As they say - there are lies, damn lies, ...and statistics!
I think I have pointed out before that you have to look at statistics in context. In particular with serving statistics you have to recognise that the high numbers posted by players like Karlovic/Isner/Arthurs are skewed in their favour by the fact that they aren't the best players. So on average they crash out in the 3rd or 4th round, whereas the likes of Federer/Sampras/etc are there to the bitter end. So at the sharp end they are meeting the great returners, the ones who have dumped Karlovic/Isner/etc out. Or just the players on a hot streak of form.
Inevitably that will depress their serving statistics. In fact that will be true of all the greatest players because much more of their time will be spent playing the great returners.
A truer comparison would look at serving statistics only over the first 3 rounds, or only against the top 8 seeds, or something like that. I doubt stats like that will ever be available.
Yes, but here is what we CAN do.
We can look at the whole list of players, from any era, and look at how they win in terms of games.
Then we have sort of an automatic cut-off between really dangerous players who win, and others who just disrupt fields.
I think a good place to start is to take career records of all the men who have won majors, and if we have to flesh that out, start adding the players who have not won majors but who have made it to major finals. Or we could include winning masters and masters-level events.
Here is what I DO know. 60% of games is like a magic number. When you see a player winning that much, you are looking at a player who is very rare. In fact, just getting close, say 57% or higher shows a very high level of play.
Not only have I gone back and looked at players from the last 25 years, I've also looked at the big picture for the earlier greats, which includes Connors, Borg, McEnroe, Lendl, others. And also the OE record of Laver and Rosewall.
These players ALL won a lot of games.
So now we come to the bottom line.
Let's set the bar at around 55% of games, which is low, but we can catch a few players like Wawrinka who are low achievers in smaller events. We can also assume that figures are highest on clay and lowest on grass, and OE stats clearly support that. Also major results. The biggest beatdowns happen on clay, smallest margins on grass, and I think really careful examination may show that the margins were lower on old grass simply because of the chaos factor - bad, low bounces that hurt guys on both sides of the net in terms of consistency.
We can now set this up:
95/15
90/20
85/25
80/30
75/35
All of these, rough as they are, will get a player to 55%.
At the top there is an advantage in any error, which is why we also have to weight for strong serve. Ir you look at the 90/20 metric - and of course that could be 92/18 - then you get HC players like Isner and Karlovic, who can sink lower than that and still take out several players in a row when they get red hot, but they seldom win big because they can't keep it up.
At the other end you get Coria-like players on clay, who have weak serves but who are absolute hell to beat because they get everything back.
What this means is that you can statistically just about eliminate players who don't have combined stats that show 55% or above games.
So if you have a guy who is at the top of the service list, someone like Karlovic, but if he is not even ON the return list leaders, career, at the very bottom, you can eliminate him just on the numbers as possibly being anywhere near an ATG. You only need to numbers - % of service games won and % of return games won. If those two figures do not combine well, take that guy off your list.
Then, to be sure, you look up his profile, and it is: 92/9. That's barely over 50% for his career. He's impressive when he serves well, and sometimes the serve almost gets him to the end of tournaments, and obviously he does huge damage to other players when the serve is red hot, but no one is going to remember him in the future as other than a freak.
Now we look at another guy with a decent return, but only decent: 76/22. This time the result is under 50%. It's Benneteau. And immediately we know he was never going to win much.
You can go down a whole list of servers and eye-ball it the same way. Impressive serving plus no return equals a guy who does not win much. The converse is true. Even if you see a guy winning 30% of return games, which is almost Murray level, if the serve is barely over 70%, the guy can't win. And so on.
That brings us to Rosewall and Laver, and others who are in that magic area above 55%. Laver is higher because he was 4 years older in the OE, and I can't use figures from before the OE because it's not fair. They won fewer games back then - ALL of them. We know why. So you have aging ATGs who appear to win more in the OE even though they had to be coming down, as all aging ATGs do.
For a guy like Rosewall, the same possibilites. If he won more than 55% of games, it had to split over this:
80/30.
And that's a minimum, because he was better than that, and Laver even higher. What that means is that they HAD to win a lot of service games OR they had to be winning return games at a rate that today is impossible. One of the other. So the question is not IF they did this, but HOW.
And that brings us to today. Who would be a model showing what a modern Rosewall or Laver would do, now?
The answer is that we have to look at one of the small guys - Ferrer, Chang, Nishikori, a few others - then assume one of these guys is capable of serving better (as Sampras and Federer both served so much better than all others their height) and has better all court skills (more dangerous at the net, less one-dimensional), and has the kind of scrambling skills that Chang, Coria and a few others had.
Then we take the Federer model, which turns out to be:
89/27 or 58% for his career, all surfaces
Then think how high the second number goes for shorter guys who are even faster and more invincible defenders.
That gets you to Chang: 79/32
First of all, note that we are at 55.5, which is nearly ATG level, no suprise. But the important thing is that he is up 5 from Roger. Let's give him an extra 5 on serve, because there is no way Chang is an example of the very best serving possible for his height. We give him 84 instead, and suddenly Chang has a bunch of majors and a whole bunch of Masters.
Now, let's look at OLD Laver:
In the official tournaments counted by the ATP, Laver is close to 58%, at least 57%, and that includes his decline as a player. So the lower you estimate his serving numbers, the higher his return numbers go. You either have a man who was serving WAY better than Chang, or someone who was returning way better (that's not too likely.)
My conclusion is that we simply do not have a Rosewall or Laver level short guy, and because of this we are assuming that a Nishikori or Coria or Chang type player cant' have good health, a much better serve and GOAT level return skills.
But I think Laver did.
That's my conclusion.
