She’s Got Skills: Reviewing the Current Top Servers and Returners of the WTA
With the Roger’s Cup wrapping up this weekend, we are well into the hard court race to the US Open. The North American lead-up has already given us some surprises on the men’s and women’s side. Let’s review the current leaderboard on serve and return to see who on the WTA are likely to be some of the biggest threats during the US Open swing.
When we look at the current top servers on hard court (Figure 1), Iga Swiatek and Coco Gauff take the top spots. It is interesting to find Swiatek and Gauff so close together in the ratings given the somewhat eerie similarities in their recent event results. Both players had earlier-than-expected exits from Wimbledon, particularly Gauff who failed to get beyond the first round. But both have bounced back in their transition to hard courts so far, each winning a hard court title (Coco in Washington and Swiatek in Warsaw) in their first hard court event since leaving Southfields. Both Swiatek and Gauff have also had just one match loss so far, each falling to Jessica Pegula in Montreal. Still, with Gauff and Swiatek expected to be winning 72%+ points on serve against an average opponent, they are still going to be some of the biggest threats in the weeks ahead.
Figure 1. Current Top 32 rated servers of the WTA. 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.
One pattern that jumps out from the serve rating summaries is that there is a clear drop off after the top 8. The top 8 separate the players expected to be in the 68%+ serve win range against an average returner. Many of the top 8 include the most highly ranked players in the WTA’s official ranking - Swiatek, Sabalenka, Jabeur, for example. So even with the serve advantage having less of a role for women’s tennis, serve ratings are still good predictors of overall win results.
For return ratings, on the other hand, we don’t see as strong of a correlation with WTA rankings (Figure 2). In fact only 3 of the top 8 servers are among the top 10 returners: Gauff, Swiatek, and Sabalenka. But many of those top servers are still competitive on the return. Ons Jabeur and Elena Rybakina, for example, are still expected to win the majority of points against an average server. Jessica Pegula, who is in the middle of an incredible run in Montreal, is an interest exception, being highly rated on serve but not making the top 32 on return. We will have to see more of the last quarter of the season play out to say whether Pegula has made gains in her return game or just caught some luck breaks.
Figure 2. Current Top 32 rated returners of the WTA. 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.
Coco Gauff has to be the biggest standout when we consider both the serve and return skill summaries together. Defense is clearly Gauff’s stronger skill, where she is rated 100 points above the next most highly rated competitor. But she still lands as the current No. 2 on serve, where she is close on the heels of Swiatek. Gauff’s skill stats should setup a formidable combination for the remainder of the season. With a Washington title already claimed, Gauff has shown she can consistently capitalize on those skills through an event. Whether she can do it again before the season’s end will be one of the questions to watch out for in the final months of 2023.