ATP top 25 serve to height comparison

[Engelworks]

The other thread here got me curious who really has the best serve for his height. I'm sure it's debatable how to best quantify that, but I just chose aces per service game (SG) per height (H). This is all using the career stats on the ATP website.

Here's the current top 25 unsorted:

Here's the same results sorted by most aces/SG and then by most aces/SG/H in side-by-side comparison:

 

[torpantennis]

Gotta love that A/SG/cm stuff!

Seriously, the absolute height of the player means nothing. Rather, you should consider the net margin, because that dictates how much you can go for your serve.

 

[spirit95]

So no matter how you look at it Ivo is still the boss... Incredible. What a beast.

 

[Engelworks]

you should consider the net margin, because that dictates how much you can go for your serve.

I added another column, clearance, which is player height minus net height. Here are the results sorted by aces/SG and then by aces/SG/clearance for side-by-side comparison:

 

[Romismak]

OP good work

But i must say that i use for myself serve stats and ace-per service game is not accurate - still far better than media used ace - per match - which is very misleading statisic, anyway ace-per service game is also joke with some guys playing a lot of tie-breaks- which are not counted and so on

also aces are not only relevant category if determining top servers

If we look at this from neutral point of view than Raonic and Federer are best servers - Roger always had great serve - not ace oriented, but great serve and he is average guy - 185 cm, but one of better servers in the game, and Milos with his 196 cm is almost there with Ivo and John as 3rd best server in the game, while those 2 guys are 208 cm tall.

Milos has the same height for example like Berdych or Tomic...

So Roger and Milos i would say for their height serving far better than they are supposed to

BTW not listed here, but regular top 20 for years - Almagro - i think he is 183cm - his serve is great for his height too, always a lot of aces and free points

 

[Engelworks]

Personally I think the best metric would be a ratio of unreturned serves to total serves, but I don't know where to find either of those stats.

 

[Bobby Jr]

The other thread here got me curious who really has the best serve for his height. I'm sure it's debatable how to best quantify that, but I just chose aces per service game (SG) per height (H). This is all using the career stats on the ATP website.

An issue I have with the aces/SG/H thing is height is not a linear scale which starts at 0 and goes up. For a male the true "zero" point should be about 165cm (I doubt there are any pros shorter than that)... or, even better, pick the average height for a tour pro and make that zero - and then scale up/down from that point and find a height to aces-per game ratio which means more in a practical sense.

If you did something like that the list would look pretty different.

 

[okdude1992]

IMO the metric to end all the "best serve" threads would be average number of unreturned serves per game.

It would be problematic to get these numbers for obvious reasons, since the ATP doesn't seem to keep track of unreturned serves....

In the meantime, average number of aces per game is decent. A/SG/H as OP would call it.
I actually ran those exact numbers for the top 100 about a year ago for my stats class. I'll see if I can find that spreadsheet, just to add to the thread. I also did a linear regression based on height. There is a pretty strong correlation between height and aces per game. A few notable outliers were Ben Becker, Nicolas Almagro, and Milos Raonic. All hit more aces than expected which isn't surprising since all these guys have big serves compared to other players their size.