Serve statistics – Page 2

Elena Rybakina and the Value of Average

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

*Elena Rybakina at the 2023 US Open. Credit: Hameltion*

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

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

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

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

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

First serves first

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Average ballast

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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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Felix Auger-Aliassime’s Achilles Heel

Also today: February 8-10, 1974

*Felix Auger-Aliassime in 2023. Credit: aarublevnews*

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

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

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

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

The Canadian charge

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Achilles heel

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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February 8-10, 1974: Sideshows take center stage

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Is Sebastian Korda Making Progress?

Also today: Talking Tennis interview

*Sebastian Korda in 2023. Credit: Hameltion*

It wasn’t long ago that Sebastian Korda was considered one of the best prospects in the men’s game. He won a tour level title before his 21st birthday, then fell one match short at the 2021 NextGen Finals. He reached two more finals in 2022, then began 2023 with a near-miss, a momentous three-hour clash with Novak Djokovic in Adelaide that ultimately went to the veteran.

That result, plus a quarter-final run in Melbourne and another runner-up finish last October in Astana, nudged Korda up to a career-high ranking of 23. While he has since dropped the points from Down Under and fallen out of the top 30, my Elo ratings keep him in the top 25, just ahead of the man who defeated him in Kazakhstan, Adrian Mannarino.

This all represents a step forward for the American, especially since he struggled throughout last year with a wrist injury. Compared to expectations, though, it’s a bit underwhelming. Korda’s father, Petr, is a grand slam champion; Sebastian has said he’d like to surpass him and win two. At age 23, he has plenty of time to develop, but eight of the men ahead of him in the rankings–including three of the ATP’s top seven–are younger still. For all the veteran exploits we’ve seen in the last decade of the ATP tour, superstars tend to make themselves known at an early age.

Last night, Korda recorded his 100th tour-level victory, a milestone that reminds us how much he has accomplished in his budding career. The match itself, however, pointed at some of his limitations. The American edged out big-serving French qualifier Hugo Grenier in the Marseille first round, 6-3, 2-6, 7-6(3). The player Korda aims to be would have progressed with ease. As it happened, he won 89 points to his opponent’s 92, marred by an error-spattered string in which he lost seven straight games. Grenier played well, but he is ranked outside the top 150. Korda didn’t look much better.

What’s missing? The 23-year-old has all the tools to climb higher: a six-foot, five-inch frame; an overpowering serve including a hard slice delivery that looks as if it were inherited directly from his left-handed father; a flexible, assured backhand; and a willingness to step into the court to take control of points. To watch him play, there’s very little separating Korda from, say, Taylor Fritz, yet Fritz is a top-tenner. Is it just a matter of time until Korda closes the gap, or does his game need to change?

Progress report

Let’s start with the positive: Korda’s serve is getting the job done. Yesterday, more than one-third of his serves didn’t come back. That’s in line with the average of the several other charted matches from the last 52 weeks. Only a handful of men end the point so often with their first shot; Fritz and Ben Shelton top 30% but still trail Korda. In a losing effort against Hubert Hurkacz in Shanghai last fall, more than 45% of the American’s serves were unreturned.

Those numbers represent a major step forward. Facing Hurkacz at the Australian Open last year, fewer than one-quarter of his serves ended the point. Korda finished below the 25% mark in matches against Daniil Medvedev and Karen Khachanov at the same event, too. It’s ironic that he won that one against Hurkacz and lost in Shanghai, but there’s no counter-intuitive moral to glean: Unreturned serves are an incontrovertible good.

The 23-year-old’s results are less reliable when the ball comes back. Even when presented with an attackable return, Korda sometimes hesitates. In two matches against Hurkacz last fall, Korda didn’t hit a single plus-one winner or forced error behind the second serve. (The high rate of unreturned serves means that his best deliveries aren’t coming back as sitters, but that hardly means that the remaining returns are all so daunting.) Grenier put 21 second serves back in play yesterday, only one of which the American ended with his second shot. Despite the qualifier’s overt aggression–he occasionally swung wildly for winners against Korda’s seconds–the average point on Korda’s deal ran to 4.3 strokes, an unusually high figure for such a strong server.

Taking first and second serves together, how much does Korda sacrifice with his conservative-seeming mindset on plus-ones? I calculated the percent of 3rd shots (plus-ones) and 5th shots that went for winners or forced errors across all charted matches since 2020. Here are results for Sebi, plus those of a few comparable players and the tour average:

Player                 3rd W%  5th W%  
Hubert Hurkacz          19.0%   20.0%  
Stefanos Tsitsipas      18.5%   20.1%  
Taylor Fritz            18.2%   17.1%  
Sebastian Korda         17.1%   16.9%  
-- Average --           17.1%   17.3%  
Felix Auger-Aliassime   16.8%   17.1%

Korda is just not as aggressive as the more successful of his tall, big-serving peers. He out-winners Felix Auger-Aliassime, but I would argue (and will do so at length, one of these days) that the Canadian’s approach is holding him back, as well. It isn’t that Korda is entirely passive on the plus-one, but given the relatively weak return quality he faces, he should be putting away more than a tour-average rate of second shots.

There is, however, a reason for his unwillingness to swing bigger, and that’s where we’ll turn next.

Something wild

Here’s the same table with two more columns: one for each player’s unforced error rate on the 3rd shot of the point, and another for the unforced error rate on the 5th shot:

Player                 3rd W%  3rd UFE%  5th W%  5th UFE%  
Hubert Hurkacz          19.0%     12.8%   20.0%     11.8%  
Stefanos Tsitsipas      18.5%     11.4%   20.1%     10.2%  
Taylor Fritz            18.2%     11.1%   17.1%      8.8%  
Sebastian Korda         17.1%     13.8%   16.9%     12.3%  
-- Average --           17.1%     10.8%   17.3%     10.4%  
Felix Auger-Aliassime   16.8%     10.9%   17.1%     11.6%

Yikes! Korda is wilder on these shots than the other players, so much so that he ends more points with the plus-one shot than everyone on this list except for Hurkacz. Of players with some degree of tour-level success, only Marin Cilic misses more plus-ones. Denis Shapovalov and Alejandro Davidovich Fokina are roughly equivalent to Korda in this department.

We’ve taken a roundabout path to reach a more general fact about the American’s game: He misses a lot of shots. As a fraction of all groundstrokes, Korda ends points in his favor about 10% more often than the average ATPer. But he commits 20% more unforced errors. His plus-ones are of a piece with his entire ground game, even if they’re a bit wilder. Racking up so many unforced errors without a correspondingly large winner count means, by definition, that his baseline game is a liability. Only that big pile of unreturnable serves is keeping him above water.

Fortunately, Korda is still young, and his game is not set in stone. He missed 13% of his plus-ones yesterday, but that number is trending in the right direction. Here are his winner and unforced error rates on the third shot of the rally, as ten-match rolling averages going back to the 2021 NextGen Finals:

You don’t need a tour guide to spot the good news here. Korda’s plus-one error rate used to be outrageously high. It’s still higher than he like it to be, but it’s dramatically better, and getting it under control hasn’t cost him much on the other side of the ledger. As he puts the wrist injury fully behind him, there may be even more room for improvement.

