Category: Trivia

How Diana Shnaider Beat Zhu Lin in Hua Hin

Also today: Bublik’s quartet of comebacks; top seed upset trivia

Diana Shnaider at the 2023 US Open. Credit: Hameltion

Diana Shnaider lost her place in the WTA top 100 after her first-round exit at the Australian Open. But before we had time to reevaluate her place on the prospect list, she hurled her momentum back in the other direction, going through the top three seeds in Hua Hin, Thailand, to win her first career tour-level title. (More later on the trivia aspect.)

The Russian left-hander is only 19 years old, and her new ranking of #73 places her fourth among all women under 21. (She’s also up to 76th on the Elo list, ranked among the top 70 on hard courts.) The only younger players ahead of her are Coco Gauff, Linda Noskova, and Mirra Andreeva. Gauff is already a major winner, and Andreeva is three years younger, the impossibly young sensation of the moment. Noskova, though, is just seven months younger; coming off a quarter-final showing in Australia, she has already cracked the top 30. Shnaider trails the Czech by some distance on the points table, but she is every bit as promising of a prospect.

Zhu Lin, the Chinese veteran seeded third in Hua Hin, was no match for Shnaider yesterday. A second-set tactical shift–and a delayed response from the Russian–sent the match to a decider, but when Shnaider adjusted and Zhu failed to offer any new problems, it became a race to the finish. The 19-year-old completed her sixth top-50 victory, collecting the trophy by the score of 6-3, 2-6, 6-1.

Shnaider’s response to the final-round challenge was a fitting end to the week. Her three seeded victims–Zhu, Magda Linette, and Wang Xinyu–play different styles of tennis. Each one, at times, threatened to derail the Russian’s own game. She doesn’t yet have the weapons to impose herself on a top-tier opponent; her game may never be quite big enough for that. But her ability to handle the variety on offer in Hua Hin is an encouraging sign that she is maturing as a player. It could be a very long time before she gives up her place in the top 100.

Pushing around

The Russian has described herself an aggressive player. “I never wanted to be a pusher,” she told Christopher Clarey. “I was always like: ‘OK, here’s the shot. I’m killing it.'”

She isn’t a pusher, but by the standards of modern-day women’s tennis, she isn’t particularly aggressive, either. Her serve isn’t big enough to dictate play: 80% of them come back, setting her equal to Elina Svitolina or Emma Navarro. She uses her groundstrokes as weapons in every direction, but she plays within herself and leaves winners on the table. She ends points a bit more often than the typical WTAer from the baseline in exchange for a tour-average rate of unforced errors. Her Rally Aggression Score, across six charted matches from the last year, is +13, slightly above the norm and similar to that of Maria Sakkari.

It’s tempting to label her a counterpuncher, especially after watching a highlight reel or two. The broadcast commentator for her first-round victory over Linette was reduced to sputtering “No way!” after one unlikely recovery; my own reaction was less printable. She’s extremely fast, deceptively so. Woe betide the opponent who approaches the net. A singles court is 27 feet wide, and Shnaider needs only a few inches.

But “counterpuncher” isn’t right either. She’s not a pusher, she’s a pusher-around. Her relatively flat crosscourt groundstrokes off both wings are daunting, especially the left-handed forehand. The Russian rarely squanders an opportunity to do something with a groundstroke, whether that means widening the court or dislodging her opponent from the baseline. She doesn’t go for broke, but there’s not much passivity in her approach.

Shnaider’s brand of pushing-around works best against an opponent with an exploitable backhand. Linette’s backhand was too steady, which is what made the first rounder the Russian’s closest contest of the week. (Each woman won 75 of the first 150 points before the knot was finally untied.) Against Wang Xinyu and Zhu Lin, the crosscourt forehand consistently took control of points:

MATCH          W/FE%  PointsWon%  
SF vs Wang       27%         76%  
FI vs Zhu        30%         66%  
-- DS Avg        20%         59%  
-- Tour Avg      14%         53%  
R1 vs Linette    22%         47%

These numbers are for crosscourt forehands only. When she hits them, Shnaider ends points in her favor one-fifth of the time, and she came close to one in three yesterday against Zhu. More commonly, the pressure created by that stroke–not the individual shot itself–is what wins the point. The average WTA player picks up barely half of points in which they hit a crosscourt forehand. It’s just not an overwhelmingly offensive shot. Iga Swiatek wins 60% of those points; Aryna Sabalenka wins 58%. Shnaider, like Iga, wins nearly 60% of them, claiming two of three against Zhu and more than three out of four against Wang.

