By pure number of titles, Connors has the record, but a lot of his titles were the equivalent of 250s or lower in terms of draws. This blog post from Charles looks at titles won based on their ATP points denomination for the winner.
Source: http://tennisgut.blogspot.ca/2016/04/victory-points-djokovic-vs-connors.html
Victory Points - Djokovic vs Connors, Lendl vs Sampras
Novak Djokovic has just won his 63rd main tour title with his victory in Miami last week. It seems like a lot of tournaments and is almost as many as Nadal has won with 67... or Sampras with 64. But it’s still a lot less than Jimmy Connors’ open era record of 109 titles.
Here’s the title list for the top 20 of the Open Era (since 1968 when professionals were allowed to play with amateurs).
109 Connors
94 Lendl
88 Federer
77 McEnroe
67 Nadal
64 Sampras
64 Borg
63 Djokovic
62 Vilas
60 Agassi
58 Nastase
49 Becker
46 Laver
44 Muster
41 Edberg
37 Smith
35 Murray
34 Chang
33 Ashe
33 Wilander
That list may or may not agree with various lists published on the ATP website or Wikipedia, and that’s because there was a fair bit of confusion in the early days of the open era (1968-1973) about what tournaments counted and which were exhibitions. Some supposed ‘tournaments’ had draws of only four players or were ‘invitational’. But after weighing all the evidence and relying mostly on the judgment of others, I think the above list is fairly good and would be accepted by most.
But I got to wondering if Novak’s 63 titles were actually a bigger accomplishment than Connors’ 109. Just looking at the total, Connors seems much better, but I’ve been under the impression that titles were a lot easier to win back in the 1970’s. Some of the tournaments were small or had very weak fields.
There wasn’t one united ATP tour back then like there is now. There was something called the Grand Prix Tour that became the ATP, and then there was the WCT (World Championship Tennis) tour that actually predated the Open era slightly and lingered in various forms right up to 1990. There was also the National Tennis League (NTL) and the US Indoor Circuit. And then there was the ITF, which took over the Grand Prix (kind of) for a while and controlled the slams.
It was a mess. Eventually in 1990, the ATP united the remnants of these tours (mostly the Grand Prix) and created the tour structure that we are still enjoying to this day.
Since I love finding structure and unpacking numbers, I wondered if it would be possible to weight all tournaments of the Open Era along the lines of today’s tour structure with tournaments worth 2000, 1000, 500, and 250 points. I thought that if I could do that, I could assign a point value to all of Connors’ tournament victories and compare them to the point value of Djokovic’s tournaments. Then I could see if Djokovic’s 63 tournaments (so far) were actually a bigger accomplishment numerically than Connors’ 109... comparing the ‘Victory Points’ from the tournaments won.
Of course, there’s bound to be flaws in my system. In addition to suffering from probably incomplete information, it’s pretty tough to say if Connors victory at Tempe, AZ in 1974 should be a 500 or a 250 tournament. I basically resolved this by looking at the ranking points assigned by the old tournaments when these were available. When they weren’t available, I looked at the prize money for the event in comparison to prize money for other events of the same year.
It’s interesting that there were actually many MORE tournaments on the ‘main tours’ back in the 1970’s than there are now. This meant there were a whole bunch of smaller tournaments. I don’t know if the top pros were trying to keep all the tournaments alive by spreading themselves out over all these tournaments or if they were trying to avoid playing each other, but it was pretty typical that each tournament would only have 1 or 2 top players in the draw. This meant that the top players played each other much less frequently than they do now. The top two might meet only 1-3 times per year instead of the 5-8 times they typically face off per year now. In my opinion that would make it easier to win a lot of tournaments, like Connors did, since he frequently wasn’t facing a lot of other top players.
So the first thing I compared was the big 4 from today: Federer, Nadal, Djokovic, and Murray. At last count (Apr 6, 2016),
Multiplying this out, Federer would have
2000 x 17 = 34,000 from slam victories
1500 x 6 = 9,000 from WTFs
1000 x 24 = 24,000 from 1000 level tournaments
500 x 27 = 13,500 from 500’s
250 x 14 = 3,500 from 250’s.