The ceiling

I’ve focused on the serve–and Korda’s approach behind it–because that’s the side of his game that will determine how high he climbs. In his career at tour level, he has won 38% of return points, a figure that means he’ll break often enough to win matches when he serves well. Maintaining a 38% rate will get tougher as the quality of his opposition rises, but that may not be a problem: He has already excelled against top tier competition. As Alex Gruskin points out, he’s 18-21 against top-20 players, a record that indicates he’s already able to compete at that level, even if his results against the rest of the pack (and his health) aren’t consistent enough to support a corresponding ranking.

Korda may improve his return game, but if he is to crack the top ten and have a real shot at those two major titles, his serve will make the difference. In the last 52 weeks, he has won 66% of return points and held 83% of service games, numbers that place him among the top half of the top 50… but not much higher. The serve itself needs no improvement, as we’ve seen. The difference between Korda and someone like Fritz or Tsitsipas is what happens when the serve comes back. The 23-year-old is making progress, but he has more steps to take before he can reach the enormous potential that once seemed so assured.

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Talking Tennis interview

I recently spoke with John Silk of Talking Tennis, and in a one-hour interview ,we covered all things Tennis Abstract: how to get the most out of the site, Elo ratings, common beliefs about tennis stats, and the Tennis 128. Watch it here:

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Yes, Jannik Sinner Really Is This Good

Also: Australian Open coverage recap

Don’t let Daniil Medvedev’s near-miss in the Australian Open final fool you: Jannik Sinner is the best player in the world right now. Like Sunday’s championship match, it’s close–but it might not be close for long.

I wrote in December about what I called the “most exclusive clubs” in tennis. Since 1991, when the ATP began keeping these stats, Andre Agassi and Novak Djokovic have been the only two players to finish a season in the top three of both hold percentage and break percentage. (Agassi did it twice.) Well, in the last 52 weeks, Sinner ranks second in hold percentage behind Hubert Hurkacz, and he stands third in break percentage, trailing only Medvedev and Carlos Alcaraz. It’s not a calendar year so we can’t officially add him to the list, but he’s playing as well on both sides of the ball as anyone ever has, apart from two all-time greats.

Oh, and on hard courts, Sinner out-holds even Hurkacz. He gets broken less than anyone in the game, securing his serve 89.9% of the time.

But wait–it’s even better than that. Alex Gruskin pointed out that since Wimbledon, Sinner’s hold percentage is 91.1%, within shouting distance of John Isner’s career mark of 91.8%. Isner cracked the top ten by combining that monster serve with a return that only a mother could love. Sinner, on the other hand, pairs absolutely dominant serving with one of the best returns in the game. Ever wonder what would happen if Big John had an elite return? Now you know.

Starting the clock at Wimbledon might raise an eyebrow–is that just the line that spits out the most impressive number?–but it’s a sensible way to divide the data. In June, not long before the Championships, Sinner rolled out a new, simplified service motion. While the measurements of the new delivery are not overwhelming–one more mile per hour, four centimeters closer to the line, a 0.7 percentage-point increase in first serves in–the results have been devastating. His serve has always been good; perhaps a few minor tweaks were all it took to make it great.

Winning how?

First, a bit of a puzzle. In the last 52 weeks, Sinner ranks fifth on tour in serve points won, with 68.3%. (Why not first or second, in line with his hold percentage? We’ll come back to that.) Yet despite the Isner comparisons, he doesn’t get it done the easy way. He hits aces just 8.4% of the time. That’s equal to the average of the ATP top 50, and it’s fewer than Djokovic.

The answer doesn’t lie in unreturned serves, either. Some players do get more free points than their ace counts imply. Stefanos Tsitsipas, for instance, ranks well down the ace list, finishing just 9% of his serve points that way. But he looks much more elite when we measure how many don’t come back–almost one-third, in his case. Sinner’s 29.6% rate of unreturned serves is above average, but it’s hardly the stuff that record-breaking hold numbers are made of. The next man on the list, for comparison’s sake, is Frances Tiafoe.

What about plus-ones? Sinner serves big, but relatively speaking, his groundstrokes are even bigger. Can we explain his serve-game success by the rate at which he ends points with his second shot?

Still no! He wins 40% of his serve points by the third shot of the rally. Again, that’s a solid mark: Djokovic and Alcaraz are about the same. On the other hand, so is Jiri Lehecka, and Tiafoe is even better.

Once a point reaches the fourth or fifth shot–especially if it began with a second serve–winning it is more about contesting a rally than converting any lingering advantage of the serve. If the returner puts the fourth stroke of the point in play, he has a 52% chance of winning it. Big servers still get some easy putaways, but opportunities disappear as the rally develops. When that happens, winning service points relies on a different set of skills–assets that Sinner, unlike many a big server, amply possesses.

Sinner, then, has the whole package, even if no single one of his weapons stands out like the Isner serve. He serves big enough to clean up 40% of points with his first or second shot. It the point lasts longer, he has probably hung on to more of an advantage than most players do: His heavy, deep groundstrokes see to that. In a really long rally, okay, maybe the edge goes to Medvedev or Alcaraz, but who else is going to outlast the Italian?

Most players excel at some stage of service points, but not all. The following graph illustrates how service points typically develop, by showing the server’s chance of winning the point when each successive shot is put in play. Based on charted men’s matches since 2021, servers win 64.2% of points. That goes up to 66.5% if they land a serve; it goes down to 52.5% if the return comes back. Several strokes later the server’s advantage is mostly gone: If he puts the 7th shot of the point in play, his chances of winning are 57.4%; if the returner comes back with an 8th shot, the server’s odds are down to 45%.

I’ve shown that progression along with specific numbers for Hurkacz, in order to demonstrate how these things go with our usual image of a big server:

While the differences between Hurkacz and tour average are modest, you get the idea. Early in the point, a big server cleans up; the longer the rally goes, the further his results fall below the line.

Now, the same graph with Sinner’s results from 2021 to the present:

He doesn’t start as high as Hurkacz, but he does do a little better than average. Crucially, he never falls below the average line, and the longer the point extends, the more he surpasses it.

I hope you’ve stuck with me this far, because the payoff is worth it. Same graph, only instead of Sinner’s three-plus-year average, we have his numbers since the beginning of 2023:

At the beginning of the point, Sinner is almost equal to Hurkacz. From then on, he takes over. A surprising gap comes early, at the two-plus rally mark, indicating that he doesn’t make many mistakes with his plus-one shot, even if he doesn’t put away an overwhelming number of them. No matter how long the point continues, the Italian outperforms tour average for that particular situation.

In tennis, it’s almost impossible to be good at everything. You can put together a nice, quite lucrative career by merely getting close to average in most categories and having one or two standout weapons. Sinner, we’re beginning to see, is not just good at everything, he is verging on great.

Break points

We now know why Sinner is winning so many serve points. But I mentioned another mystery we have yet to resolve. The Italian ranks fifth in the last 52 weeks in serve points won, the middle of a tightly-packed trio with Nicolas Jarry and Taylor Fritz, about one percentage point behind Hurkacz, Tsitsipas, and Djokovic. Yet he challenges Hurkacz for the top spot in the closely related, more consequential category of hold percentage:

Player               Hld% Rk   Hld%  SPW Rk   SPW%  
Hubert Hurkacz             1  89.1%       1  69.6%  
Jannik Sinner              2  88.8%       5  68.3%  
Stefanos Tsitsipas         3  88.4%       2  69.5%  
Novak Djokovic             4  87.6%       3  69.4%  
Nicolas Jarry              5  87.1%       4  68.4%  
Alexander Zverev           6  86.1%       7  67.4%  
Taylor Fritz               7  86.0%       6  68.2%  
Christopher Eubanks        8  85.8%       8  67.1%  
Carlos Alcaraz             9  85.7%      10  67.0%  
Tallon Griekspoor         10  85.1%      12  66.7%

The lists are almost identical, except for Sinner’s placement. He wins points at almost the same rate as Jarry and Fritz, yet he holds serve more often than either one.