She’s not killing the ball, not most of the time anyway. But it doesn’t matter. Her crosscourt forehand is the tennis equivalent of death by a thousand cuts.

Adjustment periods

Shnaider’s game is a work in progress, no criticism for a 19-year-old who balanced college tennis with the tour for half of last year. She will almost certainly develop more power, especially on the serve, where there is a wide gap between her biggest strikes and her more pedestrian offerings. She will probably also learn to take more chances from the baseline, an adjustment that would give her more control over her own fate.

On a smaller scale, each one of her three seeded opponents last week threatened to take control of their encounters; each time, the left-hander recovered in time to advance.

Linette, as we’ve seen, had no problem with the barrage of crosscourt forehands. After Shnaider won the opening frame, the top seed roared back with a 6-1 second. From there, though, the Russian was a different player. She sent more first serves to the wide corners–reliable weapons for many a left-hander–which sealed the first game of the decider with the loss of just one point. She also moved away from the crosscourt forehand, letting Linette test her own backhand with crosscourt forehands of her own. At 30-40 in the Pole’s first service game of the decider, Linette hit her plus-one shot down the middle. Where Shnaider might prefer to attack crosscourt, she instead went inside-out, setting herself up for a backhand crosscourt winner on the following shot. Linette would break back in the following game, but her momentum was broken. Shnaider had opened up new tactical options and would take the third set, 6-1.

Wang’s threat was less serious, but it represents bigger dangers that the 19-year-old will face on tour. Shnaider won the first set easily, aided by Wang’s own mistakes. But the Chinese player brought her power under control at the beginning of the second, breaking for a 3-1 advantage. The fourth game demonstrated what a big hitter can do: Wang needed only five shots to reach 40-30. There wasn’t anything to push around.

While Wang wasn’t exactly dominant on serve, she was good enough. The only way to handle a (temporarily) unbreakable server is to take care of your own deal, and Shnaider did her best. She took more chances with first serves, seeing that number fall below 50%, compared to a usual rate above 60%. When she was able to extend rallies, she let Wang make mistakes. The second-set tiebreak ended with a combination of the two: At 4-5, Wang missed a swinging volley to end a 20-stroke rally. Two points later, Shnaider cracked a wide first serve that didn’t come back.

Zhu Lin proved to be the knottiest problem of the three top seeds, even if she didn’t play the best tennis. Though Zhu doesn’t have big weapons, she knows the dangers of passive tennis, especially against someone like Shnaider who will push her around. After the first set went to the Russian, 6-3, Zhu did everything she could to shorten points. For one set, it worked:

RALLY LEN  Shots/Pt  
Set 1           4.6  
Set 2           3.7  
Set 3           4.6

Zhu picked up the second set, 6-2, in large part because Shnaider reacted so badly to the shift. After balancing winners and unforced errors in the first set, the 19-year-old hit just two winners against ten errors–including six on the forehand–in the second.

When the deciding set began, it was as if both players realized that Zhu couldn’t keep playing with borrowed tactics. Shnaider continued to put service returns close to the baseline–her Return Depth Index was 2.83, by far the best of the charted matches in her career so far–making it more difficult for Zhu to attack. Her forehand recovered, ensuring that she would keep points alive. A better player, or one with more experience, might have reacted to Zhu’s shift more quickly, but it is to Shnaider’s credit that she did so, so comprehensively, well before the clock ran out. The Russian concluded her title run with a 6-1 final set.

If the course of this week’s triumph is any indication, Shnaider’s march to the top of the rankings will be a steady one. She has too much to figure out before she consistently beats the best, and that will take time. But her run of upsets in Hua Hin showed us that she is making progress, and that her in-match problem-solving skills far surpass those of the typical 19-year-old. As the problems get tougher, we’ll find out just how far she can go.

* * *

Alexander Bublik’s four comebacks

Alexander Bublik won the Montpellier title the hard way, coming back from one-set deficits against all four of his opponents. It’s the first time anyone has ever won an ATP title despite losing the first set of each of his matches. It’s never happened on the Challenger tour, either.

However, the key word here is four. Bublik was the second seed in Montpellier, so he didn’t have to play a first-round match. No titlist has ever lost the first set in all of their matches, but many players have won a tournament despite losing four first sets.

I found 20 previous occasions when a player came back so often at the same event, en route to a title. (Presumably there are even more, if we look for finalists, quarter- and semi-finalists at majors, and so on.) Bublik was the first since 2009, when Radek Stepanek recorded back-to-back wins against Andy Roddick and Mardy Fish to claim the San Jose title. He recovered from a one-set deficit four times, straight-setting only Chris Guccione.

