Tomas Martin Etcheverry, three-set marathon expert
I run a lot of queries, and people often ask me arcane trivia questions. Has this ever happened before? Is that a record? My beat seems to be the super-niche stuff that no one would ever bother to include in the official media notes.
The Trivia Notebook is my attempt to put more of the answers in one place. I’m thinking I’ll do one of these every two or three weeks. If you have a question or topic you think would fit well here, please send it. No promises–most of my ideas don’t end up making the cut.
It’s a new year, so we’re all bursting with energy to start new projects. Most of them are long gone by April, and odds are the same thing will happen to this one. But hey, you never know, right?
In this first installment, we’ll look at 100-point ranking leaps, marathon man Tomas Martin Etcheverry, seedless quarter-final lineups, and single-country duos that conquered a tournament.
100-spot ranking leaps
Joao Fonseca ended 2024 ranked 145th in the world. My Elo ratings put him 45th, and after the Canberra title last week, his place on that list climbed to 27th.
As with many trivia questions, we’ll need to be a bit more specific. Tons of players move up 100 places each year, but going from 845th to 745th–while impressive!–is presumably not the sort of thing we’re looking for. Same thing with injury recoveries. While Pablo Carreno Busta finished 2024 ranked 196th, it won’t be momentous if the former top-tenner bounces back to the top 100.
A narrower question, then: Which players have jumped at least 100 ranking places in a single year, ending with their first year-end top-100 finish?
Here are the biggest single-year improvements that ended with a top-100 debut:
Player Year Prev YE New YE Jump
Kenneth Carlsen 1992 835 69 766
Leonardo Lavalle 1985 745 87 658
Guillermo Coria 2000 722 88 634
Pablo Carreno Busta 2013 654 64 590
Marco Chiudinelli 2009 605 56 549
Jacob Fearnley 2024 645 99 546
Josef Cihak 1987 613 77 536
Andreas Vinciguerra 1999 633 98 535
Andre Agassi 1986 618 91 527
Alex Michelsen 2023 599 97 502
Arnaud Di Pasquale 1998 572 81 491
Radek Stepanek 2002 542 63 479
Ben Shelton 2022 573 96 477
Fritz Buehning 1979 555 81 474
Jannik Sinner 2019 551 78 473
Pablo made it! A few other names there you might recognize, too.
If Fonseca skips forward 100 spots, he’ll do something that sets him apart from everyone on that list: He’ll leap into the top 50. Still, a 100-spot move is hardly historic:
Player Year Prev YE New YE Jump
Marc Rosset 1989 474 45 429
Ronald Agenor 1985 418 49 369
Goran Ivanisevic 1989 371 40 331
Vincent Van Patten 1979 374 43 331
Sergi Bruguera 1989 333 26 307
Juan Carlos Ferrero 1999 346 42 304
Jim Courier 1988 346 43 303
Horst Skoff 1986 299 42 257
John McEnroe 1977 264 18 246
Ulf Stenlund 1986 274 34 240
Mark Philippoussis 1995 274 38 236
Peter Lundgren 1985 265 31 234
Ricardo Cano 1975 274 42 232
Jack Draper 2022 265 42 223
Mel Purcell 1980 245 27 218
About 80 players have made a 100-plus-spot jump into the top 50. It’s harder to do so now than it was in the days of McEnroe or Courier, but men still manage it with some regularity. Fonseca will have to settle for breaking other records.
Marathon men
This was the Adelaide second round. Thanasi Kokkinakis decided this was enough for his Australian Open prep, as he withdrew from the quarters. Headlines about this match tended to focus on Thanasi’s penchant for marathons. He’s well-known for his 5h45 battle with Andy Murray two years ago in Melbourne. Last year, he went 3h15 against Aleksandar Kovacevic in Houston, then 3h29 a week later at the Sarasota Challenger against Gabriel Diallo.
But… the name that caught my eye was Tomas Martin Etcheverry. While he doesn’t have a marquee marathon to his name like the Murray tilt, he spends a lot of time on court. Just three months ago, he muscled through three hours and 43 minutes to beat Botic van de Zandschulp in Shanghai.
Etcheverry doesn’t have a ton of slam experience, and the best-of-five format lends itself to memorable marathons. But in best-of-three matches, the Argentinian has now crossed the three-hour mark more than any other active player:
Rank Player Bo3 Marathons
1 Tomas Martin Etcheverry 27
2 Albert Ramos 26
3 Novak Djokovic 25
4 Pedro Martinez 24
5 Carlos Taberner 23
6 Thiago Monteiro 22
7 Roberto Carballes Baena 20
8 Mikhail Kukushkin 19
8 Timofey Skatov 19
8 Juan Pablo Varillas 19
8 Thanasi Kokkinakis 19
12 Lorenzo Giustino 17
13 Jordan Thompson 16
13 Alessandro Giannessi 16
13 Marton Fucsovics 16
This is an imprecise measure, because it’s really “three-hour matches I know about.” It includes tour-level matches back to 1991, tour qualies and Challengers going back a decade, and Challenger qualies for the last few years. So it’s biased a bit toward younger players, who have played more in the “Jeff knows about their match times” era. Still, it’s an impressive tally for Etcheverry–and he’s only 25 years old.
The Kokkinakis match also tied Etcheverry for first place on the all-time list with Nicolas Massu. Here’s that leaderboard, again with the caveat that older players do not have Challenger matches counted:
Rank Player Bo3 Marathons
1 Tomas Martin Etcheverry 27
1 Nicolas Massu 27
3 Albert Ramos 26
3 Carlos Berlocq 26
5 Novak Djokovic 25
5 Rafael Nadal 25
5 Andy Murray 25
8 Pedro Martinez 24
9 Carlos Taberner 23
10 Thiago Monteiro 22
10 Paolo Lorenzi 22
12 Adrian Menendez Maceiras 21
13 Roberto Carballes Baena 20
14 Mikhail Kukushkin 19
14 Timofey Skatov 19
14 Juan Pablo Varillas 19
14 Thanasi Kokkinakis 19
18 Gilles Simon 18
Legends one and all. It’s continually amusing to me that Djokovic, Murray, and Nadal have landed on the same number. Roger Federer, for his part, only reached three hours in six of his short-form matches.
Seedless quarter-finals
At the Nonthaburi Challenger this week in Thailand, the quarter-finals featured a wild card, two qualifiers, and an alternate… but no seeds. One of the seeds withdrew, five lost in the first round, and the remaining two fell in the second.
Let’s say it together: Has that ever happened before?
In fact, there were seedless quarter-finals five times at Challenger level last year, including once in Nonthaburi! Altogether, there have been more than 80 such tournaments in Challenger history. Even “two seeds in the second round” isn’t that special–it happened at Amersfoort last year.
What about one seed in the second round? For that, we have to go back to 2018 in Lyon, where a 17-year-old Felix Auger-Aliassime defended his title. Gotta love the Wikipedia summary of how things went for the seeds:
As far as I can tell, that’s the closest we’ve come to a Challenger with no seeds in the second round. Credit to Pablo Andujar, he did his best.
Lonely countrymen
Last one, this time from the archives. Last year at the Dobrich Challenger, two Dutchmen–Jelle Sels and Guy den Ouden–met in the final. It isn’t unusual to have players from the same country in a Challenger final, even outside their home country. What was odd about Dobrich is that Sels and den Ouden were the only Dutch men in the main draw.
You know the drill: Has that ever happened before?
I should know by now: Ask that question about the varied history of the Challenger tour, and the answer is almost always yes. It happened again in September, when two Japanese men met for the Columbus final. It also arose twice in 2023. Two Bosnians played for the championship in Sibiu, and the San Benedetto title match was contested between Benoit Paire and Richard Gasquet, the only Frenchmen in the draw.
Altogether, there have been 32 such Challengers. There were none in the first decade of the tour, but they’ve clicked off about once per year since. My favorite of the bunch is the 1998 Fürth Challenger, where Christian Ruud and Jan Frode Andersen saw off all of their non-Norwegian foes.
This scenario has also come up about as often at tour level. More than half of them were before 1980, and they’ve gotten progressively rarer. But we got one in 2024! Arthur Fils and Ugo Humbert were the only two Frenchmen in the Tokyo draw, and they were the last two men standing. That was the first such tournament in a decade, since Monte Carlo in 2014, where Stan Wawrinka upset Roger Federer for the title.
That, I think, is enough tennis trivia for one day. We’ll have some more–maybe!–in a couple weeks.
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A healthy Karolina Muchova is a top-tenner. Credit: Hameltion
What will the men’s and women’s ranking lists look like at the end of the 2025 season? A few days ago, I attempted to predict which players would crack the top 100. Today, we’re playing for bigger stakes: The names at the top the table.
As with the top-100-breakthrough forecast, the most important inputs are current Elo rank and current ATP or WTA rank. Elo tells us how well someone is playing, and the official ranking tells us how well that translated into points. After all, ranking points are what will determine the list in a year’s time, too.
The cumulative ATP and WTA rankings reflect whether a player missed time in the previous year; while that isn’t always indicative of whether he or she will be absent again, injuries often recur and some pros have a hard time staying on court. The official ranking also gives some players a head start over others: The 32nd seed at the Australian Open is more likely to reach the second week than the best unseeded player, even if they have roughly the same skill level.
Age is crucial, as well. The younger the player, the more we expect him or her to improve over the course of the year. Later than the mid-20s, however, results trend (usually!) in the other direction.
I tested the usefulness of myriad other variables, including height, handedness, and surface preference. None unambiguously improved the model. I ended up using just one more input: last year’s Elo rank. Current ranks have more predictive value, but last year’s position helps, as it offers a clue as to whether a player’s current level is sustainable.
Enough chatter–let’s start with the forecast for the 2025 year-end women’s rankings:
No big surprises here–that’s the nature of a model like this. Where players are predicted to move up or down, it’s usually because their Elo rank is notably higher or lower than their official position, like Muchova or Paolini. Mirra Andreeva, the youngest woman in the top 175, is expected to gradually work her way into the top ten.
Getting fuzzier
Of course, there’s considerable uncertainty. When we check in at the end of the 2025 season, we’ll find some substantial moves, like Paolini in 2024. We can get a better idea of that uncertainty by forecasting the likelihood that players reach certain thresholds.