As mysteries go, this isn’t a tough one. Not all points are created equal; if you win more of the important ones, you’ll outperform the players who don’t. Nobody knows that better than Sinner, who upset Djokovic in Turin despite winning exactly the same number of points, then beat him again at the Davis Cup with just 89 points to Novak’s 93. He out-pointed Medvedev yesterday 142 to 141.

Sinner wins these matches by saving break points at a remarkable clip. While winning 68.3% of serve points overall, he has held off 71.7% of break chances, including 36 of 40 in Melbourne. No one else on tour tops 69%, and Hurkacz comes in at 65%. On average, top-50 men save break points two percentage points less than they win typical serve points (63.5% to 65.5%), mostly because stronger returners generate more break points.

The question, then, is whether this is sustainable. ATP numbers indicate that Sinner goes bigger on break points, averaging 125 mile-per-hour first serves in those situations rather than his usual 122s. It seems to be working, but it can’t be that straightforward. Surely he isn’t the first player to arrive at the strategy of simply hitting harder, and besides, that usually comes at a cost. Will he continue to land enough of those bigger first serves to justify the payoff?

I can’t answer that question, but I can tell you what usually happens after a season of break-point overperformance: It doesn’t last. Taking over 2,600 player-seasons since 1991, 582 (21.7%) of players saved more break points than they won serve points overall. 183 (6.8%) matched Sinner’s mark of saving at least two percentage points more than their serve-points-won rate.

Of those 183, just eleven repeated the feat the following year. None of them were big servers, and nobody managed it three years in a row. The average following-year performance of the 183 men was 1.5 percentage points fewer break points saved than their rate of serve points won–just a tick better than tour average.

Unless Sinner has developed a new secret sauce–to be clear, with Darren Cahill in his corner, I’m not ruling it out!–that’s probably the fate that awaits him. In more than three decades, only 23 men have saved at least 71.7% of the break points they faced for a full season. The Italian probably won’t keep that up, and his out-of-this-world hold percentage will fall to something more plausible, in the 86-87% range.

Fortunately, that’s still exceptionally good. The 22-year-old serves like Jarry or Fritz while racking up as many return points as Djokovic. Take away the break point magic and you still have a contender for every slam. Sinner continues to lurk in fourth place in the official ATP rankings, but as of today, he is number one on the Elo list. Before long, those positions will converge, and it won’t be because his Elo rating goes back down.

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AO recap

I hope you’ve enjoyed my coverage throughout the Australian Open. I’ll continue to write this sort of thing throughout the year, though not always every weekday!

In case you missed it, here are the ten other articles posted since the action in Melbourne began:

The Improbable Rise of Emma Navarro
The Manufactured Attack of Caroline Garcia
Can Lorenzo Sonego Hunt Down Enough Forehands?
Jiri Lehecka’s Excess of Self-Restraint
Qinwen Zheng’s Serve Under Construction
Andrey Rublev, Grand Slam Quarter-finalist (plus some considerations about Sinner’s Elo rating)
Anna Kalinskaya At Her Peak
How Coco Gauff Escaped a Trap of Her Own Making (plus stats on Sinner’s break points saved)
How To Play One-Set Shootouts Like Daniil Medvedev
Aryna Sabalenka Under Pressure

Thank you for reading.

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Aryna Sabalenka Under Pressure

Also today: January 26, 1924

*Aryna Sabalenka at Wimbledon in 2023. Credit: Adrian Scottow*

It felt like a pivotal moment. Aryna Sabalenka had taken a 5-2 first-set lead in yesterday’s Australian Open semi-final against Coco Gauff. Gauff kept the set going with a strong service game for 5-3. Sabalenka lost the first point on her serve, but bounced back with a plus-one backhand winner.

At 30-15, the American struck again. She took advantage of a Sabalenka second serve to drag the Belarusian into a backhand rally, ultimately drawing an unforced error on the ninth shot and putting the game back in play.

Then, still just two points from the set, Sabalenka double-faulted.

The narrative practically writes itself. Aryna hits hard, aims for the lines, and keeps points short. Let her do that, and she will destroy you. Her first five opponents in Melbourne managed a grand total of 16 games against her. On the other hand, if you keep the ball in play, she’ll start pressing, trying too hard to dictate with her serve, going for too much when a smackable groundstroke presents itself.

Gauff, by this reading, is Sabalenka’s nightmare opponent. She won the US Open final by denying the Belarusian one would-be winner after another. Not only can she take Sabalenka’s game away from her, but Coco–at least on a good day–won’t give it back on her own serve. When she lets loose, Gauff wields just as much power as her more tactically aggressive opponent.

As it turned out, Sabalenka did lose that service game. Several twists and turns later, Gauff led the set, 6-5. Only then did Aryna regroup, winning four straight points from 30-love to force a tiebreak, then dropping just two more points to clinch the set. Gauff kept the second set close, but Sabalenka never allowed her to reach break point. The contest closed with a narrative-busting move: Facing match point, Gauff pulled out a 12-stroke rally, the kind of point that has been known to steer her opponent off course. But instead of compounding the damage, Sabalenka came back with two unreturned serves. Game over.

What to believe, then? Was the apparent first-set turning point a reflection of the true Sabalenka? Or is this the new Aryna, who slams the door when challengers sniff opportunity? Or is it something else, the all-too-common story in which someone looks like a clutch hero or a constant choker, only for us to discover, after crunching all the numbers, that she’s impervious to momentum and plays pretty much the same all the time?

Recovering at a disadvantage

Sabalenka’s serve games do follow a pattern after she loses a longish rally. But the results are not entirely straightforward.

On the next point (assuming the lost rally didn’t end the service game), Aryna is more likely to miss her first serve:

Year   1stIn%  post-rallyL-1stIn%  Change  
2019    61.2%               55.9%   -8.6%  
2020    61.5%               57.0%   -7.3%  
2021    58.6%               52.6%  -10.3%  
2022    60.0%               59.9%    0.0%  
2023    61.1%               61.3%    0.4%  
2024    63.3%               62.5%   -1.2%
----  
TOTAL   60.5%               57.6%   -4.8%

Most of the effect is concentrated in the earlier years of her career on tour. Yesterday, the trend ran in the opposite direction: She made nearly 76% of her first serves overall, but after Gauff won a rally, she landed 88% of them.

The trend is clearer–and persisting to the present–when we look at double faults after losing a rally:

Year     DF%  post-rallyL-DF%  Change  
2019    8.6%            10.4%   20.8%  
2020    6.2%             8.4%   36.9%  
2021    7.9%            11.8%   50.3%  
2022   10.7%            10.1%   -5.5%  
2023    6.2%             7.2%   16.5%  
2024    3.4%             8.3%  144.7%  
----
TOTAL   7.9%             9.6%   22.5%

2022 was Aryna’s year of the yips; she was more likely to bunch double faults together than hit them in particularly nervy spots. (Put another way: Every spot was a nervy one.) The 2024 number will surely come back to earth, but it is still revealing: Sabalenka has made so much progress in this aspect of her game, but her second-serve struggles continue when she faces the threat of getting dragged into another rally.

