Were the 2023 Australian Open Draws Easy?
Winning seven straight matches at the pro level is hard even under the luckiest of circumstances. So we are clearly stretching the meaning of ‘easy’ in our title question. But we know that some draws are more difficult than others. And if you have watched enough matches at Grand Slams, you probably asked yourself at some point over the last week whether this year’s Australian Open was easier than usual?
One way to try to get at the difficulty of the event is to look at the path of each of its finalists. A finalist may not be the underdog in any match, but we expect a deep draw to at least present some challenges. With the finalists set on the men’s and ladies’s sides of the draw, we can size up the grind each finalist’s path to the final before a title trophy is lifted in Melbourne.
Starting with the ladies’s side, the match-to-match chance of loss is shown in Figure 1. From this, it is immediately clear that Elena Rybakina had the harder path of the 2023 finalists. Rybakina could have exited the event at any round with a 1 in 5 chance or greater. That is surprising when we consider that Rybakina entered the AO as the 8th most highly rated player. Despite that, there was still a 1 in 3 chance of a loss in her first round against Elisabetta Cocciaretto, which speaks to the difficulty of her draw and the current depth of the WTA.
The typical path to the final rounds of a Major presents progressively more difficult opponents. But, due to chance and idiosyncrasies of seedings, what is typical doesn’t always happen in practice. We can see that in Rybakina’s case, where both the R32, versus Danielle Rose Collins, and the semifinal, where she faced Victoria Azarenka, were essentially 50-50 propositions. And R16 was Rybakina’s biggest hurdle to the final, as this is the point in the draw where she came up against the No. 1 rated player Iga Swiatek. This was the only match where Rybakina was the clear underdog, having only a 20% chance of getting to the next round.
Figure 1. Match loss probability thru the semifinals for the women’s finalists of the 2023 Australian Open.
By contrast to her final opponent, Aryna Sabalenka had the more straightforward and more typical path to the final. Sabalenka entered the AO with a slightly lower rating) than Rybakina, her first three matches didn’t present massive pressure. From then on, the win difficulty for Sabalenka became harder but she was never the underdog. In fact, her toughest odds in R16 when she faced Belinda Bencic, still gave her just over a 50% chance.
What about the men’s finalists? Stefanos Tsitsipas and Novak Djokovic will meet to decide the winner of the 2023 Australian Open title. If Tsitsipas manages to nab Djokovic’s 10th Australian Open win from him, he will have done so having survived two matches (versus Jannik Sinner and Karen Khachanov) to get to the final where he had a 1 in 3 chance of losing.
Figure 2. Match loss probability thru the semifinals for the men’s finalists of the 2023 Australian Open.
Djokovic’s path to the final was, by contrast, almost laughably easier, with the odds looking like a first round match for a top seed for essentially the entire event. That is testament in part to Djokovic’s form heading into the first Major, which, despite managing a hamstring injury throughout the event, he has more or less played to. But it is also a statement about his field of competitors, in a period in the sport where the rest of the Big 4 have past their peak and other competitors that might have been a challenge or at least made for an interesting match – like Kyrgios and Rune – didn’t get their chance this time around.
We can see that the ease of Djokovic’s 2023 path can’t be attributed entirely to his own skill by comparing it to the difficulty of his matches at his past wins at the Australian Open (Figure 3). We can see that 2023 is the only season where Djokovic never had more than a 15% loss probability in his matches going into the final. It is especially notable that years like 2012 and 2013, where Djokovic was coming off a nearly untouchable 2011 season, he still faced strong opposition in the second week in Melbourne.
Figure 3. Breakdown of path difficulty for all of Novak Djokovic’s title runs at the Australian Open and his potential 10th title in 2023.
The breakdown of Djokovic’s Australian Open runs suggest significant variation in the depth of top men’s tennis over the last 15 years that have made for much tougher and much weaker events from year-to-year. Depth comes down to the distribution of skill of players. So the best way to see the changes in depth is to look at the complete ratings of the seeds.
Figure 4 gives the depth breakdowns since 2008, the year of Djokovic’s first AO win. To help compare the changes from year to year, we’ve centered the player rating on the average rating of a seed across years. So where you see the curve cross zero is the ranking at which a player was at the average seed rating. This zero point is an important marker for the overall difficulty of the field. A more left-centered zero – like we see in 2008 – means that the “best” players that year weren’t much better than the average in the last 15 years. In contrast, a more right-centered zero point – like we see in 2016 – means that more of the top seeds were far above the average rated seed and should have presented a pretty fierce event.
Figure 4. Depth curves for the Australian Open men’s seeds from 2008 to 2023.
The depth curves highlight several of the different patterns at events we all have a sense of. The years when there is no obvious favorite and any one of handful of players have a plausible chance at a title, like in 2010. The years when there is one dominant player but the depth of the field is still steep, like in 2016, and other years where there are few who can challenge one strong player – the situation the 2023 Australian Open draw finds itself in.
So it does appear that, at least for the men’s draw, 2023 has been one of the more underwhelming draws in recent history. Still, the final itself always looms largest in our memories of a Major. That still leaves time for Sunday’s showdown to deliver an epic that could make 2023 an Australian Open worth remembering.