Category Archives: Rafael Nadal

March 6, 2013 · 2:42 pm

Federer, Nadal, and Semifinal-or-Later Streaks

The Indian Wells men’s draw has been released, and a big question has been answered.  Rafael Nadal, about as dangerous a floater as can be imagined with a #5 seed, landed in Roger Federer‘s quarter.  (Sorry Roger, it had to happen to someone, and David Ferrer has suffered enough lately.)

If Fed and Rafa both win three matches, they’ll face each other in a quarterfinal match.  That’s something that’s never happened before.  The pair has met 28 times, 26 of them in a semifinal or final.  The only exceptions are their first match in 2004, when Nadal was seeded 32nd in Miami, and a round-robin pairing at the 2011 tour finals.  Ignoring the round-robin, that’s 26 matches in a row in one of the last two rounds of an event.

That’s a historically great streak, but it’s not the record.  In fact, one player is a part of two streaks–the only two streaks–that are better.

Jimmy Connors is 1st, with 28 consecutive semis or finals against Ivan Lendl, and 2nd, with 27 consecutive semis or finals against (who else?) John McEnroe.  He’s also eighth (21 straight against Bjorn Borg) and 12th (14 with Ilie Nastase).

Until the threat of this week’s draw, Federer and Nadal were right on Connors’s tail.  If Roger and Rafa meet in the quarters, the heir presumptive pair will have to include Novak Djokovic.

Here’s the all-time top ten:

Streak  Player1          Player2           
28      Jimmy Connors    Ivan Lendl        
27      Jimmy Connors    John McEnroe      
26      Rafael Nadal     Roger Federer     
23      Rafael Nadal     Novak Djokovic    
22      Stefan Edberg    Boris Becker      
22      Roger Federer    Novak Djokovic    
22      John McEnroe     Ivan Lendl        
21      Bjorn Borg       Jimmy Connors     
19      Stefan Edberg    Ivan Lendl        
17      Ivan Lendl       Boris Becker

If Nadal stays #5 for long (unlikely as that seems), both the all-time #3 and #4 streaks could be halted.  But as long as Federer stays within the top four, the current #6 streak will climb the rankings.

Of course, there are a couple of other combinations with the potential to crack this list, even reach the top:

Streak  Player1         Player2        
11      Andy Murray     Roger Federer  
10      Novak Djokovic  Andy Murray

But we shouldn’t get ahead of ourselves.  It took five years for Fed and Nadal to get from 11 up to 26.  As the top of the list shows, it takes two consistently great players to put together a streak like this.

All is not lost, though.  If they play in the quarters, they’ll just have to shift their focus to a new record: consecutive meetings in quarterfinals or later.  27 straight would put them behind Connors-McEnroe (32), Connors-Lendl (29), and one pair they’re unlikely to chase down: Nadal-Djokovic (29).

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Filed under Head-to-Heads, Jimmy Connors, Novak Djokovic, Rafael Nadal, Records, Roger Federer

February 20, 2013 · 12:15 pm

Milos Raonic’s (Almost) Unprecedented Three-peat

Last week, Milos Raonic won the SAP Open in San Jose without dropping a set.  Juts like he did last year … and the year before.  In fact, Raonic has won every set he has ever played at this event.

That’s not just impressive, it’s only the second time in ATP history that anyone has pulled off such a feat.

Simply winning an event three times in a row is not easy task, of course, even dropping plenty of sets along the way.  Raonic was only the 27th player in ATP history to do that, though of course many of his precursors strung together streaks of more than three years, and many three-peated at more than one event.  Just last month, David Ferrer made news by going back-to-back-to-back on hard courts in Auckland, having previously three-peated on clay in Acapulco.  (Raonic won’t be joining that club anytime soon.)