The feat was more common at the beginning of the century, occuring twice each in 2001 and 2002. Tommy Haas recorded four comebacks on the way to a title at the 2001 Stuttgart Masters, the single Masters-level title run on this list. His only straight-set victory was the best-of-five final against Max Mirnyi. Nicolas Escude won Rotterdam in 2002 against an all-star cast including Roger Federer, Juan Carlos Ferrero, Tim Henman, Sebastien Grosjean, and Tommy Robredo, losing the first set to all but Robredo. Don’t be too hard on Tommy, though: He took the first set from Paul-Henri Mathieu in Moscow the same year, where Mathieu dropped four first sets yet still took home the trophy.

Two major winners appear on this list: John McEnroe for his 1981 US Open run, and Andre Agassi for his 1992 championship at Wimbledon (where, in another coincidence, he beat McEnroe in the semis). Those feats aren’t really in the same category as Bublik’s, as they had seven chances to come back. On the other hand, McEnroe recovered from a one-set deficit against Bjorn Borg, so I’m not about to disqualify him from anything.

Finally, there’s one oddball occasion that–if you squint hard enough–really is a precedent for Montpellier last week. Emilio Sanchez led Spain to the 1992 World Team Cup title, beating Stefan Edberg, Guy Forget, and Jakob Hlasek in the round robin, then defeating Petr Korda in the final round. In each one, he came back after losing the first set. It’s not quite the same thing, but Sanchez went home a hero, and he came back in all four of his matches. Whether it qualifies or not, it was one hell of a week.

* * *

Shnaider’s top-three upsets

As I mentioned at the top of today’s post, Diana Shnaider went through the first, second, and third three seeds in Hua Hin en route to the title. (Unlike Bublik, she won all five of her first sets, too.) She beat top seed Magda Linette in the first round, third-seeded Wang Xinyu in the semi-finals, and second seed Zhu Lin in the final.

Shnaider’s feat is not so rare as Bublik’s. Excluding year-end tour championships, where seeds clash in every match, Hua Hin is the sixth time in a decade that player has gone through the top three seeds to win the title. Remarkably, Barbora Krejcikova has done it twice in two years, beating Anett Kontaveit, Belinda Bencic, and Beatriz Haddad Maia to win Tallinn in 2022, then upsetting Aryna Sabalenka, Jessica Pegula, and Iga Swiatek (not to mention seventh-seed Daria Kasatkina and twelvth-seed Petra Kvitova) to win Dubai last year.

The list of previous such winners is a glittering one, usually when a superstar returns from a prolonged absence. Serena Williams beat Martina Hingis, Jennifer Capriati, and sister Venus to win Miami in 2002. Steffi Graf won the 1999 French Open by knocking out Lindsay Davenport, Monica Seles, and Hingis in succession.

Graf wasn’t the first player to win a major title in such a fashion: Virginia Wade picked up the first US Open, in 1968, by eliminating Judy Tegart, Ann Jones, and Billie Jean King.

Conchita Martinez is probably the best player who won a title this way when she was still on the rise: She upset Sabrina Goles, Katerina Maleeva, and Barbara Paulus to pick up the 1988 Sofia crown. Hana Mandlikova, like Krejcikova, did it twice: At the 1984 Oakland tourney, she beat Andrea Jaeger, Pam Shriver, and Martina Navratilova. She returned the next year and did it again, knocking out Wendy Turnbull, Helena Sukova, and Chris Evert.

Finally, a twist: Margaret Court also appears on the list twice. Shortly after returning from her first pregnancy, she won the 1972 Newport title–where she was seeded sixth–with victories over Rosie Casals, Evert, and King. The odder instance is her other appearance, for the Locust Valley (New York) event in 1969. Court plowed through top seeds Denise Carter, Patti Hogan, and Betty Ann Grubb, losing just 12 games in the process.

Margaret had already won two majors that year–so why wasn’t she the top seed? Traditionally, foreign players were placed on a separate seeding list. Carter, Hogan, and Grubb were the top three Americans at the rather weak event. Court was designated 1F–the top foreign seed, ahead of 2F Kerry Harris, with whom she won the doubles, too. Foreign seeds were placed in the draw so they would avoid local seeds (and each other) until later rounds. So this example doesn’t really count: By modern standards, Court was herself the top seed, and Harris probably outranked one or more of the Americans.

Even if we toss out Locust Valley, Shnaider finds herself in good company. She joins Wade, Court, Mandlikova, Martinez, Graf, Amelie Mauresmo, Serena, and–thanks to a sparkling week in Luxembourg in 2016–the great Monica Niculescu.

