The decline of net play and the rise of baseline potency

[Rovesciarete]

Great post over at Heavy Topspin, with numbers to back it up. Very difficult to see a markedly higher frequency of net play in the future, unless we see specific technology and surface changes, imho at least:

Instead, what has probably happened is that for the typical player, both sides got stronger. As a result, the weaker side was no longer flimsy enough to make approaching the net a profitable strategy. Even players with weaker-than-average backhands are now able to hit powerful topspin passing shots. This is essentially the racket-and-string-technology argument, and it seems to me to be the most valid

There’s no question that tennis has drastically changed in the last few decades. But the conventional explanations for those trends don’t always hold up under scrutiny. In this case, while volleys have been reduced to a vestigial part of the singles game, groundstrokes–on both sides–have only gotten better.

Sinner seems to be the new prototype of this trend, after Nadal and Djokovic led the way. Some of the numbers of interest:

The same procedure applies to forehand potency and slice potency. The weights–plus one for some shots, plus a half point for others, and so on–are not precise. But the results generally jibe with intuition. Across 3,000 charted ATP matches, an average player’s results from a single match are:

• Forehand potency (FHP): +6.5
• Backhand potency (BHP): +0.8
• Slice potency (SLP): -1.3
• Backhand side potency (BSP): -0.5