Here is each top player’s probability of becoming the 2025 year-end number one:
Player p(#1)
Aryna Sabalenka 42.3%
Iga Swiatek 32.6%
Coco Gauff 21.1%
Qinwen Zheng 6.9%
Elena Rybakina 4.3%
Jasmine Paolini 2.8%
Jessica Pegula 2.4%
Emma Navarro 0.9%
Paula Badosa 0.9%
Daria Kasatkina 0.9%
Barbora Krejcikova 0.7%
Mirra Andreeva 0.7%
Diana Shnaider 0.5%
Karolina Muchova 0.5%
This is not the list I would have made. Again, this type of model isn’t going to give you big surprises, and there’s no consideration for things like playing styles. Intuitively, a big breakthrough from Andreeva (or Shnaider) seems more likely than a belated push from Kasatkina, or even Pegula.
In any event, we get an idea of how much the ranking list can shuffle itself in a year’s time. Even beyond these 14 names, the model gives another 20 women at least a one-in-a-thousand chance to end the year at the top.
We can run a similar exercise to get the odds that each player ends the season in the top 5, 10, or 20:
Most interesting to me in this table is where the columns diverge. Andreeva, with her unrealized potential, ranks higher on the top-5 list than by top-10 or top-20 probability. Azarenka, though she has little chance of returning to the top ten, is more likely than her list-neighbors to hang inside the top 20.
The same variation means that there are some new names in the table. Eva Lys, for instance, is forecast to land at #65 ahead of the 2026 season. But because she is young and has already posted multiple top-100 seasons by Elo rating, she has an outsized chance of a major breakout. The women who were displaced are either fringy veterans, like Pliskova, or those whose Elo ratings didn’t match their WTA rank, such as Yastremska.
(These forecasts are probably more accurate than the year-end-number-one table above. There haven’t been many year-end number ones, by definition, so there’s less data to draw upon.)
Long may Sinner reign
Now for the men. I’ve extended this list to 51 for obvious reasons:
YE 25 Player Age YE 24 Elo 24 Elo 23
1 Jannik Sinner 23.4 1 1 2
2 Carlos Alcaraz 21.7 3 3 3
3 Alexander Zverev 27.7 2 4 5
4 Taylor Fritz 27.2 4 6 10
5 Daniil Medvedev 28.9 5 5 4
6 Novak Djokovic 37.6 7 2 1
7 Holger Rune 21.7 13 10 12
8 Jack Draper 23.0 15 8 19
9 Casper Ruud 26.0 6 21 16
10 Alex de Minaur 25.9 9 16 11
11 Andrey Rublev 27.2 8 18 6
12 Stefanos Tsitsipas 26.4 11 14 9
13 Tommy Paul 27.6 12 11 18
14 Hubert Hurkacz 27.9 16 9 8
15 Grigor Dimitrov 33.6 10 7 7
16 Ugo Humbert 26.5 14 17 13
17 Lorenzo Musetti 22.8 17 20 50
18 Arthur Fils 20.6 20 25 38
19 Ben Shelton 22.2 21 22 17
20 Sebastian Korda 24.5 22 15 22
21 Tomas Machac 24.2 25 12 33
22 Karen Khachanov 28.6 19 19 23
23 Felix Auger Aliassime 24.4 29 28 15
24 Frances Tiafoe 26.9 18 33 26
25 Matteo Berrettini 28.7 34 13 14
YE 25 Player Age YE 24 Elo 24 Elo 23
26 Alexei Popyrin 25.4 24 27 75
27 Jiri Lehecka 23.1 28 39 46
28 Flavio Cobolli 22.7 32 30 136
29 Alex Michelsen 20.4 41 35 134
30 Jakub Mensik 19.3 48 37 119
31 Mpetshi Perricard 21.5 31 43 192
32 Francisco Cerundolo 26.4 30 36 25
33 Matteo Arnaldi 23.9 37 48 31
34 Sebastian Baez 24.0 27 67 40
35 Brandon Nakashima 23.4 38 42 70
36 Jordan Thompson 30.7 26 29 51
37 Juncheng Shang 19.9 50 52
38 Tallon Griekspoor 28.5 40 32 24
39 Alejandro Tabilo 27.6 23 54 121
40 Denis Shapovalov 25.7 56 34 34
41 T M Etcheverry 25.5 39 58 65
42 Alexander Bublik 27.5 33 59 44
43 Davidovich Fokina 25.6 61 46 28
44 Roman Safiullin 27.4 60 38 27
45 Nicolas Jarry 29.2 35 63 20
46 Nuno Borges 27.9 36 53 88
47 Thanasi Kokkinakis 28.7 77 24 61
48 Luciano Darderi 22.9 44 106 122
49 Miomir Kecmanovic 25.3 54 65 71
50 Jan Lennard Struff 34.7 42 26 35
51 Joao Fonseca 18.4 145 45
The men’s ranking model is more accurate than the women’s version, though that may be because it is built, in part, on the unusually stable Big Three/Big Four era. That stability might be gone, taking the reliability of this model with it. (The men’s model predicted the log of next year’s ranking with an adjusted r-squared of .631, compared to .580 for the women.) So again, if it looks boring, that’s the nature of the beast.
Still: We have Carlos Alcaraz taking back the number two spot, Holger Rune returning to the top ten, and Jack Draper following him in. In the other direction, we see Grigor Dimitrov’s age catching up to him, dropping five spots from his current position.
At the bottom of the list, we find Joao Fonseca bounding up nearly 100 ranking spots in a single season. That already feels conservative, less than one week into his season. All of these numbers are based on 2024 year-end rankings, yet Fonseca is up 18 places in the live rankings with his run to the Canberra Challenger final. He’d gain another 14 with a win tomorrow.
What about Novak?
The table above shows Novak Djokovic in 6th place, a prediction that aggregates a vast range of possibilities. Here are the odds of various players ending 2025 at the top of the list:
Player p(#1)
Jannik Sinner 56.4%
Carlos Alcaraz 22.5%
Novak Djokovic 14.6%
Alexander Zverev 3.8%
Daniil Medvedev 3.4%
Taylor Fritz 1.3%
Holger Rune 1.2%
Jack Draper 1.2%
Hubert Hurkacz 1.0%
Grigor Dimitrov 0.7%
No one else is even half as likely as Dimitrov to end the season ranked #1. Sinner is the clear favorite, with virtually every stat in his favor. Alcaraz is expected to improve. Djokovic, though, is the clear number three, far ahead of the other players above him in the previous table.
This is partly to be expected: He ended 2024 in second place on the Elo list. He didn’t play a full schedule, but he posted great results much of the time he played, and Alcaraz wasn’t consistent enough to capitalize on the veteran’s step back. Beyond that, remember that the model considers last year’s Elo rank as well. Twelve months ago, Djokovic still had a strong claim to be the best player in the world. His age counts against him, but he is one of only a few players in the 2025 field who has proven he can reach the top.
Novak’s 6th-place forecast, then, averages a disproportionately high probability of a resurgence with all the things that can happen to 37-year-old athletes. He’s more likely than, say, (projected) #5 Medvedev or #7 Rune to claim the top spot, but he’s also more likely to fall down the list due to injury or lack of interest.
Djokovic looks like less of an outlier when we see the chances of top-5, top-10, and top-20 finishes this year:
Player p(5) p(10) p(20)
Jannik Sinner 95.6% 98.9% 99.8%
Carlos Alcaraz 84.5% 95.7% 99.2%
Alexander Zverev 61.7% 88.4% 97.5%
Daniil Medvedev 38.5% 71.8% 92.6%
Taylor Fritz 34.1% 72.0% 92.9%
Novak Djokovic 32.4% 59.8% 86.4%
Holger Rune 20.3% 52.8% 86.1%
Jack Draper 15.6% 46.3% 82.2%
Hubert Hurkacz 9.8% 29.9% 68.2%
Andrey Rublev 9.8% 31.8% 70.8%
Stefanos Tsitsipas 9.6% 31.6% 70.6%
Alex de Minaur 9.5% 32.9% 72.1%
Grigor Dimitrov 8.3% 27.0% 63.1%
Casper Ruud 7.7% 31.1% 70.6%
Tommy Paul 7.1% 26.8% 65.0%
Ugo Humbert 5.3% 20.2% 56.9%
Ben Shelton 4.8% 18.5% 55.8%
Sebastian Korda 4.5% 17.8% 53.5%
Tomas Machac 4.4% 18.3% 54.3%
Arthur Fils 3.7% 17.0% 54.0%
Lorenzo Musetti 3.4% 16.6% 52.3%
Matteo Berrettini 2.4% 8.7% 32.2%
Felix Auger Aliassime 2.1% 8.2% 32.7%
Karen Khachanov 2.0% 8.8% 32.8%
Frances Tiafoe 1.3% 6.3% 25.9%
player p(5) p(10) p(20)
Jiri Lehecka 1.0% 5.0% 22.7%
Alexei Popyrin 0.9% 5.4% 23.1%
Francisco Cerundolo 0.8% 3.8% 17.3%
Flavio Cobolli 0.7% 4.5% 20.7%
Jakub Mensik 0.7% 4.1% 20.0%
Alex Michelsen 0.7% 4.2% 20.2%
Matteo Arnaldi 0.7% 3.0% 14.7%
Tallon Griekspoor 0.6% 2.4% 11.0%
Brandon Nakashima 0.5% 2.8% 13.9%
Denis Shapovalov 0.5% 2.2% 10.5%
Sebastian Baez 0.5% 2.5% 12.6%
Mpetshi Perricard 0.5% 3.3% 16.2%
Jordan Thompson 0.4% 2.3% 10.3%
Davidovich Fokina 0.4% 1.5% 7.6%
Roman Safiullin 0.4% 1.5% 7.1%
Juncheng Shang 0.3% 2.0% 10.8%
Nicolas Jarry 0.3% 1.2% 5.7%
Thanasi Kokkinakis 0.3% 1.2% 5.7%
Alexander Bublik 0.3% 1.3% 6.6%
T M Etcheverry 0.3% 1.4% 7.1%
Alejandro Tabilo 0.2% 1.5% 7.5%
Jan Lennard Struff 0.2% 1.0% 4.3%
Joao Fonseca 0.2% 1.0% 5.7%
Nuno Borges 0.2% 1.0% 5.2%
Miomir Kecmanovic 0.2% 0.9% 4.5%
The various models don’t quite agree: It can’t really be the case that if Djokovic cracks the top five (32.4% here), it’s nearly 50/50 whether he ends the season at number one. From outside of the models, we can be particularly skeptical, since we know that Novak isn’t likely to play a full schedule. Still, we can glean something from the juxtaposition: There’s not a lot of middle ground for the all-time-great.