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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.

* * *

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.

* * *

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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Jelena Ostapenko In the Hands of Fate

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

Jelena Ostapenko in 2023. Credit: Hameltion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Give and take

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

Deciding-set tiebreak records

AbsurDB asks:

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

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

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

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

* * *

MCP Milestones

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

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

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

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

* * *

Assorted links

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

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What Is Ben Shelton’s Ceiling?

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

Ben Shelton. Credit: 350z33

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How much can a return improve?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Beyond RPW%

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

First serve dominance

James Fawcette asks:

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

No!

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

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

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New toys

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

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

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

Enjoy!

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Generalizing Immaculate Grid

If you’re a certain kind of baseball fan, you’ve already heard about the game Immaculate Grid. It’s a clever exercise in sports trivia, with a new puzzle posted each day. There are now daily football, basketball, and ice hockey games as well.

But no tennis. We’ll come back to that.

For the uninitiated, here’s how it works. This is today’s puzzle:

The icons defining the rows and columns are team logos. For each square, you need to think of a player who spent time with both teams–or has both attributes. The upper-left square will be someone who played for both the Dodgers and the Twins. The upper-right square needs to be someone who pitched for the Dodgers and recorded at least 3,000 strikeouts.

Simply thinking of names isn’t hard enough for some trivia buffs. Every correct answer comes with a “rarity score,” determined by how many other people chose the same player. The more uncommon your pick, the better.

A tennis grid?

The biggest obstacle to an Immaculate Grid for tennis is that we don’t really have teams. Yes, there’s World Team Tennis, and there are doubles teams, but it’s not the same thing.

A partial substitute would be nationality. That’s probably the closest analogue that tennis has to teams. It’s not a perfect replacement, though. Many players have appeared for both the Dodgers and Twins, but only a small number of tennis players have switched nationality. For many pairs of nations, there is no overlap at all.

One solution, then, is to use nationalities as rows and attributes as columns. By “attributes” I mean just about anything other than nationality. We could have columns for “left-handed,” “played Davis Cup singles,” “reached a Wimbledon fourth round,” “won a tour-level doubles title,” “partnered Leander Paes,” and so on. Attributes could define rows, as well; there’s no law that says all three rows must be nationalities.

So… what the hell. Here’s a tennis-themed grid to try. Active and retired players are all fair game, as are both men and women:

There are multiple answers for every square, but I’ve included one possible solution at the bottom of this post.

The tennis version of the game only works–as far as I can tell–by using more arcane attributes than the original baseball setup. For baseball, as well as the other sports now offered, four or five of the rows/columns are usually teams, and the remainder are very well-established accomplishments. Not only does tennis lack teams in the same sense, it also doesn’t have the same set of familiar career and single-season statistical records.

For tennis, then, human curation is likely essential. When I first generated a random list of three nations (weighted by how many players appear in my database), I ended up with Denmark, Israel, and Kazakhstan. Even apart from the fact that some of the squares would have no answer at all, some of the remaining ones would be awfully obscure. If you can come up with a Danish lefty off the top of your head, you’re a better fan than I am. Good trivia games require a careful mix of difficulty and solvability, and I suspect that getting the balance right would be much trickier for tennis than for the major American team sports.

The general solution

In thinking about adapting Immaculate Grid for tennis, I realized that the same general grid-building rules could apply to anything. Think of the answers as objects–usually people, but not necessarily–and the row/column labels as attributes.

Thus, an IG-style game could be constructed for any set of objects with attributes.

One example: Film actors. Attributes could be in the form of “starred in a movie alongside x” (think “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon”) or “worked with director y” or “played famous character z.”

Another one, expanding the notion of “objects”: World cities. Attributes could be population size, whether it is a national capitol, where it is located (country or continent), that it has hosted an Olympiad or World’s Fair or other significant event, and so on.

So, for any topic, assuming you were armed with a database of objects and attributes, it would be easy to automatically generate grids. Not every randomly-generated grid of attributes would work. You’d have to avoid impossibilities, like the non-existence of a Danish player who partnered Leander Paes at tour level. The remaining problem to keep the game playable would be to avoid situations where answers exist, but they are below some threshold of obscurity.

Again, for baseball, that’s not really a problem. By using only the 30 MLB teams and a small set of famous accomplishments as attributes, every possible combination probably generates either (a) a large number of possible answers, or (b) a small number of notable answers. Yesterday, one of the squares was a Chicago White Sox pitcher who won the Cy Young Award. There are only three such players, but any Cy Young winner is relatively well-known.