What’s particularly impressive about the group of three-peating champions is how tightly it overlaps with the very best in the game’s history.  18 of the 27 three-peaters reached the #1 ranking during their careers.  Two more peaked at #2.  (Honorable mention goes to Balazs Taroczy, who never cracked the top 10, but did win Hilversum five years running.)

For all the accolades earned by those #1s, though, only one of those players did what Raonic just completed.  That was John McEnroe, who went back-to-back-to-back-to-back from 1980 to 1983 at the Sydney Indoor.  Had he not returned to the event in 1992, he would have retired with a perfect record at the tournament.

Johnny Mac had a tougher time of it than did Raonic.  Milos has only beaten one top-20 player in San Jose, and when he edged by #9 Fernando Verdasco to win his first title, he did so while winning far fewer than half of points, resulting in a pitiful dominance ratio of 0.66.  (1.0 represents an even match; Raonic’s average in San Jose is 1.71.)  The Canadian was only broken twice in these three years, but he rarely did much breaking of his own, going to nine tiebreaks.

McEnroe, by contrast, beat at least three top-20 players (including #4 Vitas Gerulaitis) and played only a single tiebreak in his  20-match winning streak.  He also had to play best-of-five-set matches in three of the four finals.

To match McEnroe’s mark, either in number of consecutive titles or difficulty of winning them, Raonic will need to start a new streak. The smaller number of ATP-level events now on the circuit, however, make it more difficult to find the perfect blend of conditions and weak opposition to put together such a streak.

That doesn’t mean McEnroe’s mark is safe, however.  Rafael Nadal is just five matches and one title way from matching at least the straight-set three-peat, sitting on a 10-match win streak in Barcelona.  In fact, Nadal has only lost one set in Barcelona since 2006.  Had he played in 2010, we might have been talking about a very different record right now.

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Filed under John McEnroe, Milos Raonic, Rafael Nadal, Records

February 19, 2013 · 4:30 pm

The Fastest Surface on the ATP Tour

Last week, Rafael Nadal claimed that the indoor clay surface in Sao Paulo didn’t play like clay–it was faster than the surface of the US Open.  It also wasn’t up to standard, with frequent bad bounces and occasional slides gone wrong.

It’s easy to write off Rafa’s complaints as the whining of a once-dominant player who inexplicably loses sets to competitors who might otherwise never appear on television.  But what if he’s right?  What if some clay surfaces are faster than some hard surfaces?

In fact, I stumbled on this paradox when sharing some surface speed numbers last fall.  In the Brasil Open’s first year at a new venue in Sao Paulo, it’s main draw players hit 58% more aces than expected, the highest rate of any ATP tour event, comfortably ahead of European indoor events in Marseille and Montpellier.

Amazingly, this year, players in Sao Paulo hit 78% more aces than they would have on an average surface.  Some of the individual performances are impressive: Nicolas Almagro hit aces on 21% and 26% of service points in his two matches; Joao Souza cracked 27% in a qualifying match.  The raw numbers aren’t as eye-popping as they might be simply because most of the competitors prefer clay-courts for a reason.  Put Carlos Berlocq on an ice-skating rink and he still won’t hit many aces.  In fact, Berlocq’s ace rates last week account for three of the top eight of the 55 matches he played in the 52 weeks.

Ace rate doesn’t tell the whole surface speed story, but it’s an awfully good proxy.  It consistently places the expected indoor tournaments near the top of the rankings and traditionally slower clay events like Monte Carlo and Rome near the bottom.  So when a clay event spits out numbers like these, something wacky is going on.

Much has been written of the homogenization of surface speed, and certainly many hard courts have gotten slower.  But the clay courts in Sao Paulo aren’t drifting toward a bland average–they are going where few clay courts have gone before.  Perhaps, as more events are played on temporary surfaces, we’ll continue to see unexpected results like these.  Certainly, we cannot assume that all clay courts are created equal.