Again, it’s worth peeking at the bottom of the list. Fonseca makes this one, too, with a nearly 6% chance of a top-20 debut this year. (Actually, a debut is even more likely, since this is the stricter probability of a year-end top-20 finish.) It seems a bit crazy to say that the 18-year-old has the same top-20 chances as Nicolas Jarry. On the other hand, Fonseca leads Jarry on the Elo table by a healthy margin. He may already be the stronger player.
Few pros are likely catapult up or down the rankings like Fonseca. Plenty will make moves that these models don’t foresee. With the information available at the beginning of the season, we can get a general sense of how things will change over the next twelve months. Now for the good part: We get to find out how the models were wrong.
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Eva Lys, probably a top-100 player in 2025. Credit: Nuta Lucian
Every year, Challenger maven Damian Kust lists the players he thinks are likely to join the ATP top 100 in the coming year. He did a typically good job last year, picking 14 of the 20 players who reached the threshold in 2024. We can forgive him for missing Jacob Fearnley, who rose from 646th to the top 90 in less than twelve months.
I’ve yet to meet a forecast that I didn’t want to mathematically model, and this is no exception. An algorithm probably isn’t going to do better than Damian does, as it will miss all kinds of details accumulated by a full-time tour watcher. But the exercise will give us a better idea of what factors make it more or less likely that a player joins the top-100 club.
The table shows the 25 men who are most likely to make their top-100 debut this year, plus a few more from Damian’s list. I’ve included Damian’s rankings*, as well as each player’s year-end ATP ranking, year-end ranking on my Elo list, and their current age. The final column, “p(100),” is their probability of reaching the ranking milestone sometime in 2025.
* Damian points out that his numbering wasn’t intended as an explicit ranking, though he did end up picking the more obvious players first, with the long shots at the end.
The three columns between the players and their probabilities are the main components of the logistic-regression model. Age, unsurprisingly, is key. The younger the player, the more likely he’ll improve. Plus, the youngest men may have played limited schedules, causing their official rankings to underestimate their ability levels.
It’s a bit unusual to include both ATP rank and Elo rank, since they are simply different interpretations of the same underlying match results. In this case, though, it makes sense. Elo is better at predicting a player’s performance tomorrow, and it outperforms the official list as a way of predicting rankings a year from now. However, we’re trying to forecast ranking breakthroughs less than a year from now. If Fonseca has a good month Down Under, he’ll crack the top 100 in large part thanks to his eleven months’ worth of ranking points from 2024. In this model, then, the ATP ranking tells us how close a player is to the point total he needs. Elo tells us more about how likely he is pile up the remaining wins.
A player’s existing stock of points turns out to be somewhat more important than his underlying skill level. The model weights ATP ranking about half-again as heavily as Elo rank.
There are innumerable other variables we could include. I tested a lot of them. The only other input I kept was height. Height is only a minor influence on top-100 breakthroughs, but it’s definitely better to be taller. De Jong, for instance, is five feet, eleven inches tall. He ranks eighth on the 2025 list when height is omitted, and falls to tenth when height is included.
This tallies with the Challenger-to-tour conversion stats I worked out for my recent post about Learner Tien. Both short players and left-handers have a harder time making the jump than their taller, right-handed peers. Those conversions don’t address quite the same thing, since it’s possible to crack the top 100 with little to no success at tour level–it just means winning lots of Challengers. For that reason, left-handedness is probably an advantage for players aiming to jump from, say, 122nd to the top 100, as Tien is now. The relationship between left-handedness and breakthrough likelihood was less clear-cut than height, though, so I left it out.
J-wow
Enough mechanics–back to the forecasts. Fonseca’s 96.5% probability might strike you as crazily high or outrageously conservative. It’s certainly confident, but then again the Brazilian is a special player. Barring injury–and immediate injury, at that–a breakthrough seems likely to happen soon.
Whether high or low, the Fonseca forecast is unusual. Like his forehand, it puts him in classy company. Going back to 2000, here are the players about whom the model would have been most optimistic:
Year Player Rank Elo Age p(100) Y+1
2021 Holger Rune 103 50 18.7 98.7% 10
2020 Sebastian Korda 118 48 20.5 97.9% 38
2024 Joao Fonseca 145 45 18.4 96.5%
2010 Grigor Dimitrov 106 75 19.6 96.3% 52
2020 Carlos Alcaraz 141 51 17.7 96.1% 32
2018 Felix Auger Aliassime 108 89 18.4 95.8% 17
2023 Hamad Medjedovic 113 66 20.5 95.4% 105
2000 Andy Roddick 156 52 18.3 94.5% 14
2020 Lorenzo Musetti 128 68 18.8 94.0% 57
2019 Emil Ruusuvuori 123 64 20.7 94.0% 84
It’s not so remarkable that eight of the nine other players on the list succeeded in reaching the top 100. The forecast would have expected (at least) that. But even including Medjedovic’s disappointing finish to 2024, the average ranking of these nine guys at the end of the following season (“Y+1”) is 45. Three broke into the top 20. And Fonseca’s forecast places him ahead of most of them.
Medjedovic’s near-miss was due in part to illness. It’s worth remembering that this model only predicts a single year; the young Serbian is still set up for a nice career. (Including, probably, a top-100 debut in 2025.) The model would have given Francisco Cerundolo a 90% chance of breaking through in 2021. He didn’t make it, yet he reached the top 20 a couple of years later. Fernando Gonzalez failed to convert an 80% chance in 2001, but after a few more years, he made the top ten.
Using a simple model–instead of the expert opinion of someone like Damian–exposes us to another type of error. The model is optimistic about the 2025 chances of 22-year-old Leandro Riedi, who possesses both official and Elo ranks on the cusp of the top 100. On paper, he’s a great pick. But he had knee surgery in September. Instead of defending points from two Challenger titles in January, he’s continuing to recover. He may ultimately surpass many of the other guys on the list, but even just regaining his pre-injury form this year is a big ask.
Waiting for Eva
Let’s run the same exercise for the women’s game. Unfortunately I don’t have enough height data, so we can’t use that. The resulting model is less predictive than the men’s forecast (even apart from the lack of player heights), but with year-end WTA rank, Elo rank, and age, it’s almost as good.
Patrick Ding took up the task of a Kust-style list for women. It’s unordered, so I’ve added a “Y” in the “PD” column next to his picks:
Rank PD Player Rank Elo Age p(100)
1 Y Eva Lys 131 43 23.0 80.1%
2 Y Anca Todoni 118 100 20.2 74.9%
3 Y Maya Joint 116 173 18.7 65.8%
4 Aoi Ito 126 109 20.6 65.4%
5 Y Marina Stakusic 125 131 20.1 62.3%
6 Y Polina Kudermetova 107 159 21.6 61.8%
7 Y Alina Korneeva 177 80 17.5 61.8%
8 Y Robin Montgomery 117 155 20.3 61.1%
9 Y Sara Bejlek 161 88 18.9 59.9%
10 M Sawangkaew 130 94 22.5 58.8%
11 Anastasia Zakharova 112 145 23.0 54.1%
12 Y Sijia Wei 134 135 21.1 49.9%
13 Y Celine Naef 153 124 19.5 48.8%
14 Y Antonia Ruzic 143 105 21.9 48.7%
15 Maja Chwalinska 128 119 23.2 47.7%
16 Y Sara Saito 150 182 18.2 43.1%
17 Alexandra Eala 148 162 19.6 41.6%
18 Y Darja Semenistaja 119 192 22.3 41.5%
19 Y Dominika Salkova 151 150 20.5 38.1%
20 Talia Gibson 140 185 20.5 37.2%
21 V Jimenez Kasintseva 156 170 19.4 36.3%
22 Y Ella Seidel 141 205 19.9 36.2%
23 Y Iva Jovic 189 157 17.1 33.8%
24 Daria Snigur 139 161 22.8 32.0%
25 Francesca Jones 152 106 24.3 31.5%
26 Y Solana Sierra 163 156 20.5 30.2%
27 Y Ena Shibahara 137 103 26.9 29.1%
28 Lois Boisson 204 95 21.6 23.9%
29 Elsa Jacquemot 159 191 21.7 21.8%
30 Y Taylah Preston 170 246 19.2 20.0%
31 Y Tereza Valentova 240 127 17.9 19.6%
32 Elena Pridankina 186 201 19.3 18.9%
33 Lola Radivojevic 185 186 20.0 18.9%
34 Y Oksana Selekhmeteva 176 176 22.0 16.8%
35 Barbora Palicova 180 202 20.8 16.2%
This isn’t quite a fair fight with Patrick, because he made his picks in early October. Two of his choices (Suzan Lamens and Zeynep Sonmez) have already cleared the top-100 hurdle. He would presumably consider Ito more carefully now, since she reached a tour-level semi-final two weeks after he made his list. I should also note that Patrick picked two prodigies outside the top 300: Renata Jamrichova and Mia Ristic. My model didn’t consider players ranked that low. I had to draw the line somewhere, and Fearnley aside, single-year ranking leaps of that magnitude are quite rare.
The mechanics of the algorithm are pretty much the same as the men’s version. The women’s list looks a bit more chaotic, pitting players with strong Elo positions (such as Lys and Korneeva) against others who are close to 100 without the results that Elo would like to see (Joint, Kudermetova, etc).
Eva Lys is fascinating because this is her third straight year near the top of the list. She finished 2022 ranked 127th, standing 71st on the Elo table. Just short of her 21st birthday, that was good for a 76% chance of reaching the top 100 the following year–second on the list to Diana Shnaider. She rose as high as 112, but no further.