One solution for tennis (or other non-baseball topics) would be to rate players (or objects) by notability. It doesn’t have to be fine-grained. For tennis, you could label any player with at least 100 tour-level matches “notable,” and everyone else “not notable.” If a row/column combination had only three possible answers, none of which were notable, you could treat it the same as an impossible combination and discard that grid. Perhaps three notable players or ten non-notable players would be enough to give gamers a fair shot; it would be up to you to determine the threshold.

If there’s ever going to be a (daily) Immaculate Grid for tennis, it won’t be run by me. But if you are so inclined, feel free to steal any of the ideas I’ve laid out here.

Finally, as promised, here’s one solution to my tennis grid above:

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The Highest-Ranked Slam Qualifier

Today, Aslan Karatsev plays for a place in the French Open main draw. He is the top seed in qualifying on the strength of his ATP ranking of 62. A top-70 ranking would normally guarantee main draw entry with room to spare. But when the list was finalized about six weeks ago, Karatsev lingered outside the top 120. Since then, he reached the semi-finals in Madrid.

It is rare for such a high-ranked player to appear in qualifying. (Or to put it another way, it is unusual for a player outside the top 100 to make such gains in just a few weeks.) But it is not unprecedented. Here are the 13th highest-ranked top seeds in men’s slam qualifying since 2000:

RANK  Year  Tourney        Player              
57    2013  US Open        Federico Delbonis   
59    2017  US Open        Leonardo Mayer      
62    2009  Roland Garros  Fabio Fognini       
62    2023  Roland Garros  Aslan Karatsev      
67    2004  Roland Garros  Albert Montanes     
68    2000  US Open        Harel Levy          
69    2007  US Open        Frank Dancevic      
69    2009  US Open        Thomaz Bellucci     
70    2015  Roland Garros  Hyeon Chung         
75    2005  Roland Garros  Andreas Seppi       
75    2008  Roland Garros  Eduardo Schwank     
75    2022  US Open        Constant Lestienne  
77    2007  Wimbledon      Nicolas Mahut

I extended the list to 13 for a reason: to include Wimbledon. The top 12 spots are monopolized by the French and US Opens, because there are so many ranking points available in the weeks leading up to those events. We have to go much further down the list to find someone at the Australian Open: Taylor Fritz was ranked 91st when he played 2018 Aussie qualifying.

While Karatsev has progressed smoothly this week, a high rank is no guarantee of success. Federico Delbonis was ranked 57th when he began qualifying rounds at the 2013 US Open. He was fresh off a run to the Hamburg final the month before. He lasted just 55 minutes against Mikhail Kukushkin, then headed home a first-round loser.

Vijay!

I’ve only gone back to 2000 because I don’t have full qualifying results for tournaments before that. But we can find some qualifiers from earlier years, because we know which main draw players came through the preliminary rounds.

Peter Wetz ran this query for me and found a surprise. In 1982, 35th-ranked Vijay Amritraj reached the Wimbledon main draw as a qualifier. 35! Arguably, he was even better than that. He had finished the 1981 season ranked 20th, in large part on the strength of a quarter-final showing at Wimbledon, where he couldn’t convert a two-sets-to-love lead on Jimmy Connors. Amritraj was considered one of the best grass-court players in the world.

The 28-year-old Indian star was stuck in qualifying because he was at odds with the tennis establishment. The men’s Grand Prix–roughly speaking, the equivalent of today’s ATP tour–established a new rule, that players must commit to at least ten Grand Prix events in order to be eligible for the slams. Another protester was Björn Borg, who wanted to keep playing only if he could pick his spots more carefully.

Amritraj had a lot of things going on, and he didn’t like being “press-ganged” into playing all those events. He was pursuing an acting career and would appear in the 1983 James Bond film Octopussy. Still, this was Wimbledon. He claimed he had received hundreds of letters from fans begging him to play. In India, he said, the only two events that mattered were Wimbledon and Davis Cup.

So Vijay went to qualifying. He was the biggest story of the event, which typically didn’t make headlines at all. He opened his campaign with a win, something he had waited 11 years for. He hadn’t entered qualifying since 1971, when he was 17 years old and failed to clear the first round.

He won his second match with ease as well, straight-setting Christo van Rensburg. He learned that day that he had already earned a main draw place thanks to a withdrawal. In those days, there was no lucky loser lottery. When a main draw position opened up, the highest-ranked loser from the final round got in. So Amritraj would make the 128-man field either way.

As it turned out, he earned his ticket–but just barely. Vijay overcame an unheralded American, Glen Holroyd, 6-7, 3-6, 6-4, 7-5, 6-2. “I will need to be better than this,” he said, “if I am to do anything at Wimbledon.”