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Filed under Rafael Nadal, Sao Paulo, Surface speed

February 16, 2013 · 11:10 am

The Most Lopsided ATP Semifinals

In the latest step of Rafael Nadal‘s minor league rehab assignment comeback, he’ll play Martin Alund tonight in the Sao Paulo semifinals.  Yes, the same Martin Alund who had never played a tour-level event before last week, has a career losing record in challengers, and only made the main draw as a lucky loser.

The jrank forecast gives Alund a 4.3% chance of beating Rafa tonight which, even having seen Nadal’s unconvincing win over Carlos Berlocq last night, seems a bit generous.

It also seems odd.  Even in lower-rung ATP events, players of Alund’s caliber (even a caliber or two above that) rarely reach the semis.  In San Jose this week, the lowest-ranked player in the semifinals is #22 Tommy Haas, assuring fans in California a very different level of play today.

As it turns out, hugely lopsided semifinals do occur now and then, and occasionally they even result in upsets.

Since the beginning of 2001, there have been about 1600 tour-level semifinals.  Using jrank, I estimated each player’s chances in those matches.  Nadal’s 95.7% probability of winning tonight doesn’t even rank in the top ten most lopsided semis.

Rafa has long been a stalwart of one-sided semifinals.  His dominance on clay is reflected in the numbers, and when he does play smaller events, he makes some opponents look woefully overmatched.  Of the 11 semifinals that were more lopsided than tonight’s showdown, Rafa was the favorite in four–including last week’s dismantling of Jeremy Chardy.  At the 2008 Barcelona event, Denis Gremelmayr had a mere 1.6% chance of triumphing over Rafa.  He won a single game.

(Chardy is rated quite a bit higher than Alund, but after last week’s loss to Horacio Zeballos, Nadal’s rating has fallen accordingly.  The jrank forecast for this week’s semifinal is thus almost identical to last week’s.)

Of course, there’s a big difference between a high probability and a certainty, and some of these lopsided matchups have generated surprises.  In Washington in 2007, the virtually unknown John Isner took out Gael Monfils, despite a mere 2.4% chance of victory.  The same year in Amersfoort, qualifier and eventual champion Steve Darcis defeated Mikhail Youzhny, overcoming a pre-match probability of only 6.1%.

Even Nadal has suffered in these situations.  The third-biggest ATP semifinal upset was Rafa’s 2010 Bangkok loss at the hands of Guillermo Garcia Lopez.

In all of those examples the underdog was a player of undeniable talent, while Alund has stumbled into his first ATP semifinal.  But as Nadal’s stumbles against Zeballos and Berlocq have shown us, it doesn’t matter so much who is across the net–the king of clay is far from his usual invincible self.

(After the break, find a list of the 63 most lopsided ATP semifinals since 2001. Asterisks denote upsets.)

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Filed under Forecasting, Rafael Nadal

December 27, 2012 · 11:40 am

Known Unknowns for Rafael Nadal

When Rafael Nadal returns to the tour–very soon, we hope–he will be entering uncharted territory.  Plenty of players miss time to injury, but it is rare for a top player to miss anywhere near this much time.

In fact, only three top 10-ranked players have ever left the tour and returned after a layoff of six months or longer.

Only one of those three–Juan Martin del Potro, in 2010–was forced to rest due to injury.  John McEnroe twice left the tour for stretches of several months, and Tommy Haas took time off in 2002 to take care of his family.  Haas’s layoff turned into something a bit more relevant, as his sabbatical was extended by a shoulder injury he suffered in preparation for a comeback.

While del Potro’s future is still unclear, the precedent for Nadal is concerning.  None of those players ever returned to their pre-layoff rankings.

Del Potro’s story, in fact, is the most encouraging.  When he suffered his shoulder injury, he had recently won the US Open and reached the final of the World Tour Finals, reaching a career-high ranking of #5.  With the exception of a brief return in October of 2010, he missed almost exactly one year.  While he didn’t return to the top 10 for another year, he won two small tournaments early on and reached the semifinals of Indian Wells barely two months into his comeback.  Two years later, his ranking is up to #7, still short of his pre-injury peak.

