GOAT - excel model

[sunof tennis]

Putting Lendl 1st is the epitome of rewarding failure.

Agree. No way on God's green earth is Lendl the best player ever.
I don't care is we decide it's Nadal, Laver Federer, Borg, Gonzalez (can't go earlier than this because I never saw any of them play, even in old highlights), but it can never be Lendl- a tier II at best.

 

[topher]

Agree. No way on God's green earth is Lendl the best player ever.
I don't care is we decide it's Nadal, Laver Federer, Borg, Gonzalez (can't go earlier than this because I never saw any of them play, even in old highlights), but it can never be Lendl- a tier II at best.

lol, I'm loving the hate for Lendl. It's hard to finagle your way around Lendl's longevity and consistency really and I didn't really want to do a major revision to the OP's model. I figured I'd leave that to the author.

A quick and dirty way to punish longevity is to divide by top 10 seasons, then I get:

1 Borg
2 Nadal
3 Federer
4 Lendl
5 McEnroe
6 Djokovic
7 Sampras
8 Connors
9 Becker
10 Agassi


This isn't exactly great either. I think the better way would be to take the 8 or so best seasons and compare, as the OP suggested, if you were going to go that route. Perhaps I'll try that later...

 

[Amygdal]

Thanks for the changes

I'll look at them later, but they seem reasonable.

8 seasons is a very reasonable number, in my opinion. I actually have an older (and dirtier) version of this model, in which I detailed such averages,

I only modeled there (did it a few months ago), for the first 36 players of the modern era. Although all in all it's a very similar model to the new one.

The reason I am mentioning this, is because, for those 36 players (including such guys as Rios or Ferrero, I think the criteria I used was either #1 position or multiple GS), I found some very interesting patterns:

1. Players who had points in my model (point = any tournament won and any masters or higher final) for 5 seasons = 36/36
2. Players who had points in my system for 6 seasons = 31/36, excluding such names as Ferrero, Murray (model did not include 2013), Rafter, Rios and Stan Smith
3. for 7 seasons = 26/36, excluding Orantes, Safin, Stich, Hewitt and Djoko (again, not including 2013)
4. for 8 seasons = 23/36, excluding Courier, Kuerten and Wilander.

So far, so good, but the real drop comes after season 8, only 15 out of 36 players, which is substantially less than half have points for that.

However, I did not average it out simply, but rather used an average of the top seasons, so for any player only the top 8 seasons count, if someone had a bad season in between, it is not averaged by 8 but rather by another number.

Now here are the results by averaging, between 1 year and 15 years (Only Connors and Agassi reached that feat).

1 year average GOAT:
1.McEnroe
2. Federer
3. Djokovic
4. Borg
5. Lendl
6. Connors
7. Nadal (note - this might change after this great year he's been having, haven't calculated yet)

2 year average GOAT
1. Federer
2. Borg
3. Lendl
4. McEnroe
5. Djokovic
6. Connors
7. Nadal

3 year average GOAT
1. Federe
2. Lendl
3. Borg
4. McEnroe
5. Djokovic
6. Nadal

4 year average GOAT
1. Federer
2. Lendl
3. Borg
4. McEnroe
5. Nadal
8. Djokovic

5 year average GOAT
Same as 4 year

6 year average GOAT
same as 4 year

7 year average GOAT
same as year 4, except Borg and McEnroe switch places

8 year average GOAT - Which is exactly what we were looking for:
1. Federer
2. Lendl
3. Borg
4. McEnroe
5. Nadal
6. Connors
7. Sampras
8. Agassi
9. Becker
10. Edberg.

Of course, Djokovic is not displayed here because he hasn't contributed for 8 seasons yet

I will add a similar analysis in the more updated spreadsheet which I OP'd with.

 

[TMF]

Awesome stats Amygdal. I would expect Borg to be #2 but Lendl show us how amazingly consistent he was for a long stretch.

Thanks for the effort.