He did something, but not as much as he would’ve liked. The 35th-ranked qualifier came back from a two-set disadvantage in the first round to beat Jeff Borowiak, then he straight-setted Pascal Portes to reach the round of 32. There, he capitulated to Roscoe Tanner in what must have been a fine display of grass court tennis. Tanner, the 14th seed and 1979 finalist, beat him, 6-4, 6-4, 4-6, 4-6, 6-3. For the fifth year in a row, Vijay exited the Championships after a five-set loss.

Amritraj never did give up on his favorite event. He returned to the main draw for the next five years, reaching the fourth round in 1985 when he upset Yannick Noah. In 1988, his streak came to end when he lost in the final qualifying round to Heiner Moraing, 7-6(3), 4-6, 6-7(3), 7-5, 8-6. Players didn’t call qualifying “heartbreak valley” for nothing.

In 1990, he came back one more time. 19 years after his first attempt to crack the main draw, Vijay got through. Ranked outside the top 300, the 36-year-old was lucky to have a place in the field at all. But he beat Éric Winogradsky, Stéphane Grenier, and Stephen Botfield to qualify. He lost in the first round, but as usual, it took five sets to stop him.

May 25, 1973: Unbroken

Ion Țiriac in the 1972 Davis Cup Finals

Here’s a trivia question for you: What was the first grand slam singles match without a break of serve?

In 1973, it hadn’t been possible for long. The US Open was the first major to adopt the tiebreak, in 1970. Before that, every set would continue until someone broke serve and established a two-game lead. Only in 1973 did the other slams follow suit. There weren’t any zero-break matches at the Australian Open, just as there hadn’t been in the first three years of tiebreak tennis at Forest Hills. Even with sudden death shootouts in place, it would be unusual for two men to string together a minimum of three unbroken sets, 36 consecutive holds of serve.

The 1973 French Open made it easier. The tournament experimented with best-of-three-set contests for the first two rounds. Now 24 holds would be enough, even if the slow Parisian clay worked in the returner’s favor.

On May 25, Roland Garros delivered such a match. Two veterans–31-year-old American Frank Froehling and 34-year-old Romanian Ion Țiriac–locked horns for a second-round baseline slugfest that, somehow, never resulted in a break. Froehling advanced, 7-6(3), 7-6(3).

It was a strange outcome. Froehling, like most Americans of his generation, served big. Țiriac, despite his barrel chest and “Brașov Bulldozer” nickname, did not. When the two men faced off in a decisive 1971 Davis Cup match, only one of five sets reached 6-all; two others finished at 6-1. The Romanian had played both Olympic ice hockey and international-level rugby, yet on the tennis court he was a jackrabbit. He realized he didn’t have the strokes of a champion, but he was smart, he was stubborn, and he could run.

And if he couldn’t break your serve, Țiriac could usually break your spirit. No one in the sport practiced more gamesmanship, a polite term for what was often outright cheating. The Romanian’s antics in the 1972 Davis Cup final were flagrant enough that the ILTF suspended him. So obnoxious were the hosts in Bucharest that the United Nations gave a “Fair Play” award to Stan Smith, one of the Americans who withstood it all. Smith’s citation: sportsmanship “in the face of a hostile, chauvinistic public, irregularities in the scoring and aggressive behavior by one of his opponents.” The UN was calling out Ilie Năstase, but Țiriac was probably worse.

By May 1973, the Brașov Bulldozer was wondering if it was worth it anymore. For eight years, he had mentored Năstase, now the best clay courter in the world and the top seed in Paris. Now, they were no longer on speaking terms.

“Năstase was becoming impossible,” Țiriac told a British journalist. “I am the sort of competitor who plays to win but, in doubles, Năstase just wanted to clown about. He let me down badly in the French Championships last year when we were the favorites to win the title. We lost in the first round.”

After the 1972 Davis Cup finals, the Romanian quit the national team. He told the same journalist that he’d retire after the 1974 season. It was clear to another spectator at the Froehling duel that “his heart was clearly not in the match.”

No one knew what Țiriac would do once he gave up full-time competition, but he was always a man to watch. Behind his perpetual glower was a brilliant mind, capable of idiosyncratic conversation in six languages. He had raised Năstase up from what he called “a nothing in the streets of Bucharest.” Perhaps he could do it again.

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Coincidentally, Țiriac’s next project was also in action on May 25th, 1973. 20-year-old Guillermo Vilas of Argentina was little known outside of South America, but that was about to change.

