As we enter the last quarter of the tennis calendar with one more Grand Slam title to be decided, it is an appropriate time to take stock of the skills at the top of the ATP. Who is up and who is down when it comes to overall serve and return? Let’s have a look at the 32 current most highly rated servers and returners to find out.
Figure 1 begins with the latest server leaderboard. Despite his Wimbledon loss, it should come as no surprise that Novak Djokovic remains the most consistent server on the ATP. If you are going to bet on any player to deliver on serve, it is Djokovic. Indeed, when we contrast Djokovic’s expected serve win percentage heading into the American hard court swing, he is at a 76% overall serve win expectation against an 1800-rated returner, which is still 4% percentage points higher than the second highest rated player, Carlos Alcaraz.
It is interesting to see how narrow the range is when it comes to win expectations of top servers. Against an equal returner, just a few percentage points on serve separate a top 5 server from a a server just within the top 30. This also makes the gap Djokovic has created between himself and the rest of the field especially impressive.
Figure 1. Current Top 32 rated servers of the ATP. The left panel shows the current all-surface serve rating and the right panel is the expected serve win percentage on hard court against an opponent with an 1800 return rating.
Now, there is no reason to look for perfect agreement between ATP rankings and our skill ratings. This is for many reasons. First, rankings aren’t purely based on performance and they don’t adjust for the strength of opponent faced. Rankings aren’t specific to serve or return performance, but more about the sum of win results. Nevertheless, it can be interesting to pick out the cases where a player’s skill ratings differs markedly from their official rating.
There are a few standouts in this respect. First, there are the players who are more highly ranked than their serve ratings so may be labelled overrated on serve. This includes Daniil Medvedev, Holger Rune and Felix Auger Aliassime. On the other hand, there are players who are much more highly rated than their current official ranking. This is the case for Matteo Berrettini, Milos Raonic, Kei Nishikori and Kevin Anderson. Interestingly, these are all players who having comebacks after some hiatus. Their current ratings would be a combination of strong past performance and compelling recent results, something official rankings don’t account for.
When we look at the top of the return rankings, it is another leaderboard dominated by Djokovic and Alcaraz at the top. But in this case, it is Alcaraz who is the dominating over the rest of the field. Indeed, Djokovic and Alcaraz are the only ATP players expected to earn more than 50% of points on return when facing an 1800-rated server.
Figure 2. Current Top 32 rated returners of the ATP. The left panel shows the current all-surface return rating and the right panel is the expected return win percentage on hard court against an opponent with an 1800 serve rating.
Reviewing the list of top returners, we notice that more than few of the top servers are to be found. It is not a shock that players like John Isner and Milos Raonic have a massive gap between serve and return skills, and this has hurt their results overall. However, it might be more unexpected to have top 10 ranked players that aren’t in the top 32 of both lists. Specifically, we see World No. 5 Stefanos Tsitsipas and World No. 10 Frances Tiafoe not making the cut on return.
In the place of those spots we might have anticipated would be taken by more highly ranked players we find surprising names like Alex Molcan and Kei Nishikori. Molcan hasn’t played on hard courts extensively this year, but his return performance at Miami and Indian Wells, where he defeated several top 50 players, are leading to a still-optimistic outlook for his return potential in the coming weeks.
Kei Nishikori is an even more fascinating scenario as he is rated highly on serve and return. After a skyrocketing trajectory for several years on tour, Nishikori has been fighting to return to form after an injury hiatus. In 2023, he has been making his way through the Challenger level and recently had a huge win over Jordan Thompson in Atlanta. There is still a lot of work to do, but Nishikori looks to have the potential for pulling out an upset or two during the last hard court swing of the season.
But the biggest question for the US Open swing is whether anyone is going to prevent another Djokovic and Alcaraz Major title? The serve and return skills of the No. 1 and 2 shows why the rest of the tour may be intimidated. Players like Jannik Sinner and Andrey Rublev should have the skill set to keep another Alcaraz or Djokovic title from becoming an inevitability, but we haven’t really seen these players capitalize on those skills when they’ve had the opportunity. Then there are the comeback stories, like Alexander Zverev and Matteo Berrettini, that have won important matches on the biggest stages in the past but may still be grasping for their top form.
Let’s hope that more than one competitor can reach the heights of the level Djokovic and Alcaraz have been playing at in 2023 and keep us guessing about who will be the winners of the race thru the US Open.
Really interesting, thanks a lot!
This is the first number of this newsletter that I read, and I'm surely going to have a look at previous numbers.
I have a couple of quick questions, coming from a big tennis fan and someone who some long ago was a data-nerd:
1) where are you usually retrieving data?
2) are you using R, right?
Thanks a lot :)