Some of these effects persist even longer. From those service games that last long enough, here are Sabalenka’s first-in and double-fault percentages two points after losing a long rally:

Year   1stIn%  +2 1stIn%  Change    DF%  +2 DF%  Change  
2019    61.2%      55.8%   -8.8%   8.6%    8.7%    1.2%  
2020    61.5%      50.5%  -17.9%   6.2%    7.2%   17.1%  
2021    58.6%      56.0%   -4.5%   7.9%    8.7%   10.5%  
2022    60.0%      63.1%    5.3%  10.7%    7.8%  -27.1%  
2023    61.1%      59.2%   -3.2%   6.2%    8.4%   35.6%  
2024    63.3%      57.1%   -9.7%   3.4%    2.4%  -30.1%  
----
TOTAL   60.5%      57.1%   -5.6%   7.9%    8.0%    2.0%

She continues to miss more first serves even two points after the rally setback. To some degree, the memory should have dissipated–after all, something else happened on the intervening point. On the other hand, she’s back in the same court. If a reliable serve didn’t work in the deuce court at 30-love, there’s reason to doubt it at 30-all.

The double fault trends are less clear, in part because our sample size is shrinking and double faults are blessedly rare. If nothing else, it’s safe to conclude that the explosion of double faults on the point after the lost rally doesn’t continue to nearly the same degree.

Tallying the cost

Now, this all seems bad. Sabalenka possesses one of the best first serves in the game; her whole attack is built around it. Her emergence as a superstar came after she got control of the service yips and cut her double faults down to manageable levels. After losing a long rally, she needs her serve more than ever, and–at least by comparison with other situations–it isn’t there for her.

Except… it doesn’t matter! At least not on the first point. Here is the bottom-line figure of service points won:

Year    SPW%  post-rallyL-SPW%  Change  
2019   59.6%             63.8%    7.2%  
2020   60.3%             56.6%   -6.0%  
2021   61.5%             61.3%   -0.3%  
2022   57.2%             59.9%    4.7%  
2023   63.7%             63.9%    0.4%  
2024   66.7%             70.8%    6.3%  
----
TOTAL  60.7%             61.7%    1.6%

Fewer first serves, but more serve points won. It isn’t supposed to work like that, but Sabalenka bounces back strong from lost rallies. A shift of +1.6% in her favor is solid enough, and it’s even better if you look solely at the last three years.

Part of the explanation is that she tightens up the rest of her game–exactly the opposite of what my off-the-cuff narrative suggests. Under pressure, I hypothesized, she would try too hard to end points. Instead, after losing a long rally, she’s more willing than usual to play another one: She commits 14% fewer plus-one errors than her usual rate, implying a lower rate of aggression when she has an early chance to put the point away.

On the second point after losing a long rally, the bottom-line outcomes are more mixed:

Year    SPW%  +2 SPW%  Change  
2019   59.6%    53.9%   -9.5%  
2020   60.3%    55.3%   -8.3%  
2021   61.5%    58.5%   -4.9%  
2022   57.2%    61.5%    7.4%  
2023   63.7%    60.7%   -4.7%  
2024   66.7%    71.4%    7.1% 
---- 
TOTAL  60.7%    58.2%   -4.0%

While these aren’t as rosy as the next-point results, focus on the last few years. Since the beginning of 2022, Aryna has won more service points than usual when she returns to the serving direction where she recently lost a long rally–despite landing fewer first serves. She is even stingier with plus-one errors on these points, coughing up 29% fewer than usual.

These trends did not hold in yesterday’s semi-final. While Sabalenka made more first serves on the two points after Gauff outlasted her in a rally, fewer of them ended in her favor: 4% less on the first point, 12% less on the second. We can’t read too much into single-match totals with stats like these: 4% is a difference of one point. And Gauff is a far superior returner and baseline player than the typical WTAer, one who is unlikely to lose focus after going toe to toe with Sabalenka for a point or two. The average player pushes Aryna to a seventh shot barely one-tenth of the time; Gauff did so on one of every six points yesterday.

All of this leads us to an unexpected conclusion: Does Aryna Sabalenka have nerves of steel? First serves and double faults are just components in a larger picture; when we measure her results by points won, Sabalenka serves more successfully right after an opponent makes her uncomfortable. The yips are gone, and the on-court histrionics are a diversion that deceived us all. Aryna under pressure may be even more fearsome than her typical, terrifying self.

* * *

January 26, 1924: Suzanne’s longest day

Suzanne Lenglen wasn’t accustomed to spending much time on court. In eight tournaments since the 1923 Championships at Wimbledon, she had lost just ten games. Her doubles matches, especially with net maven Elizabeth Ryan at her side, were often just as lopsided. She never missed, she could put the ball anywhere on the court, and most opponents were lucky just to win a single point.

*Lenglen and Ryan in 1925 at Wimbledon.* *Colorization credit: Women’s Tennis Colorizations*

In January 1924, Lenglen eased her way back onto the circuit. Battling some combination of illness, anxiety, and hypochondria, she didn’t return to singles action until February. (She’d win her first three matches before dropping a game.) But she was a celebrity on the French Riviera, and she was prevailed upon to compete in doubles. She won the mixed at the Hotel Beau-Site tournament in Cannes to ring in the new year, and she entered both the women’s doubles–with Ryan–and the mixed at the Hotel Gallia tournament a few weeks later.

On the 26th, Lenglen and Ryan completed their waltz through the draw, defeating a British pair, Phyllis Covell and Dorothy Shepherd-Barron, 6-3, 6-4. Suzanne’s most aggravating foe was another Brit, a line judge with the temerity to call a foot-fault on the five-time Wimbledon champion. She tried to get the man removed and ultimately had to settle for his “voluntary” departure. “It is unfair,” she said. “The English are pigs.”

Her nerves would be tested even more severely in the mixed doubles final. Lenglen partnered Charles Aeschlimann of Switzerland, while Ryan teamed with the 43-year-old Canadian Henry Mayes. Both men were better known on the Riviera than in the tennis world at large, more clubbable than talented. Lenglen and Ryan–herself one of the top few woman players in the world–would be the stars of the show.

Lenglen and Aeschlimann took the first set, 6-4; Ryan and Mayes came back with a 6-1 frame of their own. The underdogs–that is, the team without Suzanne–built up an early lead in the third, thanks to Aeschlimann’s inconsistency and Ryan’s glittering play. Mayes served for a 4-2 advantage, but a lucky netcord halted their momentum, and the deciding set settled into a rhythm it wouldn’t break for 20 more games.

Only at 13-14 did Ryan finally give in. She gifted a double fault to her opponents, and Mayes’s fatigue–he had played a four-set men’s doubles final beforehand–began to tell. Lenglen and Aeschlimann broke serve, securing the 6-4, 1-6, 15-13 victory. It would stand as the longest set of Suzanne’s unparalleled career.

* * *

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How To Play One-Set Shootouts Like Daniil Medvedev

*Daniil Medvedev in 2023, practicing… something. Credit: Hameltion*

In yesterday’s Australian Open quarter-final match against Hubert Hurkacz, Daniil Medvedev came through with his second five-set win of the tournament. In the decider, Hurkacz’s level dropped, Medvedev kept his ground game tight, and the Russian converted the one break point on offer. Four hours of tennis, compressed into a few crucial moments, and Medvedev has a place in the semi-finals.

Not long ago, Medvedev gained a reputation as a disappointment in deciding sets. He lost 11 of 15 three- and five-setters in 2022, and yesterday’s match was the first time in nine tries–going back to Melbourne two years ago–that he had beaten a top-ten player in a climactic set.

