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!Doha 2
by Bobby Chintapalli, Contributing Writer
Before talking Doha and data, let’s talk Venus and Serena Williams. They're the elephants in the room, even if they're not in the desert. The sisters qualified for the WTA Championships but aren’t playing due to injuries. If you’re not sure that’s a loss, or how much they mean to this sport, consider something as simple as the short WTA press release bios of the women who are playing: Nearly every one included a reference to one or both sisters.
With Justine Henin also out (she qualified as an alternate but is injured as well), Doha is a competition for best of the rest. That isn’t meant to disrespect the ladies there—a player could do much worse than be known as the best after Serena or, for that matter, Venus and Henin. After all, the Doha draw includes two Grand Slam winners, and the others who qualified beat out Maria Sharapova, Svetlana Kuznetsova and Ana Ivanovic, all of whom have won majors. All but one of the entrants has been in a Grand Slam final, and two players, Caroline Wozniacki and Vera Zvonareva, are competing to leave Doha with the year-end No. 1 ranking.
The Numbers
Now let’s do the numbers and include the Williams sisters and the alternates, Li Na and Shahar Peer. (You just know one or both of them will end up playing.) First, let's consider singles win percentage, which indicates who did the winning, regardless of how much they played. Here’s that list in descending order.
Serena Williams – 86.2%
Kim Clijsters – 85.7%
Venus Williams – 84.4%
Caroline Wozniacki – 79.7%
Vera Zvonareva – 73.0%
Sam Stosur – 72.6%
Elena Dementieva – 71.4%
Victoria Azarenka – 69.5%
Shahar Peer – 69.1%
Li Na – 66.7%
Francesca Schiavone – 66.1%
Jelena Jankovic – 65.5%
Let’s also look at average prize money per singles match won. Call me crass for bringing dollars into this, but if the win percentage tells us who won often, this tells us who won the big matches. (Disagree? Want to suggest a different measure? Let me know in the comments.) Here goes, again in descending order. (No, I didn’t make up Serena’s figure. And, yes, that’s about the median price of a single-family home in the South.)
Serena Williams – $148,280
Kim Clijsters – $99,151
Vera Zvonareva – $56,536
Francesca Schiavone – $55,404
Caroline Wozniacki – $54,348
Venus Williams – $54,099
Jelena Jankovic – $44,820
Sam Stosur – $35,952
Li Na – $29,631
Elena Dementieva – $28,667
Victoria Azarenka – $26,307
Shahar Peer – $19,802
Now about the groups: Maybe the divas haven’t been split up, but the top two seeds, Russians and Grand Slam winners have been. Take a look.
Maroon Group
[1] Caroline Wozniacki (DEN)
[4] Francesca Schiavone (ITA)
[5] Samantha Stosur (AUS)
[7] Elena Dementieva (RUS)
This group includes the draw’s youngest and oldest players, Wozniacki and Schiavone. It also includes the two players making their year-end championship singles debuts, Schiavone and Stosur.
Based on head-to-head records, Schiavone is the weakest of the eight: She has a winning record against only one other player in Doha. Perhaps luckily, that player, Wozniacki, is in her group. Schiavone is probably happier, though, about who isn't in this group—Clijsters and Zvonareva. She’s 0-21 against them.
Dementieva has the most winning head-to-heads against others in this group (two versus one for the others). Yet she has a poor record at the WTA Championships, where she’s playing, impressively, for the 10th time in 11 years.
White Group
[2] Vera Zvonareva (RUS)
[3] Kim Clijsters (BEL)
[6] Jelena Jankovic (SRB)
[8] Victoria Azarenka (BLR)
This is the stronger group at least partly for one reason—Kim Clijsters. She has a winning head-to-head against everyone who's playing Doha. In fact, she’s never lost to Schiavone, Stosur or Wozniacki. (Think they’re glad to be in the other group?)
Clijsters won this tournament in 2002 and 2003. Zvonareva, having a career year, was a finalist in 2008. Jankovic has the worst winning percentage of all eight players this year, but note that she has a favorable head-to head record against five other players. Azarenka has perhaps the barest resume in the group, but she won Moscow just days ago. And you know what they say about winning begetting winning.
Those are the numbers, and hopefully they give you an idea of what happened this year. You’ve seen enough stock prospectuses and women’s tennis though to know they don’t tell you much about what happens next. But you have Doha for that.