The rest. (headache, typing to relax after Advil and hoping for more sleep...)
Thank you for your answer. I will be watching for sure where this year is going. Suffice to say, what you say (apart from being supported by stats) also makes sense as he in fact gets older.
It's amazing how games and points line up with peaks. Fed went through the roof early, as you know, but he began to decline in 2007. You won't see this from results in a year when he won 3 slams and was stopped for the GS by Rafa. But his games and points started to drop. Why? Interesting question. Fed followed the earlier pattern. His career followed the usual norm with a peak in returning in the early 20s - which even now is not so different. Because he started out serving at such a high level, any drop in return was going to be reflected in overall stats. So this brings up an interesting question: are the larger heads and lighter rackets helping older players? Rafa and Novak are really a different generation in the way they played and still play changed tennis, and Fed had to evolve. They weren't the only two players changing, and in my mind Fed resisted evolving because, like all players, he did not worry about changing until he started to lose his edge.
Novak has followed the same pattern, but with a huge twist. If you check his early game, he had a serving weakness, and that weakness actually worsened in 2010. His return was evolving the whole time, but in waves. Then in 2011 the return went to a peak rarely seen, and of course he was around 24 then, exactly the time when former champions have mostly peaked. His return dropped after that year, so 2011 was clearly his peak returning. But his serve improved, and that's why 2015-2016 was a 2nd peak, this time with reduced defense but improved offense (serve.) So long as the serve stats go up as return stats go down, players stay at the same place. They may even win more, since the serve is such a massive weapon, and winning serve easily gives players an extra gear (Sampras.)
That's where the difference is for Novak. He was part of the generation after Fed, and he has faced no one who has further evolved the game. That allows him to coast.
But his return stats are going down with age, as they do with all players. Top players continue to control offense because they know what they are doing, where they are moving, and they are dictating play. The last time I checked he was 33.46% of return games this year, above his career average, and for any other player in the universe that would be peak. But not for him. 2018 was lower, but it was a weird year. 2019 is his 6th best year, but that's also behind 5 years, and we need to see how that holds up because it has been falling since the AO. I think that number will now fall. But we'll see.
His service % of games this year is 85%. That's below his career average. So unlike Fed, his service numbers are dropping. It's his 9th best year serving, meaning that he was better in 8 other years. One of those years was 2008.
Three possibilities:
1. We are seeing a decline, but it has not yet shown up in big wins.
2. He's trending up, which is possible, but he has generally been strongest in the spring, so the numbers need to come up or at least stay level for the rest of the year.
3. His career continues to be unpredictable because he has had strange peaks and valleys already.
There are two things that suggest a decline. The first is a fall in returning without an improvement or continued peak in serving. The other is his reduced schedule. Both the falling return numbers and reduced schedule suggest age, and how could that not be happening after the age of 30 for a guy whose biggest strength has been movement and recovery? But the continued struggles with serve need to be reversed, because when an aging player starts to drop stats in service games, he can never pick up the balance by improving the return.
I have the feeling that the huge void below the big 3 is so pronounced that Djokovic can basically unwind for most of the season without losing much belief in his abilities to sustain his level when he most needs it, and that enables him to peak his focus and (obviously) game at crucial junctures of the tournaments.
I agree totally. But part of this void is that a few players raised the bar so high, evolving the game, that until someone young figures out something new all the momentum remains with the aging players until they are finally over the hill.
That is why I am sceptical of the opinions of people that laugh when there is a talk about draws with the idea that the big 3 are just that much better that it doesn't matter who they get before and at the SFs.
You can't laugh at facts. Right now no one can touch these guys. That could change any time, but it remains in the realm of coulda, shoulda, woulda. Thiem has been the most impressive in challenging on clay, but some of the newer things he brings to the game are negated by serious weaknesses he may never plug. To win the younger players have to raise their game to the levels the Big 3 reached at their peaks, and no one is doing that. You can see the problem by looking at stats when the Big 3 are filtered out. You don't see anyone winning even 54% of points. Around 53% is about the most I see, and that's not good enough. It never was in the past. To pass that threshold you need someone great, a future ATG. I'm sure it will happen. You have to think that part of the problem is that the Big 3 at best sucked all the air out of the room, and at this point there is no glory left for everyone else. Just one major win by someone young would at least partially reset things. But first it has to happen.