wins 48% of those, better than average but not by a wide margin–and we end up with her win rate of 62.5% of serve points–fourth-best on tour.

Put another way: We combine one world-class number (unreturned first serves) with a below-average figure (first serves in), one average number (success rate when the serve come back), and one more that was slightly better than average (second-serve points won). The result is an overall success rate that trails only those of Iga Swiatek, Sabalenka, and Garcia. That, in case you ever doubted the value of an untouchable first serve, is the impact of one very good number.

The key to Rybakina’s first serve–apart from blinding speed–is its unreadability. She must lead the tour in fewest returner steps per ace, a stat I dreamed up while watching the Abu Dhabi semi-final on Saturday. Samsonova seemed to stand bolted to the ground, watching one serve after another dart past her. After one business-as-usual ace out wide, Samsonova even offered a little racket-clap of appreciation, an unusual gesture for such a routine occurrence.

In addition to the deceptiveness of a nearly identical toss and service motion, Rybakina is effective in every direction. There’s no way for an opponent to cheat to one side, hoping to get an edge on a delivery in that corner of the box. Here are Elena’s rates of unreturned first serves and total points won in each corner of the two service boxes:

Direction   Unret%  Won%  
Deuce-Wide     36%   69%  
Deuce-T        45%   75%  
Ad-T           37%   70%  
Ad-Wide        42%   74%

The average player ends points with their first serve between 20% and 25% of the time and wins 60% of their first serve points. Rybakina obliterates those numbers in every direction. If there’s a strategy to be exploited, it’s that returners ought to lean toward their forehand, because if the serve comes to their backhand, they don’t have a chance anyway.

The scariest thing for the rest of the tour is that the 24-year-old’s biggest weapon may be getting even bigger. Her 43.4% rate of unreturned first serves in the last 52 weeks compares favorably to a career clip of 38.2%. Against Samsonova on Saturday, over 41% of all serves didn’t come back, better than Rybakina managed in any of their four previous meetings.

She may be getting savvier, too. One of the dangers of a game built around a single weapon is that certain players might be able to neutralize it. Daria Kasatkina, Elena’s opponent in yesterday’s final, is just such an opponent, a resourceful defender and a first-class mover. When the two women played a three-and-a-half-hour epic in Montreal last summer, Kasatkina put three-quarters of first serves back in play, something that few women on tour could manage and one of the main reasons the match stretched so long. Rybakina survived, but she was broken ten times.

Yesterday, Kasatkina was as pesky as ever, getting almost as many balls back as she did in Montreal. But Rybakina took fewer chances with her first strike, perhaps as much to counter the wind as to adjust for her opponent. Whatever the reason, Elena made three-quarters of her first serves. She had never landed more than 61% against Kasatkina.

The Abu Dhabi final was an exaggerated example of a longer-term trend. Somehow, Rybakina is making way more first serves than ever before, sacrificing no aces and only a fraction of first-serve points won. The overall results speak for themselves:

Year    1stIn%  1st W%   Ace%   SPW%  
2024     66.8%   70.9%  10.3%  64.8%  
2023     56.8%   73.6%  10.5%  62.8%  
Career   57.8%   71.1%   8.4%  62.0%

It’s not a perfect comparison, because the entire 2024 season so far has been on hard courts. Her season stats will probably come down. But a ten-percentage-point increase in first serves in? Nobody does that. Kasatkina won just five games yesterday, and she won’t be the last opponent to discover that whatever edge she once had against Rybakina is gone.

Average ballast

As Ivo Karlovic can tell you, the best service in the world can take you only so far. Some first serves will go astray, some serves will come back, and then there’s the whole return game to contend with. Women’s tennis rarely features characters quite as one-sided as Ivo, but Vekic and Garcia illustrate the point, struggling to string together victories because their serves alone are not enough.