A year older, Lys was fourth on the 2023 list. Her WTA ranking of 136 and her nearly-unchanged Elo position of 72 worked out to a 67% chance of a 2024 breakthrough. Only three players–Brenda Fruhvirtova, Erika Andreeva, and Sara Bejlek–scored higher. She came within one victory of the milestone in September but finds herself back on the list for 2024.
Even beyond Lys’s 80% chance of finally making it in 2025, history is encouraging. I went back 25 years for this study, and only two other players would have been given a 50% or better chance of reaching the top 100 for three consecutive years. Stephanie Dubois was on the cusp from 2005 to 2007, finishing the third year ranked 106th. She finally made it in 2008. More recently, Wang Xiyu was within range from 2019-21. (Covid-19 cancellations and travel challenges didn’t help.) She not only cleared the hurdle in 2022, she did it with style, climbing to #50 by the end of that season.
The same precedents bode well for Bejlek, who had a 52% chance of breaking through in 2023, a 77% chance last year, and a 60% probability for 2025.
Mark your calendars
In twelve months, we can check back and see how the model fared against Damian and Patrick. The algorithm has the benefit of precision, and it is less likely to get overexcited about as-yet-unfulfilled potential. The flip side is that it doesn’t consider the innumerable quirks that might bear on the chances of a particular player.
For now, I’m betting on the humans.
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Jannik Sinner just wrapped up a season for the ages. He won both hard-court majors, three Masters 1000s, and the Tour Finals. He led Team Italy to a Davis Cup championship and ended his campaign on a 26-set winning streak.
By November, the Italian was no longer competing against the field: He was gunning for a place in the record books. He went undefeated against players outside the top 20. Not a single player straight-setted him: He won at least one set in each of his 79 matches. Only Roger Federer, in 2005, had ever managed that.
After Sinner won the Australian Open, I wrote that Yes, Jannik Sinner Really Is This Good. Since then, he got even better. In the seven-month span ending in Melbourne, the Italian held 91.1% of his service games, a mark that not only led the tour but put him in the company of some of the greatest servers of all time. For the entire 2024 season, he upped that figure to 91.5%–including thirteen matches on clay.
He also defied the most powerful force in all of sport, regression to the mean. Sinner’s hold percentage was aided by some sterling work saving break points. He won tons of service points, of course, but he was even better facing break point. The average top-50 player is worse: Good returners generate more break points, so it’s a tough trend to defy.
In the 52 weeks ending in Melbourne, Sinner had won three percentage points more break points than overall service points. I wrote then: “I can tell you what usually happens after a season of break-point overperformance: It doesn’t last.” In the Italian’s case, though, it did. In 2024 as a whole, he won 71.1% of service points, and 73.6% of break points. He would have enjoyed a productive season without repeating his break-point overperformance, but those two-and-a-half percentage points explain much of the gap between very good and historically great.
Clubbable
Most players who serve so effectively are middling returners. The Italian has bucked that trend as well.
Late in 2023 I wrote about tennis most exclusive clubs–Alex Gruskin’s method for identifying standout players by their rankings in the hold and break percentage categories. It’s rare for anyone to crack the top ten in both. In 2023, Sinner signaled what was coming by finishing in both top fives. He ranked fifth by hold percentage and fourth by break percentage. Most seasons, that would have been enough for a year-end number one, but Novak Djokovic was even better, finishing in the top three on both sides of the ball.
Sinner, as we’ve seen, served even better this year. His 91.5% hold percentage was well clear of the pack, even with the resurgence of countryman Matteo Berrettini and increased time on tour from rocket men Ben Shelton and Giovanni Mpetshi Perricard. Last season, Djokovic led the tour by holding 88.9% of his service games. That’s impressive, especially for a guy known for other parts of his game, but it wouldn’t have cracked the 2024 top three. The Italian set a new standard.
At the same time, his return barely flagged. He fell out of the the top five by the narrowest of margins, winning nearly as many return games as he did in 2023 but falling to sixth place. Still, a “top-six club” showing is plenty rare. The only players who have posted one since 1991 (when these stats became available) are Djokovic, Nadal, Federer, and Andre Agassi. Federer only managed it once. Sinner has now done it twice.
The Italian’s return skills are even more impressive when we compare him the other season-best servers of the last thirty-plus years. The following table shows the hold-percentage leader for each year, along with his break percentage and his rank (among the ATP top 50) in that category:
Year Player Hold% Brk% Rank
1991 Pete Sampras 87.3% 25.4% 40
1992 Goran Ivanisevic 88.8% 20.4% 48
1993 Pete Sampras 89.6% 27.7% 19
1994 Pete Sampras 88.4% 29.3% 19
1995 Pete Sampras 89.0% 26.0% 25
1996 Pete Sampras 90.8% 20.8% 43
1997 Greg Rusedski 91.6% 16.7% 50
1998 Richard Krajicek 89.2% 21.4% 41
1999 Pete Sampras 89.7% 21.7% 44
2000 Pete Sampras 91.7% 18.4% 49
2001 Andy Roddick 90.4% 19.7% 45
2002 Greg Rusedski 88.5% 17.6% 48
Year Player Hold% Brk% Rank
2003 Andy Roddick 91.5% 20.9% 43
2004 Joachim Johansson 91.9% 14.5% 48
2005 Andy Roddick 92.5% 20.8% 45
2006 Andy Roddick 90.5% 22.4% 43
2007 Ivo Karlovic 94.5% 9.8% 50
2008 Andy Roddick 91.2% 19.2% 40
2009 Ivo Karlovic 92.2% 10.3% 50
2010 Andy Roddick 91.1% 17.6% 47
2011 John Isner 90.7% 12.9% 50
2012 Milos Raonic 92.7% 15.1% 49
2013 Milos Raonic 91.4% 15.7% 49
2014 John Isner 93.1% 9.3% 49
Year Player Hold% Brk% Rank
2015 Ivo Karlovic 95.5% 9.6% 50
2016 John Isner 93.4% 10.9% 49
2017 John Isner 92.9% 9.6% 50
2018 John Isner 93.8% 9.4% 50
2019 John Isner 94.1% 9.7% 49
2020 Milos Raonic 93.9% 18.0% 44
2021 John Isner 91.1% 8.8% 50
2022 Nick Kyrgios 92.9% 19.3% 40
2023 Novak Djokovic 88.9% 28.8% 3
2024 Jannik Sinner 91.5% 28.3% 6
If it hadn’t been for Djokovic’s appearance at the top of last year’s list, Sinner’s 2024 campaign would be hardly recognizable. Even Pete Sampras struggled to hold on to a spot in the break-percentage top 20. Circuit-best servers simply aren’t supposed to win so many return games, yet Sinner threatens to make it the new normal.
Carrot yElo
The Italian’s 73 wins, including 18 against the top ten, took his Elo rating to new heights. He began the year with a career-high rating of 2,197, second on the circuit to Djokovic. He quickly took over the top spot, ultimately clearing the 2,300 mark with his victory at the Tour Finals.
Elo is not a perfect measure to compare players from different eras, but in my opinion, it’s the best we’ve got. It’s the basis of my Tennis 128, which Sinner will join as soon as I get around to updating the calculations. 2,300 is rarefied air: In the last half-century, he is only the twelfth player to reach that mark. With three singles victories to secure the Davis Cup, he nudged his rating up to 2,309, surpassing Mats Wilander and establishing the eleventh-highest peak since the formation of the ATP.
A stratospheric Elo is an indication of an outstanding player at the top of his game, but the metric is not designed to rate seasons. The alternative is yElo, a variation I devised for exactly this purpose. yElo works the same way as Elo does, adding or subtracting points based on wins, losses, and the quality of opposition. But unlike the more traditional measure, each player starts the season with a clean slate.
By regular Elo, Sinner holds a 150-point lead over second-place Carlos Alcaraz. By yElo, with its narrower focus, the Italian is even more dominant:
(The won-loss records are a bit different from official figures because my Elo and yElo calculations exclude matches that ended in retirement.)
The two-hundred-point gap between Sinner and Djokovic is one of the largest ever. Again going back to 1973, it ranks fourth. Only 2004 and 2006 Federer (over Lleyton Hewitt and Nadal, respectively) and 1984 John McEnroe (over Wilander) outpaced the competition by such a substantial margin.
By raw yElo, Sinner’s 2024 isn’t quite so historic. It’s the 26th best of the last half-century: An impressive feat, but not as close to the top of the list as some of the other trivia suggests. Here’s the list:
Year Player W-L yElo
1979 Bjorn Borg 84-5 2499
1984 John McEnroe 82-3 2476
2015 Novak Djokovic 82-6 2458
1985 Ivan Lendl 82-7 2440
2016 Andy Murray 78-9 2416
2013 Novak Djokovic 74-9 2408
1976 Jimmy Connors 97-7 2406
1977 Bjorn Borg 78-6 2403
1977 Guillermo Vilas 133-13 2401
2006 Roger Federer 91-5 2399
1980 Bjorn Borg 70-5 2395
1981 Ivan Lendl 96-12 2383
1987 Ivan Lendl 73-7 2381
1982 Ivan Lendl 105-9 2380
1978 Jimmy Connors 66-5 2379
Year Player W-L yElo
2013 Rafael Nadal 74-7 2373
1986 Ivan Lendl 74-6 2369
2011 Novak Djokovic 63-4 2367
2005 Roger Federer 80-4 2364
2014 Novak Djokovic 61-8 2363
2012 Novak Djokovic 73-12 2360
1978 Bjorn Borg 79-6 2359
2008 Rafael Nadal 81-10 2352
1986 Boris Becker 69-13 2347
1982 John McEnroe 71-9 2341
2024 Jannik Sinner 72-6 2339
1983 Mats Wilander 80-11 2338
1974 Jimmy Connors 94-5 2332
1989 Boris Becker 64-8 2329
2015 Roger Federer 62-11 2329
One factor holding back Jannik’s 2024 is the number of matches played. Elo, in part, reflects the confidence we have in a rating. Winning 90% of 100 matches (or almost 150, in the case of Vilas) gives us more confidence in an assessment than 90% of 80 matches.
Another issue is that Elo has opinions about strong and weak eras. Going 70-5 in 1980 doesn’t look much different than 72-6 today, but Elo considers Bjorn Borg’s peers to have been stronger than Sinner’s. If Sinner and Alcaraz continue to improve and a couple of their peers emerge as superstars in their own right, then a 72-6 season might rank much higher.