But such trends are easy to exaggerate. For one, three of those eight consecutive losses were clustered at the 2022 Tour Finals, where the Russian managed, remarkably, to drop third-set tiebreaks in all of his round-robin matches. Not the best way to ensure a restful offseason, but hardly an indictment of his ability to hang around late into matches with the best players in the game.

Further, except for the 2022 season, Medvedev has developed a knack for cleaning up close matches with everybody else:

Year   Decider W-L  Decider W%  
2024           2-0      100.0%  
2023          14-6       70.0%  
2022          4-11       26.7%  
2021          14-5       73.7%  
2020           9-4       69.2%  
2019         10-11       47.6%  
2018          16-9       64.0%  
2017          13-6       68.4%  
2016          23-9       71.9% 
---- 
Total       105-61       63.3%

2016 shouldn’t really count, since it’s a mix of ITFs, Challengers, and early forays onto the main tour, but given the results, I figured it was worth including. Wherever you draw the line, it’s hardly the case that Medvedev struggles in such matches. Recently, I looked into what a player’s third-set record “should” be, given their skill level, and a mark above 60% is better than expected for nearly anyone.

You might argue that the Russian shouldn’t have racked up so many deciders. He was expected to finish off Emil Ruusuvuori much more quickly than he did in the second round in Australia, and even on clay, he should never have gotten dragged to a fifth set at Roland Garros by Thiago Seyboth Wild, much less lost it. But everyone takes the scenic route sometimes. 14 of Medvedev’s deciding sets last year came against the top 50, 10 of them against the top 20.

The final set shift

When a match is reduced to a one-set shootout, it becomes a bit less serve-centric. This is a persistent finding in all high-pressure situations, from tiebreaks to break points to fifth sets. Servers get a bit more cautious, returners heighten their focus, and quick points are harder to come by.

The effects are small but real. In the 1,200-plus men’s deciding sets since 2017 logged by the Match Charting Project, servers win 1.1% fewer points in the final set that they did in the first two or four. They land fractionally more of their first serves, but only by increasing their margins: The percent of unreturned serves falls by more than 5%. The average rally increases from 4.1 strokes to 4.3.

There are two fundamental ways to benefit from those changes. First, you can buck the trend, continuing to serve big while your opponent succumbs to the natural tendency toward caution. That’s part of the reason that John Isner and Roger Federer were two of the very few players to win more tiebreaks than expected over long periods of time. It’s not easy, especially if fatigue is setting in. But if you can keep serving the way you did for two or four sets, you have a minor edge in the decider.

Second, you can be the type of player who excels in deciding-set-style tennis. If you had to pick between Medvedev and Hurkacz in a contest where more serves would come back and points would last longer, the choice is simple, right? It’s no guarantee, to be sure: The shift is a minor one, and it may not show up in any given match. Yesterday, more points were decided in four shots or less in the fifth set than in the first four. But on average, the trend moves in the other direction, right into the Russian’s wheelhouse.

Evidence shows that Medvedev follows these prescriptions, maintaining his attack on serve while taking advantage of more cautious opponents. Other top players, to varying degrees, do the same.

Let’s start with the basics. For each stat, I calculated every player’s performance in deciding sets, and in all previous sets. The numbers I’m about to show you are the ratio between those numbers, a measure of how much their tactics change when the final set begins. Positive numbers mean they do more of it in the decider, negative means they do less. We’ll look at the four Australian Open semi-finalists, plus Carlos Alcaraz (because of course) and Hurkacz (because of his deciding-set notoriety). Keep in mind that Novak Djokovic’s figures are limited to matches since 2017.

Here are the rate of serve points won, and the rate of first serves in:

Player             SPW%  1stIn%  
Carlos Alcaraz     3.9%    4.4%  
Jannik Sinner      2.6%   -1.2%  
Novak Djokovic     1.5%   -1.1%  
Hubert Hurkacz     0.8%   -1.9%  
-- Average --     -1.1%    0.7%  
Daniil Medvedev   -1.2%   -1.7%  
Alexander Zverev  -4.5%    3.2%

Medvedev is in line with tour average when it comes to winning service points: He doesn’t hold on to as many in deciding sets. Average isn’t bad in this case, though it looks mediocre in this company. A more encouraging sign, at least in terms of the tactical approach, is the change in first serves in. The Russian, in line with Djokovic, Hurkacz, and Jannik Sinner, seems to take a few more chances in the shootout. Alcaraz defies gravity, serving more conservatively yet winning more points, and Zverev looks out of place, a caricature of prudence.

Now let’s look at the percentage of serves that don’t come back (Unret%), as well as the percent of service points won in three shots or less (SPW% <=3):

Player            Unret%  SPW% <=3  
Novak Djokovic     10.9%      5.4%  
Carlos Alcaraz      0.2%      1.0%  
Daniil Medvedev    -0.6%     -2.0%  
Hubert Hurkacz     -1.1%      0.2%  
-- Average --      -5.7%     -3.6%  
Jannik Sinner      -7.4%      0.3%  
Alexander Zverev  -13.4%    -11.2%

The first rule of writing about men's tennis: Whatever the topic, you'll eventually end up showering praise on Djokovic. In recent years, he has learned how to get more out of his serve, and he turns that knob even further in deciding sets. Most players struggle to simply stay above water in the final set; Djokovic starts serving bigger.

Medvedev's rate of unreturned serves is the sort of positive sign it takes a connoisseur to appreciate: "-0.6%" doesn't turn up on many Hall of Fame plaques. But when the typical player serves so much more carefully, the Russian's consistency works to his advantage. His three-shots-or-less win rate does not stand out as much, but it is still less of a step backward than the typical tour player takes.

Once again, deciding-set Alexander Zverev is an unusual beast.

Opportunistic returning

If the challenge on serve is to keep attacking in the final set, the task on return is to take advantage of an opponent who probably isn't doing that. Ideally, that might mean more aggression on the return, but a 1% or 5% weaker first serve is still only so playable. Instead, players should make sure not to squander the chances they're given: Make more returns, then tighten up the ground game for the inevitable rallies.

Here are three stats to illustrate deciding-set return tendencies, again expressed as ratios between how each player performs in the final set, compared to previous sets:

Player            Ret InPlay%  UFE/Pt    FH%  
Alexander Zverev         6.7%    1.1%   1.0%  
Daniil Medvedev          3.9%   -3.2%  -1.2%  
Novak Djokovic           3.0%  -10.5%   1.5%  
Hubert Hurkacz           2.9%   -1.7%   0.3%  
Carlos Alcaraz           2.7%  -10.4%  -1.9%  
-- Average --            2.5%   -2.4%  -0.3%  
Jannik Sinner           -1.2%    0.1%   0.4%

Zverev, as we might have guessed, gets a lot of deciding-set returns in play. He's exceedingly conservative by every other measure we've seen, so why not here? Behind him, heading the non-pusher category, is Medvedev, who gets nearly 4% more returns in play in the final set that he did up to that point.

Unlike Zverev, the Russian also stays in control throughout the rally. He doesn't suddenly discover the otherworldly control of Djokovic and Alcaraz, who somehow reduce their unforced error rates by 10% in the deciding set, but he leads the rest of the pack, cutting down his mistakes by more than the tour average.