Here’s a quick overview of how the rest of Rybakina’s game stacks up against the average top-50 player over the last 52 weeks:

Stat     Top-50  Elena  
2nd W%    46.7%  48.4%  
DF%        5.2%   3.9%  
RPW       44.4%  44.2%  
Break%    35.5%  36.9%  
BPConv%   46.6%  43.5%

She’s somewhat better than average behind her second serve, as you’d expect from someone with such a dominant first serve. It’s aided by fewer double faults than the norm. On return, we have two separate stories. Taking all return points as a whole, Rybakina is almost exactly average, matching the likes of Barbora Krejcikova and Marta Kostyuk. The only category where she trails the majority of the pack is in break point conversions–and by extension, breaks of serve.

The discrepancy between Rybakina’s results on break points and on return points in general may just be a temporary blip. Most players win more break points than their typical return performance, because break points are more likely to arise against weaker servers. That hasn’t been the case for Elena in the last 52 weeks, and it wasn’t in 2022, either, when she won 41.9% of return points that year but converted only 40.5% of break opportunities.

Match Charting Project data indicates that she is slightly more effective returning in the deuce court than the ad court; since most break points are in the ad court, that could explain a bit of the gap. Charting data also suggests she is a bit more conservative on break point, scoring fewer winners and forced errors than her normal rate, though not fewer than the typical tour player. It may be that Rybakina will always modestly underperform on break opportunities, but it would be unusual for a player to sustain such a large gap.

In any case, she hasn’t struggled in that department in 2024. In 13 matches, she has won 46.9% of return points overall and 47.3% of break points. It’s dangerous to extrapolate too much from a small sample, especially on her preferred surface, but it may be that Rybakina’s single weak point is already back to the top-50 norm of her overall return performance.

The value of all this average is this: What Rybakina takes with her first serve, she doesn’t give back with the rest of her game. We’ve already seen how a standout rate of unreturned first serves–plus a bunch of average-level support from her second serve and ground game–translates into elite overall results on serve. A tour-average return game generates about four breaks per match. Elena has been closer to 3.5, but either way, that’s more than enough when coupled with such a steady performance on the other side of the ball.

I can’t help but think of Rybakina’s “other” skills as analogous to the supporting cast in team sports. Her first serve is an all-star quarterback or big-hitting shortstop; the rest of her game is equivalent to the roster around them. In baseball, a league-average player is worth eight figures a year. Though Elena’s return, for instance, doesn’t cash in to quite the same degree, it is critical in the same way. A superstar baseball player can easily end up on a losing team, just as Caroline Garcia can drop out of the top 50 despite her serve. Rybakina is at no risk of that.

A final striking attribute of Rybakina’s game is that her array of tour-average skills can neutralize such a range of opponents. Her weekend in Abu Dhabi was a perfect illustration, as she overcame Samsonova and Kasatkina, two very different opponents, each of whom has bedeviled her in the past. Elena is more aggressive than the average player, but she is considerably more careful than Samsonova; her Rally Aggression Score is equivalent to Swiatek’s. She was able to take advantage of the Russian’s rough patches without losing her own rhythm or coughing up too many errors of her own.

Against Kasatkina, she posted the most unexpected “average” stat of all. In a matchup of power against defense, defense should improve its odds as the rallies get longer. On Sunday, the two women played 15 points of ten strokes or more, and Rybakina won 8 of them. In her career, Elena has won 52% of those points–probably more by wearing down opponents with down-the-middle howitzers than any kind of clever point construction, but effective regardless of the means.

Rybakina won’t beat you at your own game. But she’ll play it pretty well. Combined with the best first serve in women’s tennis, drawing even on the rest is a near-guarantee of victory. Abu Dhabi marked her seventh tour-level title, and it will be far from her last.

* * *

Ugo Humbert, Elo top-tenner

You probably don’t think of Ugo Humbert as a top-ten player, if you think of him at all. The 25-year-old left-hander cracked the ATP top 20 only a few months ago, and his title last week in Marseille gave him a modest boost to #18.

Elo is much more positive about the Frenchman. Today’s new Elo rankings place him 9th overall, just behind Hubert Hurkacz, the man he defeated to reach the Marseille final. Humbert has always been dangerous against the best, with a 22-25 career record facing the top 20, and a 10-12 mark against the top ten.