In the second round, the young left-hander drew seventh seeded Spaniard Andrés Gimeno. A year before, Gimeno had become the oldest first-time major champion when he won the French at age 34. This isn’t to say he was a late bloomer: He signed up for the professional ranks when he was 23, after a sterling amateur season in 1960. He held his own against Rod Laver, Ken Rosewall, and the rest for seven years before the start of the Open era. He faced Laver at least 120 times between 1960 and 1971, winning nearly one in three.

But after a four-title 1972 season, Gimeno suffered a meniscus injury. He was a meager 5-4 on the season coming into the French Open, fading as fast as Vilas was rising.

The inter-generational battle was a dramatic one. The Argentinian finally triumphed, 6-2, 5-7, 8-6. Țiriac would later say that Vilas lacked a killer instinct–“This guy not capable in life to kill a fly”–but he was always able to exhaust opponents into submission. For the second year in a row, the lefty had reached the third round in Paris.

Soon, Vilas’s accomplishments would be measured not in match wins, but in finals–often against rival Björn Borg. The coincidences multiply: Yet another match on May 25th was a delayed opening-round tilt, 16-year-old Borg’s first-ever appearance at the French. He, too, made a statement that day, handing a routine defeat to 1971 Roland Garros quarter-finalist Cliff Richey, 6-2, 6-3.

While Țiriac’s two-tiebreak loss to Froehling was the quirkiest result of the day, tennis history was in the making all over the grounds.

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This post is part of my series about the 1973 season, Battles, Boycotts, and Breakouts. Keep up with the project by checking the TennisAbstract.com front page, which shows an up-to-date Table of Contents after I post each installment.

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Nine Degrees of Spencer Gore

In many ways, the early days of tennis seem impossibly ancient. It was a time of long skirts, wooden rackets, and underhand serves that were in no way tactical. Sometimes, though, the century and a half of lawn tennis feels like almost nothing.

After stumbling across a mention of a 1951 professional match between Bill Tilden and Pancho Gonzales, I took to Twitter:

The path from Tilden to Federer–or one of many other active players–requires only three intermediate steps.

If we expand the types of links we’re willing to consider, the connections are almost overwhelming. From the 1931 men’s champion of Black tennis, forbidden from entering the US National Championships, you can get to Svetlana Kuznetsova in only three steps:

If we stick to women’s singles, the paths are a bit longer, because fewer women played for as long as the likes of Tilden and Gonzales, especially in the amateur era. Yet it still only takes five steps to travel from 1908 US champion Maud Barger-Wallach to Venus Williams:

If you’ve ever played Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, you know how addicting this kind of thing can be. And you can guess how productive I was at work today while mulling the kinds of paths that can be constructed between early tennis and the present.

But wait, there’s math!

Is my path from Tilden to Federer the optimal one? Could we construct a smaller set of connections between Barger-Wallach and Venus Williams? Like many pursuits that start out as time-wasters, this is a math problem that we can solve.

In a different domain, the Oracle of Bacon offers just that sort of solution, calculating the shortest path between Kevin Bacon and any actor, where each step is a film that “connects” any pair of cast members. For example, Serena Williams has a “Bacon number” of 3:

Academics have “Erdős numbers” and you can see how baseball players are connected with the Oracle of Baseball at baseball-reference.com.

These solutions come from the field of graph theory, which includes many algorithms that address this sort of problem. (As well as real problems that are relevant to the real world.) Checking every possible path between actors, academics, or baseball players is extremely computationally intensive, so different techniques take varying approaches to trimming the number of paths worth investigating. One of these algorithms, breadth-first search, is efficient enough that it can identify the shortest route from a half-million tennis matches on my laptop in a few seconds.

Gore to Djokovic

Let’s see what this Oracle of Tennis can tell us. The first Wimbledon champion, in 1877, was Spencer Gore. He was no Pancho–he played The Championships only one more time. The Oracle will have some work to do to get from Gore’s corner of the graph to the modern era.

It turns out that the shortest path from Gore to Novak Djokovic–the first Wimbledon winner to the reigning titleholder–takes nine steps:

Spencer Gore vs Montague Hankey (1877 Wimbledon)

Hankey vs Charles Lacy Sweet (1883 Cirencester Park)

Sweet vs George Lawrence Orme (1884 Sussex County)

Orme vs Max Decugis (1901 French Covered)

Decugis d Coco Gentien (1924 Coupe de Noel)

Gentien vs Pancho Gonzales (1949 Roland Garros)

Gonzales vs Jimmy Connors (1971-73, 4 meetings)

Connors vs Fabrice Santoro (1992 Vienna)

Santoro vs Novak Djokovic (2007-08, 2 meetings)

That isn’t the only nine-step path from Gore to Djokovic, but there are none shorter. Many of the most efficient routes involve the same players. Gore didn’t give us many opponents to choose from, so the relatively(!) long career of Montague Hankey is a common first step. And the final sequence of Pancho-to-Connors-to-Santoro-to-Djokovic (and many other present-day stars) is tough to beat.

