!Picby Pete Bodo
One of the longer-running debates in tennis is over the degree to which statistics matter, at least in the sense that they seem to be of crucial importance in baseball—not just to how the game is presented and interpreted, but in the very fabric of its history.
Dissidents like to point out that the gaudy '22 forehand winners' stat can mean everything—or nothing. Remember how the tone for the entire men's final at Wimbledon this year was painfully established by a pair of horrible forehand errors by Rafael Nadal? Novak Djokovic won both points and the set, and he never looked back until he was the new champion. How many glorious 15-all winners would it take to offset the damage done by those two shots?
Those serve percentages and return-points-won stats can also be deceiving. What difference does it make that you won 82 percent of your second-serve return points if you flubbed of whiffed on the three that were attached to the only break points you saw all day?
However, that's just quibbling—you can say exactly the same thing about certain baseball statistics. The .312 hitter doesn't win you the World Series if he's collected an inordinate number of hits off weak pitchers in a sorry division, or if his average really is .212 with men in scoring position.
The search for reliable statistics goes on, in almost all sports, and it invariably makes the games we watch and play more interesting. I know the ATP, and our favorite ATP genius Greg Sharko, are always canvassing we writers for ideas that might improve or add increased relevance to statistics. I always thought it would be good to know what percentage of Big Points a player wins, those BPs defined as points played from 30-all, deuce, or advantage. Maybe we'll see that stat one day.
I'll be taking a closer look at some of the more striking ATP stats (MatchFacts, in the organization's patois—Ricoh MatchFacts if you don't mind giving a sponsor a plug) in the off-season. But now, if you haven't visited that module at the ATP website recently, let me give you a little pop quiz:
1 - Who has, to date, the best career first-serve return winning percentage (going back to 1990)?
2 - Who leads the ATP with return games won on grass over a career (active and retired, at last 50 matches)?
3 - Who are the top three career ace producers on clay?
If you just can't wait for the answers, scroll down to the bottom of this post.
The "by surface" component in these new, more comprehensive statistics is noteworthy. Nadal leads all players going back to 1990 in the break-points-converted-on-clay department. But he isn't even on the radar when it comes to the same statistic on grass. Seriously—I can't even find his name (he's 85 places down, at 40 percent—but tied with Andre Agassi, John McEnroe and. . . Brad Gilbert (among others). The only player whose conversion rate was better than 50 percent on grass is Christian Bergstrom (51 percent), but that's based on just 19 matches—a valid if not overwhelming sampling.
Now you can also view the full statistical tableaux of the top 200 on one page. The small print might make you dizzy, but you can just scroll down one column and see that Feliciano Lopez and Novak Djokovic have an identical 67 percent rate when it comes to break points saved in 2011. Only Gilles Muller (68 percent) and Ivo Karlovic (70 percent) posted better numbers among the Top 100.
Well, we could go on like this, which serves to remind me that there's another reason to keep statistics. And that's because they're a lot of fun. Frankly, I'm not sure that staring at the graph or chart where all these numbers and percentages are pulled together is easily converted into hard and fast conclusions about the overall superiority of one player or another. One obvious problem is that in some categories (as in the career break-points-converted percentage), a large number of players share the same number, and the range is narrow. In that case of BPs converted on all surfaces, it's between 30 and 46 percent. That's not insignificant, but the bunching is.
As any number of commentators has observed, you can't ever have too much information. In the next wave of statistics, somebody is going to find a way to combine and weigh the numbers in the individual categories and come up with something like an overall efficiency index. I have a strange feeling that if and when that happens, you'd come up with something like a mirror image of the Top 25 rankings, with perhaps one or two odd exceptions. But it's a good potential project—identify the key statistics that can quantify why Djokovic is No. 1, Nadal No. 2, and so forth.
But until that happens I'm open to all suggestions. And all statistics.
Your answers: 1. Guillermo Coria, 2. Karol Kucera, 3. Carlos Moya (on top with a whopping 1798 in 480 matches), followed by Nicolas Almagro and Ivan Ljubicic.