Headbanging with Rosangel

Rosangel, one of our most devoted and astute comment posters, had an intriguing idea after she watched Novak Djokovic's impressive performance at the two recent Masters Series events (Indian Wells and Miami). Knowing how tough it is to play your way to the top and stay there, she decided to do some serious number crunching (that skill appears to be emerging as a real TennisWorld avocation!) on the head-to-head front. In fact, she charted the H2Hs of the Top 12 against the Top 50 players, and further broke things down (not published) by gathering the H2H of the Top 50 vs. the current Top 5, Top 10 and Top 20. Below is her chart of the Top 12 and their H2H stats in a variety of key areas. It is accurate as of April 9.  In addition, here are some of Rosangel's comments on what she was attempting to do, and what she discovered:

• I have also looked at certain players we at TennisWorld have focused on recently - young guys, late-career winners and the former world number ones. I may post some of those stats in the Comments if you all are interested.

-  Among the Top 50 players, Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal, Andy Murray, David Nalbandian, Guillermo Canas, Tim Henman, Gaston Gaudio and LLeyton Hewitt all have a 50%  or better winning percentage against Top 5 opposition.

• Andy Roddick has only a 40% winning percentage against the Top 5, although he performs at a better than 50% rate against the Top 10. The other Andy (Murray) has a 53% WP against the Top 5 but against the Top 10 his WP drops to 41%

-Two off-the-radar players with winning records against the Top 10: Guillermo Coria and recently retired Andre Agassi.

-  Outside those elites who have a winning record against Top 5 players, only three players - Djokovic, Marat Safin and Ivan Ljubicic  - have a 50% or better WP against the Top 20.

• The table includes players' ages, and the year they turned pro. Note that Nadal turned pro in 2001, but with one exception, was not playing on the main tour until 2003.

-  Andy Murray, on a shorter career (time-wise), has built a stronger record against the top dogs than his friend and rival Djokovic. But Djokovic's numbers vs. the Top 10 will benefit on April 16th, when Murray enters the Top 10.

Here are some other oddities for you to savor:

1) Wawrinka is the highest-ranked (No. 36) never to have had a win against a Top 5 player

2) Benjamin Becker gets a similar "honor" if you expand the pool of opponents to the Top 10. In fact, Becker has the peculiar distinction of having only one win against a Top 20 player - No. 20 Jarkko Nieminen.

3) Dominik Hrbaty has the unique honour of being the only Top 50 player with a winning H2H against both Federer (2-0) and Nadal (3-1). But he has losing a losing H2H against the rest of the top 5, and the other three members of the Top 10 whom he has played.

I also started thinking about those top players, personified by Human Litmus Test  Kolya The Obscure (Nikolay Davydenko), who have losing H2Hs against the Top 5, Top 10 or Top 20. My investigations were sparked by the work of Sam and Andrew, and the debate they raised over Roddick's place in the scheme of things.

So I looked at top players' records against the current Top 50, to see if they beat the players who they ought to be beating. In this table the Complete Dominance column tracks the number of players who have not been able to post a single win over the player in question.

Federer's numbers versus the Top 50 are astonishing; Nadal's nearly as impressive - especially when you consider his age. But Roddick is also at least 10% ahead of the other contenders. He is well ahead of Kolya, who has a losing H2H (75-76) against the current Top 50 - thus proving, as if we didn't already know it, that his ranking is perhaps artificially inflated by the "Best-18" system used for ranking (that is,  the computer uses a player's 18 best results, no matter how many tournaments he plays). The only other players who have losing records against the Top 50 are Tommy Robredo, Murray and Djokovic (for the latter two, age undoubtedly has something to do with this).

Federer is Tier 1, Nadal is Tier 2 and Roddick is Tier 3? I looked at their career winning percentages to see if they shed light on this issue. Of course, this is not authoritative for assessing a career-in-progress, but it's interesting nonetheless. Federer has a career winning percentage  of 79.6%, and Nadal sits at  78.1% - closer than I expected. Roddick has won 76.1%,  while Hewitt has slipped to 76.0%. The remainder of the Top 12 have winning percentages between 60% and 68% - with the outstanding exception of Davydenko, who's at 56.8%.

Looking at the game's recent greats, Pete Sampras had a 77.4% winning percentage, and Agassi 76.0% (that's weaker than Roddick's). The highest winning percentage of all was Bjorn Borg's 82.3%. He is closely followed by Jimmy Connors at  82.0%  - truly astonishing, given that Connors had a long career and ended up playing twice as many matches as Borg. McEnroe came in third at 81.7%. From there, the next players are Federer and Nadal. With the exception of Hewitt, our still-active former Number Ones - Moya, Ferrero and Safin - have career winning percentages in the mid-60s.

Finally, I couldn't notice how thin the actual H2H records of today are. The most substantial current "rivalry"  is Federer-Hewitt at 11-7 (favoring Federer),  followed by Federer-Nalbandian at 8-6 (again, for Federer). I don't know that 13-1 Federer-Roddick counts as a rivalry, or even 11-3 (Federer owns Ljubicic). Tommy Haas and Hrbaty, though, have something interesting going, with Haas leading 8-6.

If memory serves, Rod Laver and Ken Rosewall played so often that professed to not know their H2H, though they seemed to agree that Laver had won more. More recently, Sampras led Agassi by a healthy margin, 20-14, while Jim Courier-Michael Change finished 12-12. Stefan Edberg nosed out Chang at 12-9 and Borg bested Connors, 13-8.  Mats Wilander prevailed over Edberg, 11-9. Given their wildly different styles, that rivalry had it all.

So Federer-Hewitt is a pretty hefty rivalry spoiled by one inconvenient fact: Federer won their last 9 matches. No former number ones, it seems, are able to provide a big or close challenge to the current number one.

-  Rosangel

(Ed. note: marvelous work, Rosia. Assist to Steggy for helping get these tables into viewable form - PB).