When Haas left the tour at the end of 2002, he had just recently fallen from his career-high ranking of #2.  When he returned more than a year later, he had early success similar to Del Potro’s, reaching the 4th round at Indian Wells and winning two events in his first six months.  Yet he didn’t return to the top 10 for nearly three years.

McEnroe is the enigma of this bunch.  Ranked #2 in the world at the beginning of 1986, he needed a break from the tour.  Seven months later, he began a comeback at Stratton Mountain, where he reached the semis and lost to Boris Becker.  After a clunker of a first-round loss at the US Open, he reeled off 18 consecutive wins, including three over top-10 players.  That put him back in the top 10, but it was two years into the comeback that he regained a position in the top 5–in part due to another six-month layoff beginning in September 1987.

Aging patterns

What the recaps of Haas’s and McEnroe’s layoffs hide is that, while they weren’t playing, they were headed into an age range where most pros start declining.  At the time of their returns, McEnroe was 26, Haas 25–a typical player’s peak age, at least before today’s new era of indestructible 30-somethings.

While McEnroe has shown astonishing longevity, his years as a contender for world #1 were probably about over when he took his sabbaticals.  And Haas missed the year in which he might have played his very best tennis.

Neither player is a clear precedent for a clay court genius with knee problems, but the age factor is tough to ignore.  Nadal turned 26 in June, putting him right in between Haas and McEnroe at the times of their departures from the tour.

Assuming Rafa is healthy, there’s little doubt he’ll maintain his position in the top 10.  I’d be surprised if he didn’t win at least a couple of clay court events this year, even if he maintains a much-reduced schedule.  But if history is any indication, he has seen the last of the top two.

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Filed under Injuries, Juan Martin Del Potro, Rafael Nadal, Tommy Haas

November 19, 2012 · 1:24 pm

If Rafa Only Plays on Clay

Since suffering the injury that would lead him to miss the second half of 2012, Rafael Nadal has said that he may have to cut back his tournament schedule so that he plays fewer matches on hard courts.

For someone who wants to remain at the top of the game, that’s a tough ask.  The majority of ATP ranking points come from hard-court tournaments.  If Rafa stuck to the clay, he would only be able to contest one of the four majors.

Becoming a full-time clay courter would almost certainly knock Nadal out of the running for world #1.  (As well as give him plenty of R&R in Mallorca.)  But how bad is it?  Let’s consider the possibility that in some future season, he only plays on clay.

Here is a possible 2013 schedule for a clay-only player, along with each event’s ranking points.  Three 250s are on this schedule, placed to provide warm-ups after each multi-week layoff:

20-Feb  Buenos Aires   250   
27-Feb  Acapulco       500   
09-Apr  Casablanca     250   
16-Apr  Monte Carlo    1000  
23-Apr  Barcelona      500   
07-May  Madrid         1000  
14-May  Rome           1000  
28-May  Roland Garros  2000  
09-Jul  Stuttgart      250   
16-Jul  Hamburg        500

If Rafa ran the table and won all of those events, that’s 7000 ranking points (only two of the 250s would count).  Unless the rest of the field becomes much more level, that won’t be good enough for the #1 ranking.  But it is a greater point total than Rafa has right now, and it would keep him in the top four.  Even averaging finalist points for these 10 events would allow him to remain in the top eight.

(Getting credit for those tournament wins would be a little trickier.  Players are required to show up for at least 4 500-level events, including one after the US Open.  If you only play on clay, there are no options.  To avoid the dreaded “zero-pointer” for not playing, Rafa might have to contest, say, Valencia.  However, points from those events no longer automatically count as one of a player’s top 18 events, so as long as the requirement was met, Rafa’s six non-slam, non-required-Masters events could be Monte Carlo, Acapulco, Barcelona, Hamburg, and two 250s.)

