Djokovic’s Return Effectiveness is All About Breaking His Opponent’s Patterns
After two weeks of speculation on how Novak Djokovic would deal with his return to the Australian Open after his shocking deportation last year, Novak ended another chapter in Melbourne with his 10th Australian Open title and 22nd Major title overall. Those stats are even more remarkable when considering the relative ease of Djokovic’s path to his latest title. Even in the final against Stefanos Tsitsipas, Djokovic never really felt threatened, his own perfectionism being more of a source of frustration than his opponent.
Many have opined on how Djokovic is able to be so consistently dominant. In terms of tactics, it is the return game that is often highlighted as particularly lethal. It is one of those ideas that standard stats do such a poor job in demonstrating. Because standard stats usually focus on the outcome of points, like winners and unforced errors. When anyone watching Djokovic’s matches knows that so much of what happens in the final shots is simply the inevitable consequence of what came before.
Case in point is Djokovic’s serve return. Even when Djokovic isn’t ending the point on the serve return, he leaves you with the strong impression that the point is largely decided by what he does with that first shot. Both the depth and angles of that shot work together to put his opponent on the back foot and disrupt whatever game plan they may have had.
Public tennis data is not much help for getting at the true quality of Djokovic’s serve return, since it doesn’t tell you about any of the characteristics of shots (e.g. speed, location, etc.). But data from the Match Charting Project (MCP) (a tremendous volunteer effort) can help us get at some of the indirect impact of Djokovic’s serve return strength.
Consider Djokovic’s final opponent at this year’s Australian Opponent. Tsitsipas has a pretty single-handed backhand but it also his more vulnerable groundstroke shot. So he tends to prefer his forehand. According to MCP data, in his first round against Quentin Halys, even on 2nd serve Tsitsipas still managed to take his third shot on the forehand side 57% of the time. Against Djokovic in the final, that was down to 53%. If that drop in FH preference was entirely attributable to Djokovic, it would be a direct result of the quality and placement of his return.
What happens in any single match won’t tell us about a player’s general effectiveness. To do that, we need to expand our view and consider if a change we see goes beyond what can be explained by usual match-to-match variation in a player’s patterns. To be Djokovic’s defensive dominance to the test, we collected all hard court matches (the AO now undeniably being his favorite conditions) of opponents who have a head-to-head against Djokovic since 2012 of 10 matches or more in the MCP. We tally about the forehand preference on the third shot and in rallies when Djokovic’s top opponents were serving and we do the same for matches those opponents played against other players in the same years and matches, so that event conditions should be less of a concern for any differences we see.
Figure 1. Djokovic’s defensive impact on third shot forehand patterns of his opponents on hard court.
Figure 1 shows the average forehand preference on third shot on the player’s first and second serve. We can see that all 10 of these competitors favored the forehand on the first serve – all players going to that side on the third shot between 60% to 80% of the time. No matter who the opponent, we also see that this preference tends to drop on the 2nd serve, which should be no surprise because the weaker 2nd serve can help the receiver to be more of the aggressor on the return.
What about Djokovic’s impact? Given the general forehand preference, we are looking for players who get to the forehand significantly less versus Djokovic than other opponents in similar match conditions. We can see that in the overall point estimates in Figure 1, especially where the forehand rates against Djokovic are so pulled down that they surpass the 95% confidence region where the change could be explained away by match-to-match randomness.
We see a negative impact on 2nd serve almost universally. The results are actually ordered according to the magnitude of the change associated with Djokovic so we see he was the biggest thorn in Juan Martin Del Potro’s side on 2nd serve but had little impact on Rafael Nadal’s third shot preference, at least when it comes to broad type of shot. Indeed, only three of the opponents shown here were able to still hit the forehand more than 50% of the time against Djokovic: Stefanos Tsitsipas, Roger Federer, and Nadal.
Although we might not expect much impact on the first serve, given the difficulty of making an attack on the serve return against that shot, it is remarkable how many players we see going to the forehand much less versus Djokovic on the first serve third shot. Dominic Thiem moves down from 74% to 65%, for example, and Andy Murray from 70% to 61%.
Do we see any change in rallies as well? Although any change in forehand preference in a rally on an opponent’s serve can’t be due to the serve return alone, given the impact on that shot, we could expect to be a lethal setup shot that helps to give Djokovic more control in rallies. There is more match-to-match variation in the rally patterns but Figure 2 does back up this hypothesis in more than a few cases.
Figure 2. Djokovic’s defensive impact on the rally forehand patterns on his opponent’s serve on hard court.
On 2nd serve, we see an opponent like Dominic Thiem going to the forehand less than 50% of the time in his matches against Djokovic, and against Daniil Medvedev the rate is down to 45%. Even players who showed less change on the third shot, appear to have a reversal of patterns against Djokovic, including Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal.
The other thing that is notable on the rally shot patterns is that we see less of difference on the first and second serve against Djokovic. This suggests that Novak is able to neutralize the first serve more quickly than other opponents, putting opponent’s like Thiem and Federer under similar pressure after a few shots regardless of how the point started.
If there is any one piece of strategic advice that the analyses above suggest about how to win against Novak Djokovic, I think consistency on the first serve has to be one of them. From the large shifts we see on the 2nd serve third shot against Novak we can conclude that this is a key place where Djokovic takes control on the return. However, in a best-case scenario against Novak, opponents have to find ways to do more with fewer options, and, as we’ve seen repeatedly over the last decade of Djokovic’s career, that is a tough ask for even the strongest competitors.