The third metric shown here--forehands as a percentage of all groundstrokes--is simply a curiosity. There's no right or wrong way to choose strokes, at least not at the level of the whole tour. As we saw last week, Medvedev and Zverev go for backhands on the plus-one shot more than anyone else, because they are in the unusual position that it might really be their stronger option. If a player improves his ground game in the fifth set--and this is nothing more than a hypothesis--it might show up in the numbers as more shots from his preferred wing. None of these men show a dramatic shift in shot selection, but I can't help but notice that Medvedev hits a few more backhands in the final set than he did in the two of four sets it took to get there.

If Medvedev reaches a fifth set in tomorrow's semi-final against Zverev, he won't need this level of savvy to know what's going on. The German's tactics, whether by design or instinct, are abundantly clear. Zverev can turn a shootout into a war of attrition, with two fifth-set tiebreaks already in Melbourne and an astonishing record of 22 deciding sets won in his last 26 attempts. While it will doubtless be a grind, the Russian might just be able to use his opponent's passivity against him. Faced with the tiny margins of a grand slam fifth set, every edge is worth exploiting.

* * *

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How Coco Gauff Escaped a Trap of Her Own Making

Also today: Jannik Sinner’s near-unbreakability

*Coco Gauff at the 2022 US Open. Credit: All-Pro Reels*

Coco Gauff is not a pusher, but she can do an awfully good impression of one. In yesterday’s Australian Open quarter-final against Marta Kostyuk, the American coughed up 50 unforced errors against just 17 winners. The average rally lasted 4.6 strokes, a modest number that was rescued from marathon territory only by Gauff’s many unreturned serves.

Coco’s forehand, the usual culprit when things get messy, was on full display yesterday. While the stroke has shown signs of improvement–only 9% of them contributed to the unforced error tally, below both tour average and Gauff’s own standard–it remains loopy, and it gets ever-more cautious under pressure. Kostyuk was willing to go after the high-bouncing mid-court groundstrokes, often putting Gauff on the run. Fortunately for the American, her defense rarely deserts her. She eked out a three-hour, 7-6, 6-7, 6-2 victory for a place in the Melbourne semi-finals.

My impression watching the match was that Gauff put an unreasonable number of returns–especially forehand returns–in the middle of the court, not too deep, and that Kostyuk was punishing them. I was partly right: The Ukrainian forced Coco to hit forehand after forehand against the serve, more than two-thirds of her service returns all told. Gauff did indeed send more of those balls down the middle, closer to the service line than the baseline. And Kostyuk attacked… but to little avail.

Let’s get into the numbers. The Match Charting Project divides the court into thirds, both in terms of direction (forehand side, backhand side, and middle) and depth (shallow [in the service boxes], deep [closer to the service line than the baseline], and very deep). All else equal, shots deep and/or to the sides of the court are better, though of course they are riskier. Some returns will inevitably end up down the middle and shallow; the goal is only to avoid it when possible.

Here is how Gauff’s performance yesterday compared to tour average and her own typical rate of service returns that went down the middle and didn’t land close to the baseline:

RETURNS          Middle/Not Very Deep  
Tour Average                    34.0%  
Coco Average                    40.5%  
Coco vs Kostyuk                 43.7%

Indifferent return placement is nothing new for the American, and she left even more hittable plus-ones for Kostyuk than usual. It wasn’t as bad as last year’s US Open final against Aryna Sabalenka, when Gauff put more than half of her returns in the less effective zones, but Kostyuk is no Sabalenka when it comes to imposing her will with the serve.

Return placement matters. On average, tour players win 46% of points when they land a down-the-middle, not very deep return. When they put the ball anywhere else–closer to the baseline or a sideline–they win 56%. Gauff is a little better behind the weak returns, but for her career, the gap is still present: 47% versus 55%.

Except… that isn’t what happened yesterday!

RETURN OUTCOMES  Mid/NVP W%  Better W%  
Tour Average          46.2%      56.3%  
Coco Average          46.9%      54.8%  
Coco vs Kostyuk       60.0%      55.2%

When Gauff placed a return near a line, her results yesterday were typical. But Kostyuk was unable to capitalize on the rest. Among 88 matches logged by the Match Charting Project, Gauff has won 60% of those middle/not-very-deep returns only a dozen times, usually in blowouts.

Judging from the American’s performance on return, she could have made quick work of yesterday’s contest, too. The sticking point came on her own side of the ball, where her non-committal forehands didn’t work out as well.

Minus-ones

On the WTA tour, when the return lands in play, the server has nearly lost her advantage. A good first serve can give her a lingering edge, or a well-placed return can tilt the balance in the other direction, but overall, the point begins again as a neutral proposition. Servers win 52% of those points.

Gauff, on average, does a little better, converting her serve 53% of the time. There are signs she’s improving, as well. In the US Open final against Sabalenka, she won 55%, and in the Auckland final this month versus Elina Svitolina, she picked up 59%. Apart from lopsided matches, the high-50s are the best anyone can do on an ongoing basis: Iga Swiatek’s average is 57%, and Sabalenka’s is 55%.

Coco won 39% against Kostyuk.

Gauff’s lack of confidence in her forehand showed up in multiple ways. First, she didn’t use it as much as a plus-one weapon. She usually hits 57% of her plus-one shots from the forehand side, in line with tour average. Yesterday, that rate was just 51%, something that had more to do with her own choices than any return magic that Kostyuk conjured up.

Then, she didn’t do much with those forehands. The following table shows plus-one forehand rates (3F%), the percentage of plus-one forehands hit down the middle (FH Mid%), and the server’s winning percentage (FH Mid W%) behind those down-the-middle forehands:

PLUS-ONES          3F%  FH Mid%  FH Mid W%  
Tour Average     56.6%    29.9%      45.9%  
Coco Average     57.2%    35.0%      47.0%  
Coco vs Kostyuk  50.7%    39.5%      40.0%

Gauff magnified her own tendency to go back down the middle with her second-shot forehand. It didn’t work, as she won just 40% of those points, compared to her typical rate of 47%.

Even beyond the plus-one, Coco just kept pushing the forehand. She went down the middle with 46% of her forehands, compared with her usual 37% and the tour average of 28%. She won barely one-third of the points when she did so, partly because of the nine unforced errors she racked up playing an already conservative shot. Two of those missed down-the-middle forehands came on back-to-back points when she could hardly afford them, taking her from 15-all to 15-40 when trying to close out the match at 5-3 in the second set.

In the end, as we’ve seen, Gauff’s defense saved her. She won more than half of Kostyuk’s serve points despite lackluster returning. Had she served just a little better–she missed six straight first serves in that 5-3 game–she would have finished the job an hour sooner. Had she attacked a bit more effectively with her second shots, even the off-day from the line wouldn’t have amounted to much.

To state the obvious: She’ll have to play better to beat Sabalenka in tomorrow’s semi-finals. One thing, at least, will work in Coco’s favor: She’ll have many fewer choices to make. The defending champion will dictate play and give her less time to think than Kostyuk did. Gauff withstood the Belarusian barrage in New York, winning the US Open title despite a couple of detours against less aggressive players in the early rounds. The American can’t play tomorrow like she did yesterday, but thankfully, Sabalenka won’t let her.

* * *

Jannik Sinner’s near-unbreakability

Jannik Sinner has lost his serve just twice en route to the Australian Open semi-finals. He has faced 28 break points and saved 26 of them.