In practice, it’s tough to imagine that Rafa (or anyone else, short of Alessio Di Mauro) would avoid hard-court events entirely.  Much more likely is a scenario in which he plays all the clay court events possible and competes in hard-court events only when he feels sufficiently healthy.  That might mean an occasional semifinal run; it probably also means more second-round exits.

As unlikely and unusual as it would be, the all-clay schedule may be Nadal’s best route to setting more records.  With fewer injuries and much more rest, it’s easy to imagine him racking up another four or five French Open titles, along with perhaps ten more Masters crowns.  It would be an unusual career trajectory, to be sure, but it would also generate more fodder for the next ten years of GOAT debates.

 

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Filed under Rafael Nadal, Rankings

August 23, 2012 · 1:16 pm

The Slam No One Misses

By now you’ve heard: Rafael Nadal will miss the US Open.  It’s hardly a surprise, as Rafa hasn’t played a match since Wimbledon, and his knee has kept him off the tour for long periods in the past.

What is remarkable is the rarity of a top player missing the Open.  Despite its location near the end of the ATP schedule, after eight months of grueling tennis in which every player picks up his share of nagging injuries, New York gets a better turnout from top-10 players than any of the other three slams.

In fact, Nadal is only the third top-three player since 1991 to skip Flushing.  In 1999, #1-ranked Pete Sampras couldn’t play, and in 2004, it was #3-ranked Guillermo Coria who stayed home.  In the tournament’s last 21 editions, a top-ten player has missed the event only ten times.

It’s interesting to speculate as to why top players manage to show up in Flushing at a rate unmatched elsewhere.  Surely the event doesn’t have more cachet than Wimbledon.  Certainly the multiple shifts of surface throughout the spring and summer test every player’s mental and physical stamina.  Perhaps the longish break between Wimbledon and the Open allows players to take time off if they need it.  Most men play Canada and Cincinnati, but as we’ve seen this year, plenty of guys are willing to miss either one, meaning that only a serious injury keeps one out of the New York draw.

Defying conventional wisdom even further, the slam with the second-best turnout among top players is the French, not Wimbledon.  Since 1991, only 13 top-tenners have missed Roland Garros, and three of those were Boris Becker.

Wimbledon may be synonymous with the sport of tennis, but it is a distant third, with 25 top-tenners missing from the last 22 draws.  Here the no-shows are more logical: Alex Corretja three times, Marcelo Rios twice, Sergi Bruguera four times.  In the late 1990s, some guys simply didn’t consider the All-England Club a must.

Australia is a bit further back in fourth, with 29 top-tenners who didn’t play.  Melbourne does seem to have the least cachet of the four big events, but the tide may be turning.  Since 2006, only one top-ten player, Nikolay Davydenko in 2009, failed to make an appearance.

It may seem that absences from Grand Slams are random, driven by accidents such as major injuries that can happen at any time.  Any single absence surely does look that way.  There are larger forces at work, however–the value associated with certain tournaments, the demands of the schedule leading to physical breakdowns at some times and not others–that are not random.  In one more way, Rafael Nadal is proving himself a unique player, missing the most unmissable slam on the ATP calendar.

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June 29, 2012 · 12:18 pm

The Greatest Upset in Sports Recency

Last night, Lukas Rosol shocked the tennis world by beating Rafael Nadal.  Immediately, the verdict was in: One of the greatest (the greatest?) upsets of all time.  Completely unthinkable.  Impossible to see coming.

And to a certain extent, that’s correct.  Nobody picked Rosol to beat Nadal; I’d be surprised if anyone went on the record forecasting that the Czech would win a single set.  But for all that, the superlatives have gone too far.  It’s one thing to predict that Djokovic/Nadal/Federer/whoever will win a certain match.  It’s another to make the broader claim that they will always beat opponents of a certain level.  The first claim is a sound one; the second is madness.