Humbert’s place in the Elo top ten might feel like a fluke; there’s a tightly-packed group between Hurkacz at #8 and Holger Rune at #13, and an early loss in Rotterdam could knock the Frenchman back out of the club. But historically, if a player reaches the Elo top ten, a spot in the official ATP top ten is likely in the offing.

I wrote about this relationship back in 2018, after Daniil Medvedev won in Tokyo. As his ATP ranking rose to #22, he leapt to #8 on the Elo list. In retrospect, it’s odd to think that “Daniil Medvedev will one day crack the top ten” was a big call, and it wasn’t that far-fetched: Plenty of people would’ve concurred with Elo on that one. He made it, of course, officially joining the elite the following July.

In that post, I called Elo a “leading indicator,” since most players reach the Elo top ten before the ATP computer renders the same judgment. This makes sense: Elo attempts to measure a player’s level right now, while the ATP formula generates an average of performances over the last 52 weeks. That’s a better estimate of how the player was doing six months ago. Indeed, for those players who cracked both top tens, Elo got there, on average, 32 weeks sooner. In Medvedev’s case, it was 40 weeks.

Most importantly for Humbert, Elo is almost always right. In October 2018, I identified just 19 players who had reached the Elo top ten but not the ATP top ten. Three of those–Medvedev, Stefanos Tsitsipas, and Roberto Bautista Agut–have since taken themselves off the list. One more has come along in the meantime: Sebastian Korda joined the Elo top ten in early 2023, but his ATP points total has yet to merit the same ranking.

Most of the Elo-but-not-ATP top-tenners had very brief stays among the Elo elite: Robby Ginepri qualified for just one week. The only exception is Nick Kyrgios, who spent more than a year in the Elo top ten, thanks to his handful of victories over the best players in the game. His upsets earned him plenty of notoriety, but his inability to consistently beat the rest of the field kept his points total deflated.

Humbert, in his much quieter way, fits the same profile. His serve means that he can keep things close against higher-ranked players, but he has struggled to string together enough routine wins to earn more of those chances. (Injuries haven’t helped.) Still, the odds are in his favor. In 32 weeks–give or take a lot of weeks–he could find himself in the ATP top ten.

* * *

Surfaces in South American Davis Cup

It dawned on me about halfway through the deciding rubber of the Chile-Peru Davis Cup qualifying tie: They were playing on a hard court! In South America! Against another South American side!

It made sense for Chile, with big hitters Nicolas Jarry and Alejandro Tabilo leading the team, and they did indeed vanquish the Peruvian visitors. But South America is known as a land of clay courts, the home of the “Golden Swing.” It seemed weird that an all-South American tie would be played on anything else.

As it turns out, it isn’t that unusual. Since the late 1950s, I found 252 Davis Cup ties between South American sides. I don’t have surface for 37 of them, almost all from the 1970s. Presumably most of those were on clay, but since that’s the question I’m trying to answer, I’m not going to assume either way.

That leaves us with 215 known-surface ties, from 1961 to the Chile-Peru meeting last weekend. (I’m excluding the matchup between Argentina and Chile at the 2019 Davis Cup Finals, since neither side had any say in the surface.) To my surprise, 37 of those ties–about one in six–took place on something other than clay. That’s mostly hard courts, but five of them were played on indoor carpet as well.

The country most likely to bust the stereotype has been Venezuela, which preferred hard courts as early as the 1960s. Ecuador also opted to skip clay with some frequency; it accounted for the first appearance of carpet in an all-South American tie back in 1979.

Chile has generally stuck with clay, but not always. The last time they hosted a South American side on another surface was 2000, when they faced Argentina on an indoor hard court. The surface probably wouldn’t have mattered, as Marcelo Rios and Nicolas Massu were heavy favorites against a much weaker Argentinian side. Though they won, the home crowd was so disruptive that the visitors pulled out without playing the doubles. Chile was disqualified from the next round and barred from hosting again until 2002.

The crowd last weekend was typically rowdy, but Jarry and Tabilo advanced without controversy. For some South American sides, hosting on hard courts may finally become the rule, not the exception.

* * *

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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.

* * *

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.

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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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