Since 1991, when the ATP started keeping the relevant stats, he is the 26th player to reach the final four at a major with so few breaks of his own serve:

Tournament  Semi-finalist       BP Faced  Broken  
2013 USO    Rafael Nadal               6       0  
2018 Wimb   John Isner                 7       0  
2015 Wimb   Roger Federer              3       1  
1994 Wimb   Pete Sampras               9       1  
2015 AO     Novak Djokovic            11       1  
2014 Wimb   Roger Federer             12       1  
1997 Wimb   Pete Sampras              12       1  
2010 USO    Rafael Nadal              14       1  
2012 RG     Rafael Nadal              17       1  
2004 Wimb   Roger Federer             17       1  

Tournament  Semi-finalist       BP Faced  Broken  
2014 Wimb   Milos Raonic               9       2  
2011 RG     Novak Djokovic*            9       2  
2007 USO    Roger Federer              9       2  
2006 Wimb   Roger Federer              9       2  
2006 Wimb   Rafael Nadal               9       2  
2015 USO    Roger Federer             11       2  
2014 AO     Roger Federer             11       2  
1997 USO    Greg Rusedski             11       2  
1993 AO     Pete Sampras**            12       2  
2013 Wimb   JM del Potro              13       2  
2019 AO     Rafael Nadal              15       2  
2008 Wimb   Roger Federer             15       2  
2005 AO     Andy Roddick              15       2  
1998 Wimb   Pete Sampras              17       2  
2000 AO     Yevgeny Kafelnikov        22       2  
2024 AO     Jannik Sinner             28       2

* Djokovic won one round by W/O and another by retirement
** I don't have stats for Sampras's QF, but the final score suggests that he wasn't broken

Pretty good company! As the table makes clear, though, Sinner’s 28 break points faced is not so elite. In fact, the average major semi-finalist faces exactly 28 break points in his first five matches.

The Italian’s accomplishment, then, is saving so many. 26 of 28 is a 93% clip, and that is more rarefied air:

Tounament  Player      Faced  Saved   Save%  
2013 USO   Nadal           6      6  100.0%  
2018 Wimb  Isner           7      7  100.0%  
2012 RG    Nadal          17     16   94.1%  
2004 Wimb  Federer        17     16   94.1%  
2010 USO   Nadal          14     13   92.9%  
2024 AO    Sinner         28     26   92.9%  
2014 Wimb  Federer        12     11   91.7%  
1997 Wimb  Sampras        12     11   91.7%  
2015 AO    Djokovic       11     10   90.9%  
2000 AO    Kafelnikov     22     20   90.9%

Things will get tougher on Friday, when Sinner faces all-time-great returner Novak Djokovic for a place in the final. Then again, Djokovic failed to convert his first 15 break points against Taylor Fritz yesterday–maybe he was just preparing for the matchup with Sinner.

* * *

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Andrey Rublev, Grand Slam Quarter-finalist

Also today: Jannik Sinner’s rosy forecast; lopsided fifth sets

*Andrey Rublev at Wimbledon in 2023. Credit: aarublevnews*

Andrey Rublev is a known quantity. He will hit big first serves, but his second serves can be attacked. He will hit monster forehands, often venturing far into his backhand corner to play them, and his opponents will often be stuck in place, watching them go by. He’ll also miss a lot of them. His backhand isn’t the same type of offensive shot; he can be dragged into long rallies if you pepper that side.

There isn’t a lot of subtlety to his game. That isn’t a criticism: Subtlety can win you acolytes and endorsement deals, but it isn’t necessary to win championships. With yesterday’s five-set win in Australia over home hope Alex de Minaur, Rublev advanced to his tenth career grand slam quarter-final. He’s 0-9 so far in those matches, but his consistency in getting there is the bigger story. Alexander Zverev is the only other man under the age of 30 with ten major quarter-finals. Rublev will get on the board eventually.

What you might not know about the 26-year-old Russian is that he has matured into a reliably dangerous returner. He’s always been effective on that side of the ball, and his return numbers have remained steady as the strength of his competition has increased. Last year, he won nearly 39% of his return points, good for 3.2 breaks of serve per match–seventh-best on tour. At the 2023 US Open against Daniil Medvedev, his most recent attempt to reach a major semi-final, Rublev broke serve five times in his straight-set defeat. The return wasn’t the problem.

That day, Medvedev’s return was the problem. (Andrey’s second serve didn’t do him any favors either, but that’s nothing new.) Of Rublev’s 98 serve points, 65 of them lasted four shots on longer. I can’t emphasize enough how bizarre that is–or, seen from another perspective, what a performance it was from his opponent. Medvedev not only got 65 serves in play, he got 65 plus-one shots back. Rublev’s top two weapons were negated.

The standard Rublev performance, at least among the 138 matches logged by the Match Charting Project, involves 59% of his service points ending by the third shot. He wins just over three-quarters of those. (Against Medvedev, he tallied a respectable 70%, but 70% of not very many is still not very many.) Put those numbers together, and 45% of his serve points end in his favor in three shots or less.

That’s a pretty good head start! Last year, the Russian won 66% of his total serve points. The majority of the damage gets done early.

The serves and plus-ones not only account for a decent chunk of the points played–at least on a good day–but they also serve as a proxy for how the longer rallies turn out. When Rublev wins most of his short service points–even when he doesn’t play as many as he would like–he almost always comes out on top. If we sort his charted matches by winning percentage on short service points, then split them into thirds, the difference is stark:

<=3 SPW%       Matches  Match Win%  
81%+                45         87%  
75.5% - 80.9%       44         64%  
up to 75.4%         49         24%

(The buckets are slightly different sizes only because I didn't want to put nearly identical percentages into separate categories.)

When Rublev wins most of the short service points, he wins the match. When he doesn't, he usually loses. If anything, the table understates the contrast; a disproportionate number of the low-percentage victories came on clay, including several on the slow dirt of Monte Carlo.

To some extent, it's obvious that "winning more of some subset of points" correlates with "winning more of all the points" and thus winning the match. But remember, this is the success rate independent of how many points end quickly. The combination of frequency and success--"what percent of total service points end quickly and in the server's favor"--should tell us more about the overall result. But for Rublev, that metric isn't as predictive of final outcomes as the winning percentage alone.

Battling demon

Yesterday against de Minaur, Rublev won 82% of the short service points. The Australian kept it close by reducing the number of short points to just under half of Rublev's serves. But the rule I've just outlined held true, despite a pesky defense. When de Minaur put the fourth shot back in play, he won 57% of return points. That's great, but with Rublev cleaning up the overwhelming majority of the short points, it wasn't enough.

We have shot-by-shot logs for four of the six matches between these two guys:

Tournament        Result  Short%  Short W%  
2024 Australian        W   49.4%     82.0%  
2023 Rotterdam         L   60.3%     75.6%  
2022 Monte Carlo       W   42.7%     73.2%  
2018 Washington        L   53.2%     71.6%

De Minaur did his job yesterday, keeping the ball in play more often than he did in the two previous hard-court meetings. (The Monte Carlo surface presumably helped lengthen points in that match.) The Australian won both of those earlier contests, watching Rublev make more plus-one mistakes and taking care of business when the rallies lasted longer.

In Melbourne, the Russian stayed a bit more within himself. He was able to hit a forehand on barely half of his plus-one shots--below both tour average and his own typical rate. Instead of blasting away with ill-advised backhands--part of what lost him the Rotterdam match--he accepted the invitation to rally. His 43% rate of winning longer service points isn't great, but it's far superior to the 0% chance of claiming the point after smacking an unforced error.