One way to look at this is a glance at the betting market.  For high-profile matches, punters and sportsbooks give us a good idea of the conventional wisdom going into a match.  Pre-match odds varied from (very roughly) 25:1 to 75:1.  Even if we go to an extreme and take odds of 100:1, that means that the market gave Rosol a 1% chance of victory.  A small chance, but far from a zero chance.

So, of course, Nadal should have gotten through to the third round–he probably should have gotten to the semifinals.  But with 1% underdogs at every step, every once in a while it’s not going to happen.  Consider that each of the top three play two matches against unseeded opponents at every slam.  That’s six opportunities at every slam for a greatest upset of all time.  The occasional first- or second-rounder doesn’t fit the bill, like Nadal-Isner at last year’s French, but later-round matches take their place, like Federer-Goffin last month.

Given 24 opportunities per year, there should be one such upset every four years.  That’s still newsworthy, but statistically speaking, it’s not the greatest upset in tennis history, it’s the greatest upset in very recent memory.  And that’s just counting slams.

No nobody

Part of the reason we overreact to these things is that our brains aren’t wired to think about small probabilities–it’s either likely or it’s not.  Another reason is the historically unprecedented dominance of the big three.

Contributing to the effect is something that Steve at Shank Tennis pointed out:  The media is inaccurately portraying Rosol as a “nobody.”  Sure, Rosol has never played a Wimbledon main draw before, and he’s beaten a top-20 opponent only once. But this is the third-ranked player from the Czech Republic, a man who has been in the top 101 for more than a year, peaking inside the top 70.  In any major team sport, a top-100 player is among the top five on his team; number 65 might make an all-star team.

When Donald Young beat Andy Murray, we were shocked, but not to the same extent–we all know about Young’s potential, and besides, American fans have been talking about him for years.  Even when Alex Bogomolov registered the same upset the following week, it was a recognizable name, also in part due to US wild cards and press attention.

Rather than dismissing yesterday’s match as a freak event involving a player who we’ll never hear from again, we’re better off to treat it as a sign of just how strong the back of the field is.  Rosol is not the only man outside of the top 50 with a thunderous game.  He’s not the only threat on tour who was never talked up as a junior.  And he’s certainly not going to be the last “journeyman” to register a high-profile upset over an “unbeatable” opponent.

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Filed under Rafael Nadal, Wimbledon

March 29, 2012 · 9:46 am

The Fatal Flaw of Nadal’s Two-Year Ranking System

Now that Rafael Nadal has resigned from the ATP player council–apparently because no one took his two-year ranking plan seriously–we’re likely to hear a bit more about this alternate approach.

Presumably, Nadal’s method would count the last 104 weeks (two years) of results instead of the last 52, as is currently the case.  As far as I know, he isn’t pushing for any other adjustments.  As long as that is the case, the rest of the council (and the ATP in general) is right to ignore Nadal’s plan: It would do significant damage to the sport, without much in the way of benefits.  It would drastically slow the rise of young players, but change little for guys at the top.

Ultimately, the question is over the purpose of the ranking system.  If it is to reward past performance, a two-year ranking system may be appropriate.  If it is to rank competitors by their current level of play, treating a tournament 22 months ago the same as last week’s tournament is flat-out wrong.

Consider what the present ranking system tells us.  By equally weighting tournaments over the last 52 weeks (with more points for more important events, of course), a player’s ranking is the average of how good he has been over the last 52 weeks–in other words, it’s a approximation of how good he was 26 weeks ago.  For most players, this is a decent estimate of how good they are right now.  If we go to a two-year system, the rankings would be an estimate of how good players were one full year ago.  Yikes.

The most obvious casualties of such a system are young players (or any players, really) on the way up.  Even with the current system, the rankings take some time to catch up with a rising star like Bernard Tomic or Milos Raonic.  When Raonic had his great run in early 2011, the rankings were still counting a bunch of challenger results from one year earlier.  In a two-year system, Raonic’s more recent results would count for even less.  It would take twice as long for such a player to establish himself.