The asphalt jungle
A couple of months ago, pundits started mulling where Sinner’s 2024 stood among the greatest hard-court seasons of all time. Since then, he piled on so many more wins that the qualifier wasn’t needed. Yet it remains a valid question.
The Italian’s highlights came almost entirely on hard courts. He won 53 of 56 matches, 42 of them in straight sets. He’s plenty skilled on natural surfaces, but given a predictable bounce and conditions that emphasize his power and penetration, opponents don’t stand a chance.
I don’t publish surface-specific yElo ratings, because they have limited usefulness for much of the year. For our purposes, though, hard-court yElo–same algorithm, limited to matches on one surface–is just the ticket. By this measure, Sinner’s 2024 is the eighth-best of all time:
Year Player Hard W-L Hard yElo
2015 Novak Djokovic 59-5 2426
2013 Novak Djokovic 53-5 2413
2012 Novak Djokovic 48-5 2377
2005 Roger Federer 49-1 2374
2006 Roger Federer 59-2 2373
1995 Andre Agassi 52-3 2370
2016 Andy Murray 48-6 2363
2024 Jannik Sinner 52-3 2353
2010 Roger Federer 45-7 2338
2014 Novak Djokovic 40-6 2334
Year Player Hard W-L Hard yElo
2014 Roger Federer 56-7 2333
1985 Ivan Lendl 29-3 2332
1987 Ivan Lendl 33-2 2325
1996 Pete Sampras 46-4 2319
2015 Roger Federer 38-6 2318
1981 Ivan Lendl 41-3 2317
2011 Roger Federer 45-7 2314
2009 Novak Djokovic 53-10 2309
1985 John McEnroe 25-1 2309
1986 Ivan Lendl 30-2 2298
So, um, peak Djokovic was pretty good, huh?
Even though Elo doesn’t hold the rest of the 2024 field in particularly high regard, Sinner’s season was so dominant that he does well by this measure. A year that would rate as Djokovic’s fourth-best, Federer’s third, or Agassi’s second, is truly something worth celebrating.
The Italian still has some ground to cover before he challenges Novak, Roger, and the rest for all-time hard-court dominance. But he has already upped the standard for the 2020s and posted one of the most remarkable two-year spans in the game’s history. Sinner has built an enormous gap between himself and the field, and it is increasingly difficult to see how his peers will close it.
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Jasmine Paolini at the 2022 Transylvania Open. Credit: Nuta Lucian
There are unorthodox aging curves, and then there’s whatever the hell Jasmine Paolini is doing right now. The best women tennis players tend to make their presence known in their late teens. I wrote earlier this year about the “improbable rise” of 22-year-old Emma Navarro.
Paolini is 28.
When Paolini was the age that Coco Gauff is now, she was ranked just inside the top 300, fresh off a first-round loss at an ITF $25K in Bulgaria. When she was the age that Iga Swiatek is now, she had finally cracked the top 150, about to head to Wimbledon qualifying. (She lost in the first round there, too.) When she was the age that Aryna Sabalenka is now, she had just stumbled through a four-match losing streak to the likes of Jil Teichmann and Irina-Camelia Begu that knocked her out of the top 50.
Just 16 months ago, Paolini was once again outside the top 50. For a five-foot, four-inch counterpuncher with no obvious weapons, she had achieved a great deal. There was little reason, though, to think she could climb much higher. Her peers were getting bigger, the game was becoming ever more aggressive, and she was reaching the age at which WTA stars begin to think about what else life might hold for them.
Then she started winning.
Since leaving Wimbledon last year, the Italian has won 66 of 99 matches, including two major semi-finals and five top-ten scalps. She picked up her first 1000-level title and made four other finals. Yesterday, she led Team Italy to a Billie Jean King Cup crown, starring in both singles and doubles en route to the championship. Her ranking is up to an astonishing 4th in the world. As if that weren’t enough, she’s in the top ten in doubles.
None of this was supposed to happen. Paolini’s late-2023 surge to the top 30 was one thing; what has happened since simply defies belief. How has she managed it? Is it a fluke, or will we see the Italian at the 2025 year-end championships as well?
Opportunistic effects
First, a bit of a caveat. Paolini, like Taylor Fritz, has played the official ranking system like a Stradivarius. She reached only three finals in 2024, yet two of them were slams. The other was a 1000. She earned huge chunks of points for a semi-final defeat of Mirra Andreeva at Roland Garros, a semi-final squeaker against Donna Vekic at Wimbledon, and a Dubai title that didn’t require her to face a top-ten opponent.
None of this is meant to take away from Paolini’s accomplishment. She beat the players in front of her, and in the case of Andreeva, she did so in emphatic fashion. The point is that her top-four finish has more to do with good timing than consistently dominant play.
My Elo ratings offer a second opinion, using an algorithm based on the quality of her opponents, rather than the venue and round of each match. By Elo, she stands in 9th place, just ahead of Madison Keys and Diana Shnaider, well back of Jessica Pegula and Elena Rybakina. Still a very good season, if a bit less astounding.
Even more revisionist is the total-points-won leaderboard. Going into the BJK Cup Finals, Paolini had won 51.8% of her total points this season. That’s a respectable rate, especially for someone who hovered in the 50% range for most of her tour-level career. But it is not typically top-five, or even top-ten material:
By this metric, the Italian stands in 19th place among the WTA top 50, behind a handful of players who didn’t even crack the official top 20. That doesn’t really mean she’s the 19th best player on tour: She faced one of the toughest schedules of anyone. Much as I love both Yulia Putintseva and counterintuitive arguments, I’m not going to try to convince you that Putintseva had the better season.
Still, Paolini’s position on the TPW list tells us something about how she won her matches. She didn’t lose many blowouts, but she didn’t win many, either. (She certainly didn’t get in the habit of spanking opponents like Swiatek and Sabalenka do.) Ten of her wins required a third set. Two victories–including the Wimbledon semi-final–came despite losing more points than she won.
The margins were not so narrow that we can ascribe the Italian’s breakout to luck. (Though the Vekic match could have gone either way, to say the least.) But this is the high-wire act that took Paolini to the top. She doesn’t have the tools to bludgeon her opponents. She has done a lot of things right to win 42 matches this year. To keep winning at a two-of-three clip, she’ll need to continue executing the new game plan to near-perfection.
The new game plan
It’s a bit tricky to isolate the key changes in Paolini’s approach, because–like Qinwen Zheng–she’s doing almost everything better than she did before the surge. That said, a few things stand out.
Check out the Italian’s breakdown of points won by rally length (in Match Charting Project-logged matches) before this season, compared with her performance this year:
Paolini’s improvement in 7- to 9-stroke rallies is significant, and her gain in the 4- to 6-shot category is enormous. In very short points and very long ones, little has changed.
Especially in the categories of shorter points, we need to keep in mind what these win rates measure. It’s tempting to think of a prototypical short point, then imagine Paolini, instead of her opponent, winning it. But the length of a given point is not handed down to us by God. When someone like Paolini starts winning more shorter points, it’s because she is ending them before they become long points, and/or she is preventing her opponents from ending points quickly.
The Italian can hardly stack up one-shot points (unreturned serves), and she can’t even reliably put away plus-ones–though she is doing that more than she used to. Instead, like the expert doubles player she has become, she can structure points that inch closer and closer to a point-ending opportunity. Call it plus-two tennis, aggressive point construction for undersized counterpunchers.
The plus-two forehand
Tactics are one thing; Paolini is a top-ten player because she has executed them so well. Her forehand is a big reason why.
She is ending points with her forehand at a much better clip than she did before the calendar flipped to 2024, and her inside-out forehand has seen particular improvement:
Here, “winners” refer to both clean winners and shots that induce forced errors. Through 2023, Paolini’s forehand winner/forced error rate of less than 12% put her in the bottom quarter of tour regulars. 17.5% moves her to the top third, not far behind Swiatek and Keys. The same stat for inside-out forehands (IO Wnr%) doesn’t put her in quite the same company, but it is an even better reflection of the tactical shift. Before, the Italian rarely used that shot as an offensive weapon; now it is a regular part of the arsenal.
The bottom line is reflected in the Forehand Potency (FHP/100) numbers. The number of points Paolini earns with her forehand more than tripled from previous seasons to 2024. That doesn’t quite account for the entire shift from a top-50 player to a top-fiver, but it explains a whole lot.
And the no-fearhand
One side effect of the Italian’s forehand-centered strategy is that she is less afraid of other players’ forehands.
Again, Paolini is doing just about everything better. For instance, 22% of her first serves went unreturned in 2024, compared with 20% in the past. Nice little boost, but not something you would notice by watching a couple of matches. A bigger shift is where she puts the first serves:
Check out the rate at which she is hitting deuce-court first serves wide (D Wide%). 25% to 37% is a massive change, and one that would be dangerous for a different sort of player. In the deuce court, the down-the-tee serve is the conservative one: It goes to the backhand of a right-handed returner, and since it lands in the middle of the court, the returner doesn't have any sharp angles to exploit. The wide serve is the opposite, feeding forehands to opponents like Sabalenka, Rybakina, or Zheng along with the angles necessary to turn them into winners.
What Paolini knows--again, like a savvy doubles player--is that most players will fail to convert the majority of those opportunities, even if they occasionally smack a highlight-reel return winner. The Italian didn't crack the top five by running the table against the elite. Most of her 42 wins came against the next rung of competitors, women who are often held back by inconsistency. Paolini pushed them off the court, giving the choice of either going big (and frequently missing), or sending back a shot that she could handle with her own (improved!) forehand.
All those deuce-court wide serves explain how Paolini picked up so many more plus-one winners (the <=3 W% column) and converted so many in-play returns overall (RiP W%). Every individual wide serve is a gamble, but the Italian has discovered that, on net, they pay off.
The way forward
I'm a bit surprised to find myself concluding that, yes, Paolini might just maintain this level. The odds are heavily against another top-five finish. That was a quirk of her draws and well-timed (probably accidental!) peaks. But 52% of total points? A single-digit year-end ranking? Maybe!