His total then is 84,000 victory points. It’s important to realize that this number comes from tournament victories only. It does not in any way account for runner-up performances, or how deep a player goes at any event. Only wins count in this number.
Here are the totals for the Big Four:
84,000 Federer
66,000 Nadal
65,250 Djokovic
22,750 Murray.
It’s interesting to see how close Djokovic is to Nadal, only 750 points back. Since Djokovic has won fewer tournaments, that means Djokovic must be averaging more points per tournament won – on average Djokovic is winning bigger tournaments. Here are the averages:
Average points per tournament won:
1036 Djokovic
985 Nadal
955 Federer
650 Murray
Clearly, Djokovic is leading the pack in points/tournament, but perhaps that changes over the course of a career. Drilling a little deeper into Federer’s tournaments, now that he is older and not ranked has highly, he is playing and winning more 250’s than he did in his prime. In the five years from 2005-09, Federer won only two 250 events, whereas in the last 5 years, he’s won five. Similarly, Djokovic has won only two 250’s in the last five years, but perhaps that will change if he becomes no longer able to claim all the slams and 1000’s he’s winning now. Other than one 500, all the tournaments Djokovic won last year were at the 1000 level or higher (ten of them). Nadal won no 250’s at all from 2006-2012, despite racking up 38 bigger tournaments.
Now what about other players from the open era? I went through the records of the other leading players and assigned them all point values (250, 500, 1000, etc). This was reasonably easy for Sampras and Agassi, since the point structure hasn’t changed much since their day (other than doubling). For the Becker, Edberg, Wilander, Lendl generation, I started having to get more interpretive. And by the time I was considering McEnroe, Borg, Connors, and Vilas I was digging deep into old tour money lists. For what it’s worth here’s what I got.
It’s interesting that Federer has the highest total points despite having less total tournaments than Lendl or Connors. It’s also interesting that Connors and Vilas have the lowest average points per tournament. It means that the tournaments these two won tended to be lower ranking tournaments. However, in the end, I think the ‘Total Points’ may be the best measure of a player’s accomplishment. Here’s the list again with just total points, (to make it easier to read).
84,000 Federer
71,750 Lendl
66,000 Nadal
65,250 Djokovic
64,500 Connors
60,750 Sampras
59,000 McEnroe
54,250 Borg
46,250 Agassi
42,500 Becker
34,000 Vilas
33,750 Nastase (for Nastase, sub-1000 tournaments were split 50-50 between 500’s and 250’s)
33,250 Edberg
Of course point allocation is not completely fair. The Australian Open for example counts as 2000 points no matter when a player won it. But before 1983, it was a relatively easy tournament to win – probably more like a 500 today.
In fact, in the early open era, the status of the slams in general was uncertain. Were they really the biggest, or were the US Pro Championships in Boston more important? or the WCT finals? Because of the various wars between the different circuits like the WCT, the Grand Prix, and the ITF, most of the top 10 did not play the 1970 French Open, the 1971 US Open, 1972 French, 1972 Wimbledon, and 1973 Wimbledon (or most of the Aus Opens to 1983). The biggest tournaments in these years may have been the WCT tournaments. Furthermore, anyone playing World Team Tennis in 1974-78 was banned from the French Open in the same year – which led to some weak French draws.
But gradually the four slams rose again in importance and with them the Grand Prix circuit, so that by the mid 1980’s the tour was starting to look a lot like it does now and was ready for the takeover by the ATP tour that happened in 1990. So all slams get 2000 points no matter when they were played.
In 1970 the Grand Prix decided to promote 9 of their tournaments as the “Group One” tournaments, that later came to be called the “Super Series” in 1978. These 9 tournaments eventually evolved into the 1000 level tournaments of today, and there have always been 9 each year since 1970. Although in the big picture they were not nearly as important or difficult to win in the early years as they are now, for the sake of consistency I have awarded 1000 points to the winner since their inception. Further, I have not given any more than 500 points to any other tournaments, even WCT tournaments that may have offered more prize money than the early Super Series. I justify this in part because often the WCT tournaments had very small draws of 4 to 16 players.