The clear beneficiaries, of course, are the opposite type of competitor: established players who are declining or injured.  If a player is consistently good, it really doesn’t matter how the ranking system is calculated–just about any way you slice it, Djokovic, Nadal, Federer, and Murray would be the top four.  But the players who benefit are the ones who posted good results between 52 and 104 weeks ago, and haven’t done nearly as well since.  Right now, that means injured players like Robin Soderling, and declining players like Andy Roddick and Fernando Verdasco.

Should Roddick and Verdasco continue to be rewarded for their play in 2010?  To me, anyway, the answer is a clear “no.”  Even with Roddick’s sharp decline, he will probably still earn a seed for the French Open.  Does he deserve more than that?

But what about Soderling?  He hasn’t played since June, and his ranking has fallen to #30.  Unless he returns in the next three months, he’ll fall off the list altogether.  If there is a case for Nadal’s system, this is it.  But the ATP already has two methods in place to protect players like Soderling: protected rankings (PR) and wild cards.  Players injured for a certain length of time are able to use a PR (equal to their ranking when they last played) for entry to a set number of tournaments.  Until recently, Tommy Haas was still using a PR of 20.  Soderling would have a PR that would get him into enough tournaments to rebuild his ranking, assuming he comes back with any semblance of his previous form.

Of course, there’s also the wild card.  When Soderling returns, even if he is unranked, every 250- and 500-level tournament would hand him a wild card without a second thought.  This makes PRs even more valuable than the ATP intended them to be: Haas, for example, has been able to use his PR of 20 for so long because many tournaments gave him wild cards.  He could save the PR for when he needed it.

The only disadvantage to PRs and WCs is that these players aren’t seeded.  But really, after sitting out for a year, does a player deserve safe passage to the third round?  I find it hard to believe that they do.  And if this is really such an important issue, perhaps a player such as Soderling could be granted the lowest seed (e.g. 32, at Indian Wells, Miami, or a slam) two of the times he uses his protected ranking.

To recap: A simple two-year system would retard the rise of young players, forcing them to prove themselves for twice as long as is currently the case.  It wouldn’t affect consistently good players.  It would help players on the decline who probably don’t deserve help.  And top players returning from injury have little problem entering tournaments; Nadal’s approach would just get them seeds.

But Jeff, doesn’t your ranking system use two years of results?

Yes, I was getting to that.  It’s crucial to distinguish between using two years of results (acceptable) and weighting all results equally (unacceptable).

The biggest problem with the ATP ranking system as is–and it would be an even bigger problem with a two-year system like Nadal’s–is that it treats long-ago tournaments as equal to yesterday’s tournaments.  The winner of the 2012 Indian Wells event has 1000 points on his ranking.  The winner of the 2011 Miami even has 1000 points on his ranking.  The winner of the 2011 Indian Wells event has … zero points on his ranking.

How a player performed 18 months ago, or 20 months ago, has some predictive value.  But not nearly as much as the predictive value of their more recent performances.  In slight support of Nadal’s case, this is particularly true of players returning from injury.  My system never removed Juan Martin del Potro from the top 10 or so; using a one-year system, the ATP rankings saw him drop far out of the top 100.

If you are to use two years of results, it is absolutely imperative to differentiate between recent results and older results.  In fact, even a simple approach of this sort would improve the current 52-week system.  My algorithm weights results one year ago about half as heavily as last week’s, and two years ago roughly one-quarter as heavily.  The weighting is not simple, and thus would be inappropriate for the ATP system, which must be easily understood by both players and fans, but it points the way toward simpler solutions that might work.

That’s enough for today.  Check back tomorrow, when I’ll go into more depth about how the current ranking system can be improved.

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Filed under Harebrained schemes, Rafael Nadal, Rankings