Once I began thinking of the Italian's singles play in terms of doubles strategy, it all clicked. Her anticipation is outstanding--and like everything else, it is better than it was last year. She often wins points without working particularly hard. She's in the right place to end the point on the fifth or sixth shot of the rally. (That place is increasingly at the net. She came to net more in 2024, and she won more of those points than before, too.) Anticipation isn't a skill that will deteriorate with age, nor is it one that opponents can neutralize.
Paolini's new point-shortening, forehand-smacking, deuce-court-serving tactics aren't going to earn her many big upsets, just as they haven't so far. The strongest players--not coincidentally, often the ones with the most fearsome forehands--are the ones in the best position to take advantage the wide deuce-court serves and force the Italian both to move off the baseline and rely more on the backhand.
But a top-ten season doesn't require a pile of top-ten victories. Paolini was 3-6 against that group this year, and that included one win against a fading Ons Jabeur and another in Riyadh against a rusty Rybakina. The Italian's finish owed much more to her 38-15 record against everyone else. Despite the improbability of a top-ten debut at age 28, Paolini has built a game capable of repeating the feat in 2025.
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Taylor Fritz at the 2023 US Open. Credit: Andy M. Wang
Taylor Fritz has been remarkably consistent over the last three seasons. He ended the 2022 campaign ranked 9th, finished last year 10th, and enters this week’s Tour Finals in 5th place, with a chance to overtake Daniil Medvedev for a spot in the top four.
Take a look at his top-line statistics for 2022, 2023, and 2024. They’re sorted by total points won (TPW). Can you tell which one belongs to his career-best current season?
You might be tempted to go with the first row, since he won the most points then. But the margin is small, and he won matches at a better clip in the second. Wait, though: He snagged the most return points in the third season, and more breaks of serve are particularly crucial for a player hovering in the 36% to 38% range.
I won’t leave you hanging. The second line belongs to 2024. Here are the three stat lines, now sorted by season:
The 27-year-old American is clearly doing something right that isn’t captured by the usual stats. 10th to 5th is a major move. Last year he didn’t even qualify for the Tour Finals. After beating Medvedev yesterday, he’s one win away from a probable berth in the semis. What’s going on here?
All the right matches
The official ranking system ensures that tournaments and matches are very much unequal. When Fritz beat Frances Tiafoe in the Acapulco quarter-finals last year, he gained an additional 90 points for his semi-final showing. When he slipped past Tiafoe in this year’s US Open for a place in the championship match, he earned a whopping 480 points.
I could just about stop here. 480 points is the difference between Fritz’s current point total and 8th place. A slightly bigger difference of 560 points would knock him down to 10th, and he’d be hanging around Turin this week as an alternate. His stats would barely change, but the story of his season would be very different.
It’s not just the Tiafoe match; it’s more than the US Open final. 2024 was the first year that Fritz lived up to expectations at the slams in general. Here are his grand-slam win totals back to 2018:
Year Wins
2024 17
2023 8
2022 8
2021 6
2020 6 * no Wimbledon
2019 4
2018 4
No top tenner would be happy with just eight wins at majors. Simply reaching the fourth round at each slam adds up to 12. In 2022, Fritz lost five-setters to Stefanos Tsitsipas and Rafael Nadal, then fell to a streaking Brandon Holt in Flushing. Last year, he suffered two second-round exits. Both five-setters, the losses came against Alexei Popyrin in Australia and Mikael Ymer at Wimbledon.
When the 2024 season kicked off, Fritz had just two major quarter-finals to his name. His career record in five-setters was 8-10.
Since then, the American has reached three more quarters (including the US Open final run). He won four five-setters against just one defeat. He avenged the Melbourne loss to Tsitsipas and twice upset Alexander Zverev, a player who had beaten him in five of eight previous meetings.
The re-balancing
The odd thing about Fritz’s season is that his slam success has been offset by weaker results elsewhere. Returning to the observation I started with: He won nine more matches at majors in 2024 than in 2023, but his winning percentage barely budged. Instead of losing to Ymer or Holt on a big stage, he fell to Matteo Arnaldi in Acapulco, Thiago Seyboth Wild in Miami, Alex Michelsen in Geneva, and more.
It was a smart trade, though it was surely not a premeditated one. You can train with the majors in mind, but you can hardly punt an early-round match at a 250 with any kind of hope that it will result in a quarter-final victory at the next slam.
There’s another category, though, in which Fritz may have used stronger tactics to get better “luck.” Here are the American’s tiebreak records since 2021:
The 2023 mark of 59% is about where Fritz should be, based on the rate at which he normally wins serve and return points, combined with the matches in which he finds himself in tiebreaks. 2024 was the first season he beat tiebreak expectations by a non-negligible margin.
This could be luck. Tiebreak records fluctuate, and very few players sustain records above or below expectations for long. Still, the American might have figured something out. In the sample of 2024 matches logged by the Match Charting Project (plus several others from grand slams), Fritz is serving waybetter in tiebreaks than he has in the past:
80% is Isner territory. In the improbable event that Fritz can sustain these kinds of numbers, coupled with a solid return-points-won rate around 38%, he should be winning even more tiebreaks than he already does.
I don’t want to overemphasize tiebreaks: After all, his 21-11 record is only one or two tiebreaks better than it “should” be. On the other hand, it’s easy to scan through Fritz’s career results–including those at majors–and see how one or two tiebreaks could change the story. He took a first-set tiebreak from Tsitsipas in Melbourne this year. He split two against Zverev at Wimbledon, then took two of two from the German in New York. Take one of those away–just one!–and again, he might be watching the Tour Finals from the sidelines.
Zverev tolerance
Regardless of whether tiebreak luck played a role, Fritz’s two major victories over Zverev helped to define his season. Neither pre-match betting odds nor my Elo ratings predicted an American victory on either occasion.
Both Fritz and Zverev are tall guys with big serves; either one can put away a service game with four quick strikes. One key difference between them is that Zverev is more patient, comfortable playing long points from the baseline. This isn’t necessarily an asset: It isn’t always in the German’s interest to let matches go that way. But if you’re going to pick one of these two guys to play points from the baseline, it’s pretty clearly Zverev.
In the US Open quarter-final, though, 39 points went ten strokes or longer. Fritz won 20 of them. In the fourth-set tiebreak, three and half hours into the battle, the American won two of two: a 24-stroke grinder that Fritz finished at the net, then a 12-shotter on match point that Zverev squandered with a unforced forehand error.
Two lessons jump out. First, the American can hold his own from the backcourt with one of the best baseliners in the game, at least on a hard court. Second, that skill doesn’t seem to fade with fatigue, something that might have caused Fritz’s five-set struggles in the past.
A third takeaway may be even more important. Instead of the numerator–20 points won–consider the denominator: 39 points played. The first time Fritz and Zverev met at a major, at Wimbledon back in 2018, barely half as many points lasted so long, even though the match itself was longer. Yes, the surface kept that number down, but not by a factor of two. At Washington early in Fritz’s career, on a surface more like that in Flushing, the two men played an entire match with just one rally that reached ten strokes.
In that 2018 Wimbledon meeting, Fritz held his own in the long rallies, winning 9 of 21. The problem was his rush to avoid them. He committed 56 unforced errors to the German’s 36.
Zverev keeps his unforced error rates down because he is willing to wait. He forces opponents to take risks unless they want to spend all day grinding out baseline battles. Most players in the Fritz mold–including Fritz himself, in the past–opt to take their chances. They usually lose, which is why Zverev is ranked second in the world. The American has steadily improved his groundstrokes and his fitness to the point that he doesn’t need to take low-percentage big swings. It’s no guarantee of victory–after all, Fritz won just 50.9% of points in the Flushing four-setter–but it’s a better bet than the alternative.
Let’s play ten
There’s a wider lesson here, and not just for Taylor Fritz. We tend to think of long-rally proficiency as a clear-cut skill. Yes, some players are better at it than others, but not by a wide margin.
Here are the long-rally (10+ shots) winning percentages for the ATP top ten, based on Match Charting Project data for the last 52 weeks:
Player 10+ W%
Alex de Minaur 57.4%
Carlos Alcaraz 57.1%
Jannik Sinner 55.8%
Daniil Medvedev 55.0%
Grigor Dimitrov 54.2%
Novak Djokovic 52.8%
Andrey Rublev 51.8%
Casper Ruud 50.2%
Alexander Zverev 50.2%
Taylor Fritz 46.8%
Before I studied this, I would’ve expected considerably more dispersion. While every edge counts, this one is not as crucial as it gets credit for. Fewer than one in ten points reach the long-rally threshold, so even the most extreme gaps–like that between Fritz and de Minaur here–would determine the outcome of only the closest matches.
More important, I suspect, is willingness to play these points. Fritz is never going to crack the top half of a list like this. He has–to his credit–maxed out the rally tolerance that his size and physical gifts will grant him. Still, a 47% chance of winning a protracted point is better than his odds after belting a low-percentage salvo to avoid the battle altogether.
Players who serve as effectively as Fritz does tend to be considerably less sturdy from the baseline. Pros with his (adequate if not world-beating) groundstrokes are often less inclined to rely on them. One-dimensional big servers almost never reach the top five. Yet Fritz, combining his primary weapon with a tactical savvy that allows him to maximize the rest of his assets, has done exactly that.
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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:
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:
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.
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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.
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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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Novak Djokovic practicing at the 2023 US Open. Credit: Amaury Laporte
Fifteen break points. A week has passed, a new champion has been crowned, and I still can’t stop thinking about it. In the first two sets of his Australian Open quarter-final match against Taylor Fritz, Novak Djokovic failed to convert fifteen straight break points.
It’s so far out of character as to defy belief. Djokovic has converted more than 40% of his break chances in the past year, even counting the 4-for-21 showing in the entire Fritz match. The American, one of the better servers on tour, typically saves only two-thirds of the break points he faces. The chances that Novak would come up short 15 times in a row are about one in seven million.
Even stranger, it wasn’t because Fritz served so well. He missed his first serve on 7 of the 15 break points. He hit two aces and another four didn’t come back, but that leaves nine rallies when–under pressure, in Australia–Taylor Fritz beat Novak Djokovic. Five of those lasted at least seven strokes, including a 25-shot gutbuster at 4-3 in the second set that was followed, two points later, by yet another Fritz winner on the 17th shot. All credit to the American, who walked a tightrope of down-the-line backhands and refused to give in to an opponent who, even in the first two sets, was outplaying him. But clearly this wasn’t a matter of Fritz intimidating or otherwise imposing himself on Novak.