Source: http://tennisgut.blogspot.ca/2016/04/victory-points-djokovic-vs-connors.html
Source: http://tennisgut.blogspot.ca/2016/04/victory-points-djokovic-vs-connors.html
Victory Points - Djokovic vs Connors, Lendl vs Sampras
Novak Djokovic has just won his 63rd main tour title with his victory in Miami last week. It seems like a lot of tournaments and is almost as many as Nadal has won with 67... or Sampras with 64. But it’s still a lot less than Jimmy Connors’ open era record of 109 titles.
Here’s the title list for the top 20 of the Open Era (since 1968 when professionals were allowed to play with amateurs).
109 Connors
94 Lendl
88 Federer
77 McEnroe
67 Nadal
64 Sampras
64 Borg
63 Djokovic
62 Vilas
60 Agassi
58 Nastase
49 Becker
46 Laver
44 Muster
41 Edberg
37 Smith
35 Murray
34 Chang
33 Ashe
33 Wilander
That list may or may not agree with various lists published on the ATP website or Wikipedia, and that’s because there was a fair bit of confusion in the early days of the open era (1968-1973) about what tournaments counted and which were exhibitions. Some supposed ‘tournaments’ had draws of only four players or were ‘invitational’. But after weighing all the evidence and relying mostly on the judgment of others, I think the above list is fairly good and would be accepted by most.
But I got to wondering if Novak’s 63 titles were actually a bigger accomplishment than Connors’ 109. Just looking at the total, Connors seems much better, but I’ve been under the impression that titles were a lot easier to win back in the 1970’s. Some of the tournaments were small or had very weak fields.
There wasn’t one united ATP tour back then like there is now. There was something called the Grand Prix Tour that became the ATP, and then there was the WCT (World Championship Tennis) tour that actually predated the Open era slightly and lingered in various forms right up to 1990. There was also the National Tennis League (NTL) and the US Indoor Circuit. And then there was the ITF, which took over the Grand Prix (kind of) for a while and controlled the slams.
It was a mess. Eventually in 1990, the ATP united the remnants of these tours (mostly the Grand Prix) and created the tour structure that we are still enjoying to this day.
Since I love finding structure and unpacking numbers, I wondered if it would be possible to weight all tournaments of the Open Era along the lines of today’s tour structure with tournaments worth 2000, 1000, 500, and 250 points. I thought that if I could do that, I could assign a point value to all of Connors’ tournament victories and compare them to the point value of Djokovic’s tournaments. Then I could see if Djokovic’s 63 tournaments (so far) were actually a bigger accomplishment numerically than Connors’ 109... comparing the ‘Victory Points’ from the tournaments won.
Of course, there’s bound to be flaws in my system. In addition to suffering from probably incomplete information, it’s pretty tough to say if Connors victory at Tempe, AZ in 1974 should be a 500 or a 250 tournament. I basically resolved this by looking at the ranking points assigned by the old tournaments when these were available. When they weren’t available, I looked at the prize money for the event in comparison to prize money for other events of the same year.
It’s interesting that there were actually many MORE tournaments on the ‘main tours’ back in the 1970’s than there are now. This meant there were a whole bunch of smaller tournaments. I don’t know if the top pros were trying to keep all the tournaments alive by spreading themselves out over all these tournaments or if they were trying to avoid playing each other, but it was pretty typical that each tournament would only have 1 or 2 top players in the draw. This meant that the top players played each other much less frequently than they do now. The top two might meet only 1-3 times per year instead of the 5-8 times they typically face off per year now. In my opinion that would make it easier to win a lot of tournaments, like Connors did, since he frequently wasn’t facing a lot of other top players.
So the first thing I compared was the big 4 from today: Federer, Nadal, Djokovic, and Murray. At last count (Apr 6, 2016),
Multiplying this out, Federer would have
2000 x 17 = 34,000 from slam victories
1500 x 6 = 9,000 from WTFs
1000 x 24 = 24,000 from 1000 level tournaments
500 x 27 = 13,500 from 500’s
250 x 14 = 3,500 from 250’s.
