Meles
Bionic Poster
Thiem's major weakness in 2015 on clay and hard courts was the first serve return game.
Clay: 30% of first serve points won
Hard: 26%
To put this in perspective the career hard court leaders are Murray and Djokovic at 34 and 33%. Nadal and Coria lead on clay at 39%. All respected names on these surfaces. So, basically in 2015 Thiem was horrible to put it mildly at 8-9% below the career leaders.
For 2016, Thiem's numbers:
Clay: 32%
Hard: 32%
A big jump, but what is even more interesting is this jump did not occur until after the Australian Open. A quick tally of Acapulco, IW, and Miami (reverse order starting with Djokovic match):
39, 79, 39, 12 (Tsonga), 41, 29, 28, 41, 46, 25, 47
The average over these recent tournaments is about 39%! The leaders for the entire 2016 hard court year:
1 Novak Djokovic 36
2 Gael Monfils 34
3 David Goffin 33
4 Roger Federer 33
It seems to be the key to beating Thiem too as Tsonga crushed Thiem and Thiem only got 12% of Tsonga's 1st serve points. Djokovic had all sorts of trouble holding serve against Thiem in Miami.
So Thiem has gone from the outhouse to the penthouse in the first serve return points won on hard courts in the last month. The question is how much will this translate to the Spring clay court season? (Poll)