There’s no shortage of explanations. Djokovic is recovering from a wrist injury that hampered him in his United Cup loss to Alex de Minaur. He apparently had the flu going into the Melbourne semi against Jannik Sinner. The whole Australian adventure might be nothing more than a health-marred aberration; in this interpretation, none of Jiri Lehecka, Dino Prizmic, Alexei Popyrin, or even Fritz would otherwise have taken a set from the all-time great.
But… the man is 36 years old. If other tennis players his age are any guide, he may never be fully healthy again. He will continue to get slower, if only marginally so. He personally raised the physical demands of the sport, and finally, a younger generation has accepted the challenge. Djokovic has defied the odds to stay on top for as long as he has, but eventually he will fade, even if that means only a gentle tumble out of the top three. After a month like this, we have to ask, is it the beginning of the end?
Rally intolerance
The two marathon break points that Fritz saved were not exceptions. 64 of the 269 points in the quarter-final reached a seventh shot, and the American won more than half of them. Even among double-digit rallies, the results were roughly even.
Here’s another data point: Djokovic fought out 53 points in his first-rounder against Prizmic that reached ten shots or more. The 18-year-old Croatian won 30 of them. Yeah, Prizmic is a rising star with mountains of potential, but he’s also ranked 169th in the world. This is not the Novak we’ve learned to expect: Even after retooling his game around a bigger serve and shorter points, he remained unshakeable from the baseline, his famous flexibility keeping him in position to put one more ball back in play.
Down Under, though, those skills went missing. Based on 278 charted matches since the start of 2015, the following table shows the percentage of points each year that he takes to seven shots or more, and his success rate in those rallies:
By the standards of tennis’s small margins, that’s what it looks like to fall off a cliff. The situation probably isn’t quite so bad: The sample from 2024 is limited to only the matches against Lehecka, de Minaur, Prizmic, Fritz, and Sinner. On the other hand, matches charted in previous years also skew in favor of novelty, so upsets, close matches, and elite opponents are overrepresented there too.
It is especially unusual for Djokovic to see such a decline on hard courts. Over the last decade, he has gone through spells when he loses more long rallies than he wins. But they typically come on clay. Carlos Alcaraz shut him down in last year’s Wimbledon final as well, winning 57% of points that reached the seventh shot and 63% of those with ten or more strokes. The only period when hard-court Novak consistently failed to win this category was late 2021, when Medvedev beat him for the US Open title (and then outscored him in long rallies in Paris), and Alexander Zverev won 62% of the seven-plusses (and 70% of ten-plusses!) to knock him out of the Tour Finals.
Protracted rallies are a young man’s game, and Djokovic’s results are starting to show it. Before dissecting Alcaraz in Turin last November, Novak had never won more than half of seven-plusses against Carlitos. He has barely held on against Sinner, winning 43% of those points in their Tour Finals round-robin match and 51% at the Davis Cup Finals. In 13 meetings since 2019, Medvedev has won more of these long rallies than Djokovic has. Zverev, too, has edged him out in this category since the end of 2018.
Against the rest of the pack, Djokovic manages just fine. He dominates seven-plusses against Casper Ruud and Stefanos Tsitsipas, for instance. But it’s one of the few chinks in his armor against the best, and if January represents anything more than the temporary struggles of an ailing star, more players are figuring out how to take advantage.
Avoiding danger
For players who lose a disproportionate number of long points, the best solution is to shorten them. Djokovic may never have thought in exactly those terms, but perhaps with an eye toward energy conservation, he has done exactly that.
Especially from 2017 to 2022, Novak drastically reduced the number of points that reached the seven-shot threshold:
In 2017, 29% of his points went that long; in 2022 and 2023, barely 23% did. It remains to be seen whether January 2024 is more than a blip. In his up-and-down month, Novak remained able to control his service points, but he was less successful avoiding the grind on return. As we’ve seen, that’s dangerous territory: Djokovic won a healthy majority of the short points against Fritz but was less successful in the long ones, especially following the American’s own serve.
Much rests on the direction of these trends. If the players Djokovic has faced so far this year can prevent him from finishing points early, how will he handle Medvedev or Zverev?. If Novak can’t reliably outlast the likes of Fritz and Prizmic, what are his chances against Alcaraz?
Djokovic is well-positioned to hold on to his number one ranking until the French Open, when he’ll be 37 years old. By then, presumably, he’ll be clear of the ailments that held him back in Australia. Still, holding off the combination of Sinner, Alcaraz, Medvedev, Zverev, and Father Time will be increasingly difficult. The 24-time major champion will need to redouble the tactical effort to keep points short and somehow recover the magic that once made him so implacable in the longest rallies. Age is just a number, but few metrics are so ruthless in determining an athlete’s fate.
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Arina Rodionova on the cusp of the top 100
In December, Australian veteran Arina Rodionova celebrated her 34th birthday. Now she’s competing at the tour-level event in Hua Hin this week, sporting a new career-best ranking of 101. With a first-round upset win over sixth-seed Yue Yuan, she’s up to 99th in the live rankings. Her exact position next Monday is still to be determined–a few other women could spoil the party with deep runs, or she could climb higher with more victories of her own–but a top-100 debut is likely.
Rodionova, assuming she makes it, will be the oldest woman ever* to crack the top 100 for the first time. The record is held by Tzipi Oblizer, who was two months short of her own 34th birthday when she reached the ranking milestone in 2007. Rodionova will be just the fifth player to join the top-100 club after turning 30.
* I say “ever” with some caution: I don’t have weekly rankings before the mid-80s, so I checked back to 1987. Before then, the tour skewed even younger, so I doubt there were 30-somethings breaking into the top 100. But it’s possible.
Here is the list of oldest top-100 debuts since 1987:
Player Milestone Age at debut
Arina Rodionova* 2024-02-05 34.1
Tzipi Obziler 2007-02-19 33.8
Adriana Villagran Reami 1988-08-01 32.0
Emina Bektas 2023-11-06 30.6
Nuria Parrizas Diaz 2021-08-16 30.1
Mihaela Buzarnescu 2017-10-16 29.5
Julie Ditty 2007-11-05 28.8
Eva Bes Ostariz 2001-07-16 28.5
Maryna Zanevska 2021-11-01 28.2
Ysaline Bonaventure 2022-10-31 28.2
Mashona Washington 2004-07-19 28.1
Laura Pigossi 2022-08-29 28.1
Maureen Drake 1999-02-01 27.9
Hana Sromova 2005-11-07 27.6
Laura Siegemund 2015-09-14 27.5
* pending!
I extended the list to 16 places in order to include Laura Siegemund. She and Buzarnescu are the only two women to crack the top 100 after their 27th birthdays yet still ascend to the top 30. The odds are against Rodionova doing the same–the average peak of the players on the list is 67, and the majority of them achieved the milestone a half-decade earlier–but you never know.
A triumph of scheduling
Rodionova has truly sweated her way to the top. She played 105 matches last year, winning 78 of them, assembling a haul of seven titles and another three finals. When I highlighted the exploits of Emma Navarro a couple of weeks ago, I couldn’t help but draw attention to the Australian, who is one of only two women to win more matches than Navarro since the beginning of last year. Iga Swiatek is the other.
Most of the veteran’s recent triumphs–44 match wins and five of her seven 2023 titles–have come at the ITF W25 level. She didn’t beat a single top-200 player in those events, and she faced only five of them. In her long slog through the tennis world last year, Rodionova played just one match against a top-100 opponent, and that was a loss to 91st-ranked Dalma Galfi.
The point is, the Aussie earned her ranking with quantity, not quality. No shame in that: The WTA made the rules, and the Australian not only chose a schedule to maximize her chances of climbing the ranking table, she executed. Kudos to her.
What her ranking does not mean, however, is that she is one of the 100 best players in the world. Elo is a more reliable judge of that, and going into this week, the algorithm ranks her 207th. (She peaked in the 140s, back in 2017.) You can hack the WTA rankings with a punishing slate of ITFs, but it’s much harder to cheat Elo.
Here are the players in the official top 150 who Elo considers to be most overrated:
Player Elo Rank WTA Rank Ratio
Caroline Dolehide 124 41 3.0
Peyton Stearns 145 54 2.7
Arantxa Rus 103 43 2.4
Tatjana Maria 94 44 2.1
Arina Rodionova 207 101 2.0
Laura Pigossi 221 114 1.9
Elina Avanesyan 120 62 1.9
Varvara Gracheva 89 46 1.9
Nadia Podoroska 127 67 1.9
Lucia Bronzetti 109 58 1.9
Dayana Yastremska 54 29 1.9
Once you climb into the top 100, savvy scheduling is increasingly impractical. Instead, this kind of gap comes from a deep run or two combined with many other unimpressive losses. Caroline Dolehide reached the final in Guadalajara followed by a quarter-final exit at a WTA 125, then lost three of five matches in Australia. Arantxa Rus won the title in Hamburg and reached a W100 semi-final, then lost five of six. The WTA formula lets you keep all the points from a big win for 52 weeks; Elo takes them away if you don’t keep demonstrating that you belong at the new level.
The sub-200 Elo rank suggests that Rodionova will have a hard time sustaining her place on the WTA list once the ranking points from her W25 titles start to come off the board. Until then, she can continue to pad her total and–fingers crossed–enjoy the hard-earned reward of a double-digit ranking.
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Emma Navarro at the 2023 US Open. Credit: Hameltion
When Emma Navarro beat Elise Mertens for her first WTA title in Hobart on Saturday, it was only part of a natural progression. For more than a year now, she has shown a knack for winning, regardless of level, surface, or just about anything else. While most fans still don’t know her name, she’s up to 26th in the official rankings and 22nd on the Elo list.
The former collegiate champion–winner of the national title as a Virginia Cavalier in 2021–started her 2023 campaign just inside the top 150. She arrived at the brink of the top 100 with back-to-back ITF titles on clay in April, then cracked the top 60 with a grass-court final in Ilkley. Her first top-ten win came in September on hard courts, against Maria Sakkari in San Diego, and after a busy fall that included another two ITF titles, she broke into the top 40. She’s 8-1 so far in 2024; the only blip is a loss to Coco Gauff.