His total then is 84,000 victory points. It’s important to realize that this number comes from tournament victories only. It does not in any way account for runner-up performances, or how deep a player goes at any event. Only wins count in this number.
Here are the totals for the Big Four:
84,000 Federer
66,000 Nadal
65,250 Djokovic
22,750 Murray.
It’s interesting to see how close Djokovic is to Nadal, only 750 points back. Since Djokovic has won fewer tournaments, that means Djokovic must be averaging more points per tournament won – on average Djokovic is winning bigger tournaments. Here are the averages:
Average points per tournament won:
1036 Djokovic
985 Nadal
955 Federer
650 Murray
Clearly, Djokovic is leading the pack in points/tournament, but perhaps that changes over the course of a career. Drilling a little deeper into Federer’s tournaments, now that he is older and not ranked has highly, he is playing and winning more 250’s than he did in his prime. In the five years from 2005-09, Federer won only two 250 events, whereas in the last 5 years, he’s won five. Similarly, Djokovic has won only two 250’s in the last five years, but perhaps that will change if he becomes no longer able to claim all the slams and 1000’s he’s winning now. Other than one 500, all the tournaments Djokovic won last year were at the 1000 level or higher (ten of them). Nadal won no 250’s at all from 2006-2012, despite racking up 38 bigger tournaments.
Now what about other players from the open era? I went through the records of the other leading players and assigned them all point values (250, 500, 1000, etc). This was reasonably easy for Sampras and Agassi, since the point structure hasn’t changed much since their day (other than doubling). For the Becker, Edberg, Wilander, Lendl generation, I started having to get more interpretive. And by the time I was considering McEnroe, Borg, Connors, and Vilas I was digging deep into old tour money lists. For what it’s worth here’s what I got.
It’s interesting that Federer has the highest total points despite having less total tournaments than Lendl or Connors. It’s also interesting that Connors and Vilas have the lowest average points per tournament. It means that the tournaments these two won tended to be lower ranking tournaments. However, in the end, I think the ‘Total Points’ may be the best measure of a player’s accomplishment. Here’s the list again with just total points, (to make it easier to read).
84,000 Federer
71,750 Lendl
66,000 Nadal
65,250 Djokovic
64,500 Connors
60,750 Sampras
59,000 McEnroe
54,250 Borg
46,250 Agassi
42,500 Becker
34,000 Vilas
33,750 Nastase (for Nastase, sub-1000 tournaments were split 50-50 between 500’s and 250’s)
33,250 Edberg
Of course point allocation is not completely fair. The Australian Open for example counts as 2000 points no matter when a player won it. But before 1983, it was a relatively easy tournament to win – probably more like a 500 today.
In fact, in the early open era, the status of the slams in general was uncertain. Were they really the biggest, or were the US Pro Championships in Boston more important? or the WCT finals? Because of the various wars between the different circuits like the WCT, the Grand Prix, and the ITF, most of the top 10 did not play the 1970 French Open, the 1971 US Open, 1972 French, 1972 Wimbledon, and 1973 Wimbledon (or most of the Aus Opens to 1983). The biggest tournaments in these years may have been the WCT tournaments. Furthermore, anyone playing World Team Tennis in 1974-78 was banned from the French Open in the same year – which led to some weak French draws.
But gradually the four slams rose again in importance and with them the Grand Prix circuit, so that by the mid 1980’s the tour was starting to look a lot like it does now and was ready for the takeover by the ATP tour that happened in 1990. So all slams get 2000 points no matter when they were played.
In 1970 the Grand Prix decided to promote 9 of their tournaments as the “Group One” tournaments, that later came to be called the “Super Series” in 1978. These 9 tournaments eventually evolved into the 1000 level tournaments of today, and there have always been 9 each year since 1970. Although in the big picture they were not nearly as important or difficult to win in the early years as they are now, for the sake of consistency I have awarded 1000 points to the winner since their inception. Further, I have not given any more than 500 points to any other tournaments, even WCT tournaments that may have offered more prize money than the early Super Series. I justify this in part because often the WCT tournaments had very small draws of 4 to 16 players.
Source: http://tennisgut.blogspot.ca/2016/04/victory-points-djokovic-vs-connors.html