Sutton to Raducanu

Historical women’s tennis data isn’t in quite as good of shape as men’s–yet. Thanks to TennisArchives.com, we can scan hundreds of thousands of men’s results from the amateur years in addition to the usual Open Era records. I’ve pushed my dataset of historical women’s results back to 1917–a huge improvement over the state of affairs a year ago, but missing the first few decades of tournaments.

We can still reach quite far back. Two-time Wimbledon champ and winner of the 1904 US National Championships, May Sutton Bundy was part of a Southern California tennis dynasty and one of the greats of her era. After giving birth to four kids in the 1910s, she returned to competitive tennis and won singles titles as late as 1928.

So even though we don’t yet have her entire career record in the database, we can use the Oracle to link her to the present. It takes only seven steps to get from Sutton to 2021 US Open champ Emma Raducanu:

May Sutton Bundy vs Marion Zinderstein Jessup (1921 Seabright)

Jessup vs Betty Rosenquest Pratt (1943 Wilmington)

Pratt vs Christine Truman (1957-59, 3 meetings)

Truman vs Martina Navratilova (1973 Wimbledon)

Navratilova vs Ai Sugiyama (1993 Tokyo)

Sugiyama vs Stefanie Voegele (2006 Fed Cup)

Voegele vs Emma Raducanu (2021 US Open)

I don’t know what else to add–this was a weird day.

Love-Six? No Problem

Last week, Tsvetana Pironkova dealt Aryna Sabalenka a rough start to her Miami campaign: a 6-0 first set. It took two more hours and a third-set tiebreak to settle the issue, but ultimately Sabalenka came back, shrugging off the abysmal opening frame.

It’s not the first time Sabalenka has completed such a comeback. In 2018, she overcame a bagel opener at the hands of Marketa Vondrousova at ‘s-Hertogenbosch, and famously, she recovered after losing the first 10 games in Ostrava last fall to Sara Sorribes Tormo. She didn’t just claw her way back against the Spaniard, she won the next 12 in a row–not to mention her next 13 matches after that.

Remarkably, these three matches are the only times Sabalenka has lost a first-set bagel at tour level. She’s won them all.

Context, please

Three-set comebacks are common in women’s tennis, but as you might guess, they are less common when the first set is a lopsided one. A 6-0 or 6-1 opener suggests either that the players are mismatched, or one of the competitors is having a particularly good or bad day.

Approximately one-third of matches go to a third set, and about one in six end up in favor of the woman who lost the first one. But when the opening frame is a bagel, those numbers are roughly halved–more than four in five of the matches are put away in straights, and fewer than 8% of the 0-6 losers complete the comeback.

Here are the numbers for every opening set score, drawing on all WTA tour-level matches since 2000:

Score  p(3 Sets)  p(Win)  
0-6        18.6%    7.5%  
1-6        24.3%   10.9%  
2-6        29.3%   14.4%  
3-6        33.2%   17.4%  
4-6        37.1%   21.0%  
5-7        36.0%   20.1%  
6-7        39.7%   22.7%  
Total      32.0%   16.8%

All else equal, losers of close first sets have a much better chance at coming back than those who drop lopsided openers.

About those 7.5%

All else is never equal, so it isn’t right to say that Sabalenka had a one-in-thirteen chance of coming back against Sorribes Tormo or Pironkova. A top player who loses an opening set is much more likely to bounce back than, say, Renata Zarazua, the qualifier who lost 6-0 6-0 to Angelique Kerber the same day as Aryna’s latest exploit. Zarazua isn’t that bad, but the odds she’d win the last two sets were much worse than Sabalenka’s.

Yet in the 2000s, no one has done what the Belarussian has, winning all of the matches in which she loses a love-six opening set. She’s three-for-three, and no one else is even two-for-two at tour level.

Sabalenka has a ways to go to catch Klara Koukalova, who came back from a first-set bagel six times, more than anyone else on tour this century. It took her 24 tries, which still works out to an impressive conversion rate of 25%. By contrast, Sorana Cirstea has been first-set-bageled 19 times, and has yet to turn any of them around.

There are more meaningful aspects of Sabalenka’s powerful and entertaining game, but at the moment, her perfect record after love-six openers is my favorite.