Altogether, that’s 72 victories since the beginning of last year. Not many women can boast so much success at the W25 level or higher in that span:
Player 2023-24 Wins
Arina Rodionova 79
Iga Swiatek 73
Emma Navarro 72
Oceane Dodin 64
Jessica Pegula 62
Julia Riera 59
Aryna Sabalenka 59
Martina Capurro Taborda 59
Yafan Wang 58
Carlota Martinez Cirez 57
The remarkable part of Navarro’s rise is not the sheer quantity of positive results; it’s that she rose through the rankings so fast at the age she did. She first cracked the top 100 last May just before her 22nd birthday–hardly old by any rational standards, but nearly geriatric on the youth-driven WTA tour. The 25 players standing in front of Navarro in this week’s rankings broke into the top 100, on average, before their 20th birthday: The median is Aryna Sabalenka’s arrival at 19 years, 5 months. Late developers like Jessica Pegula, Barbora Krejcikova, and Navarro are exceptions to a long-standing rule.
It’s not unusual for a player to finally achieve a double-digit ranking when they are 21 or older, but it’s rare for a future star to do so–and now that Navarro is a tour-level title-holder ensconced in the top 30, she deserves that label. Since 1990, there have been 207 players who finished their age-21 season ranked between 101 and 200 without a previous appearance in the top 100. Only 25 of them reached #100 at the end of the following year; Navarro was only the fourth to crack the top 50.
Of those 200-plus players, only 35 of them ever achieved a top-40 ranking. (A few more, including Katie Boulter and Katie Volynets, could still join the group.) On average, it took them 1437 days–just short of four years–to do so. Navarro needed only 315 days, the second-fastest in the last 30-plus years. Here are the players who made the fastest move from the end of their age-21 season to the top 40:
Player Age 21 top 40 debut Days
Elise Mertens 2016 2017-08-28 245
Emma Navarro 2022 2023-11-06 315
Veronika Kudermetova 2018 2019-11-11 315
Kurumi Nara 2012 2014-06-09 525
Jamie Hampton 2011 2013-06-24 546
Casey Dellacqua 2006 2008-07-28 581
Tathiana Garbin 1998 2000-09-25 637
Liudmila Samsonova 2019 2021-11-01 672
Bethanie Mattek Sands 2006 2008-11-03 679
Anne Kremer 1996 1999-04-12 833
Jil Teichmann 2018 2021-04-26 847
Zi Yan 2005 2008-05-05 861
Paula Badosa 2018 2021-05-24 875
Yone Kamio 1992 1995-06-12 896
Alison Riske Amritraj 2011 2014-06-09 896
Johanna Konta 2012 2016-02-01 1127
It’s possible that Navarro could have been ready for the big time earlier had she not spent two years playing college tennis. Her sub-100 ranking at the end of 2022 was partly due to a limited schedule, as she played only a handful of tournaments before leaving school after the spring semester that year. But she wasn’t playing top-100 tennis when she did step on court: Elo ratings respond much more quickly to quality results (and do not reward quantity for its own sake), and her ranking by that algorithm, 148th, was virtually identical to her place on the official list.
Whatever the benefits and (temporary) costs of her stay at the University of Virginia, Navarro seemed to learn from the step up in competition–and quickly. She lost her first 11 matches against the top 50; in the last four months, she has won 5 of 6.
What works
The most memorable victory so far was Saturday’s triumph over Mertens for a debut WTA title. It was a grind, taking two hours, 50 minutes, and spanning 14 breaks of serve en route to a 6-1, 4-6, 7-5 finish. There was little first-strike tennis on display, as the average point ran to 5.5 strokes. 69 points required seven shots or more, and 37 reached double digits.
The battle for openings worked to Navarro’s advantage. In a sample of eleven previous matches logged by the Match Charting Project, she struggled in longer rallies, winning just 46% of points that reached a seventh shot compared to 49% overall. On Saturday, she reversed that trend in a big way, out-point-constructing her veteran opponent and winning a whopping 59% of the longer points. Of 84 charted Mertens matches, it was only the eighth time that she played at least 20 long points and won so few of them. Among the few players to beat her so soundly on rally tactics: Pegula and Simona Halep.
While Navarro’s results have steadily improved, her game plan is still recognizable form her days as a college champion. After defeating Miami’s Estrela Perez-Somarriba for the 2021 NCAA title, she described her approach: “I was able to dictate with my forehand and finish a lot of points with my backhand.” In Hobart, her backhand continued to populate the highlight reel, with seven clean down-the-line winners. But it was the forehand that opened the court in the first place.
She played, essentially, a clay-court match, using the forehand to create opportunities for the next ball. She hit winners with 7% of her forehand groundstrokes, slightly below tour average. But when she was able to hit a forehand, she won the point 62% of the time, an outstanding figure for a close match. One point serves as an illustration of the rest: At 2-all, 15-all in the third set, Navarro converted a return point with a down-the-line backhand winner on the 14th shot of the rally. After a deep forehand return, Navarro was forced to hit two backhands. When she was finally able to deploy the forehand on the 8th shot, she stabilized the point by going down the middle. The 10th shot took advantage of a let cord with a heavy crosscourt forehand, a weapon that worked in her favor on Saturday more than two-thirds of the time. Her next forehand went the other direction, creating the space for–finally–a backhand out of the Belgian’s reach.
While not every point was quite so tactical, point construction always lurked. Mertens frequently attempted a pattern where she would go the same direction with two consecutive groundstrokes then, having wrong-footed Navarro with the second of them, go for a winner. The sequence doesn’t work against a big swinger because the points don’t last long enough. That wasn’t a problem against the American, but Navarro’s resourcefulness nullified the tactic nonetheless. Unlike many players her age, Navarro is able to use slices off both wings to neutralize points, and she often did so on the second shot of Mertens’s would-be pattern. The Hobart champion hit 40 slices over the course of the match, ultimately winning the point on 20 of them. For a defensive shot, rescuing 50% of those situations counts as a victory.
There is little in Navarro’s game that advertises her as a world-beater: The weapons I’ve described work best as part of a carefully-managed package. She may prove to be most dangerous on clay, where aggressive opponents will have a harder time keeping points short. She might also develop yet another level. Twelve months ago, only a reckless forecaster would have predicted she could rise so high, so quickly. We still haven’t seen her peak.
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Deep leaderboards
Among the cult favorites on the Tennis Abstract site are the tourleaderboard pages, which contain nearly 60 sortable stats for the top 50 players on each circuit. Many of those stats aren’t available anywhere else, including things like average opponent ranking and time per match. It’s also possible to filter the matches for each calculation to determine things like the best hold percentages on clay.
Last week I introduced three new pages that extend the same concept:
Major tournament committees never had an easy job. Given a pile of national and regional rankings–sometimes many months out of date–and another pile of entry forms, they had to decide who could play their event. Then, with the field in place, they had to decide on the seedings.
It was an art, not a science. Rankings were published just once a year. Beyond the first ten, few lists compared players across national borders. In both ranking lists and entry decisions, there were biases, both acknowledged and obscured. Players complained of a “star system,” in which famous names were given priority over superior players. Insiders, especially members at clubs where tournaments were held, had an edge. Young players benefited from well-connected coaches.
So it had been for half a century. Tournament entries hadn’t always been an issue: There was usually enough room in the bracket for everyone. In the early days, draws were arranged at random. It took a run of disastrous bad luck for officials to decide to keep top players away from each other. At the US National Championships in 1921, the paths of the two best men players–Big Bill Tilden and Little Bill Johnston–intersected in the fourth round. The women’s draw was even worse: Visiting sensation Suzanne Lenglen drew home favorite Molla Mallory in the second round. It is no exaggeration to say that the latter quirk of fate–and Suzanne’s loss by retirement–altered the course of tennis history.
Within six months, USLTA tournament draws were seeded.
In 1973, the system underwent a change almost as significant as the adoption of seeding. On August 23rd, the new men’s players’ union, the ATP, released its first set of rankings.
There was no bias in the ATP’s calculation, aside from the tendencies of an imperfect algorithm. Players were given points for their performance at each tournament, then assigned an overall total based on their average over the past year.
The ATP’s list didn’t immediately rise to the top of the heap. The same week, the US Open announced its seeding lists, based on
the U.S. Lawn Tennis Association rankings, Commercial Union Grand Prix points, World Championship Tennis records, and–for the first time–a statistical approach consisting of a new computerized ranking system developed by the Association of Tennis Professionals.
Information overload, perhaps. Committee members couldn’t decide between Ilie Năstase and Stan Smith, so they awarded the two men co-No. 1 seeds. (The ATP ranked them first and third, respectively.) The committee also acknowledged surface preferences, something that the single-number ATP formula ignored. Dirtballer Manuel Orantes ranked second on the new computer, but he was seeded eighth on the grass at Forest Hills.
Quibbles about the ranking formula are as old as the system itself. The approach of averaging tournament results, in particular, incentivized players to stick to their best surface and skip smaller events; it was possible for someone to sit out a week and see his ranking go up!
The important thing, though, was that the imperfections were the same for everyone. An algorithm could be tweaked; a small group of entrenched bureaucrats could not. Bill Scanlon, then a 16-year-old beginning to gain attention as a promising junior in Texas, later called the ATP rankings “the one perfect truth.” They weren’t perfect, but that wasn’t the point. The formula provided objective targets free of favoritism.
The biggest winners were the deserving players on the fringes. Nastase and Smith would’ve been seeded anywhere regardless of the system. Most people could agree on the top ten, give or take a name or two. But what about an American teen who grew up playing in public parks, as Bobby Riggs had done in the 1930s? Or the rising number of challengers from Eastern Bloc nations without a long history on the international scene? Outsiders could now be judged more on their performance, less on their reputation and connections.
The players, in short, had gained even more control over the game. Within a few years, most tournament committees had given up on the job of determining entries and seeds themselves. Most fans probably didn’t notice the difference. But the rise of computer rankings set the stage for a more meritocratic, more inclusive sport.
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