I don't want to overstate Rublev's caution, because he didn't play a cautious match. He probably never should. But getting a few more balls in play and fighting out the ensuing rallies makes his second serve look a lot better. As we've seen, Rublev does well on return. His second-serve points aren't much better than return points... but that's okay! Yesterday he won 55% behind his second serve, a glittering result compared to the 37% and 38% he won against de Minaur in Washington and Rotterdam, respectively.

Is this the one?

Rublev can be forgiven for having a losing record in major quarter-finals; he's been the lower-ranked player in seven of the nine. He's dropped two to Novak Djokovic, one to Rafael Nadal, and three to Medvedev. He should have picked up one (or three) along the way, but as the fifth man on a tour that always seems to have a big three or four, it's an uphill struggle.

Tomorrow's opponent is Jannik Sinner, just one place above him in the ATP rankings. (Elo likes him more than that--a lot more. See below.) This will be their seventh meeting, and history doesn't bode well for the Russian. Sinner has retired twice but won the other four.

Here are the short-service-point stats for Rublev in three of those matches:

Tournament        Result  Short%  Short W%  
2023 Miami             L   62.5%     77.1%  
2022 Monte Carlo       L   41.0%     58.5%  
2021 Barcelona         L   43.8%     85.7%

(Unfortunately we don't yet have a chart of his 7-6, 7-5 loss last fall in Vienna.)

This isn't insurmountable for the Russian: He often wins matches behind 77% of his short service points, and he almost always does with a 86% win rate. He'd like more than 44% of his serve points to end quickly, but that's tougher to execute on clay.

Against Sinner, the first three shots are even more important than usual, because the Italian plays a similar game, and once a rally reaches four strokes, he plays that game better. In Miami, Sinner won two-thirds of Rublev's "long" service points. In Monte Carlo, he won 54%, in the vicinity of what de Minaur did yesterday. In Barcelona, Sinner won a whopping 70% of return points when he got the fourth shot in play--as he more often than not did.

Rublev's second serves tell the story, as they did in the de Minaur match. Those, typically, are the points he can't finish early, when he should be thinking in terms of constructing the point, not grunting and crushing. In the four completed Sinner matches, he won only 37.5% of second-serve points. That's not going to get it done.

To beat an elite opponent, Rublev needs to remember when to bash and when to think. He executed well yesterday, pulling away in the end against a man who never stops fighting. Reaching his first major semi-final, against 22-year-old who seems to get stronger every week, he'll need to play even better.

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Sinner in the hands of a friendly forecast

Jannik Sinner is the favorite tomorrow: According to my Elo-based forecast, he has a 78% chance of advancing to the final four. That's a hefty margin for a match between players adjacent to one another in the official rankings. The difference is more about Sinner than Rublev: My forecast gives Sinner a nearly 30% shot at taking the title, second only to Djokovic.

While the Italian ranks fourth on the ATP computer, he's second according to the Elo algorithm, closer to Djokovic than anyone else is to him. Here is the top of the table entering the Australian Open:

Rank  Player             Elo  
1     Novak Djokovic    2217  
2     Jannik Sinner     2197  
3     Carlos Alcaraz    2149  
4     Daniil Medvedev   2104  
5     Alexander Zverev  2037  
6     Andrey Rublev     2035  
7     Grigor Dimitrov   2032

If you think in terms of major titles, official ranking points, or hype, this probably seems wrong. By those measures, Sinner is the laggard among the top four.

But Elo gives credit based on the quality of opponents beaten, and Sinner built quite a resume in the last quarter of 2023. He beat Rublev, Alcaraz, Medvedev (three times!), and most important, Djokovic twice. Nothing catapults you up the Elo list faster than knocking off the top dog.

The question, then, is whether Elo has overreacted to those two victories. My implementation of the Elo algorithm doesn't differentiate between narrow wins and blowouts. (Other versions use sets, games, or even points, though in my testing, those alternatives don't make the ratings more predictive.) The two Djokovic upsets were nail-biters. The Tour Finals round-robin match was decided in a third-set tiebreak, and each man won exactly 109 points. At the Davis Cup Finals, Sinner took the third set 7-5 despite winning fewer total points than his opponent.

While Sinner certainly deserved those victories--staring down match point against a 24-time major winner is a feat in itself--we might wonder how much they tell us about future results. If the two men keep fighting out such close matches, Djokovic is going to win some of them.

Each of the two upsets were worth a gain of 15 Elo points. Had Sinner lost them, he would've dropped 10 or 11 points instead. Call it a 25-point swing for each match. Thus, if we take the most pessimistic possible route and give both of the dead-heat results to Djokovic, Sinner's Elo rating would stand about 50 points lower, roughly tied with Alcaraz around 2,150.

(That isn't exactly right, because if Djokovic had won the Davis Cup match, Italy wouldn't have advanced to the final, and Sinner would've have beaten de Minaur. But Sinner did beat de Minaur, handily, and if we want to assess his current level, we shouldn't ignore that match.)

Handing both of the close results to Djokovic seems extreme. If we want to measure each player's current level without putting too much weight on the tiny number of points that decided those two matches, we might give one of the two victories to Djokovic. That would knock Sinner down to about 2,172, while boosting Djokovic to around 2,225.

In the Australian Open title-chances forecast, Novak would look a little better, and there would be more daylight between him and Sinner. Still, unless we make the harshest possible adjustment to Sinner's Elo rating, the Italian remains the next most likely Melbourne champion and a heavy favorite against Rublev tomorrow.

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Dessert bagels

The Rublev-de Minaur match had an unusual ending: After splitting four sets, the Russian ran away with the fifth, 6-0.

Typically, if two players are so evenly matched that they reach a fifth set, neither one is going to dominate the decider. For the rare occasions that it happens, it's unique enough that I think it deserves its own name. I propose "dessert bagel."

In grand slam competition since 1968, there have been just 159 dessert bagels, including Rublev's--fewer than one per major. No one has ever recorded a dessert bagel in a final, but it has happened twice in semis. Mats Wilander polished off Andre Agassi in the 1988 Roland Garros semi-final, and Djokovic finished his 2015 Australian Open semi against Stan Wawrinka the same way. Still, second-week dessert bagels are rare: Rublev's was only the 16th in more than a half-century.

It's an oddity piled on oddities: Rublev-de Minaur was the fifth dessert bagel in Melbourne this year:

Round  Winner      Loser       Score                
R128   Mannarino   Wawrinka    6-4 3-6 5-7 6-3 6-0  
R64    van Assche  Musetti     6-3 3-6 6-7 6-3 6-0  
R64    Medvedev    Ruusuvuori  3-6 6-7 6-4 7-6 6-0  
R32    Kecmanovic  Paul        6-4 3-6 2-6 7-6 6-0  
R16    Rublev      de Minaur   6-4 6-7 6-7 6-3 6-0

Five 6-0 deciders is a record for a single slam. There haven't been as many as three since the 2007 Australian, and no major has seen more than one since 2017. If even more dessert bagels start piling up in the quarter-finals, we'll know that something bizarre is going on Down Under.

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Qinwen Zheng’s Serve Under Construction

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

*Qinwen Zheng in 2023. Credit: Hameltion*

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What is to be done?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The odds of a 42-point tiebreak

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

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

What are the odds?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here are the equivalent numbers for servers at various levels:

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

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

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

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January 19, 1974: Sanctioned

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The Manufactured Attack of Caroline Garcia

*Caroline Garcia in 2019. Credit: Peter Menzel*

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is it working?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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