For the last couple of years, I have been hearing on this site how weak 2014-2016 was. It seems to be a pattern where fans sound off that a certain group of years were weak when it is a player other than their favorite that is dominating and I have heard this from all sides, whether it is 2006, 2010 or 2015. Regarding the years in question, I wanted to delve further into this with more substantial evidence. It's easy to just say an era was weak without any proof to back up that claim and it's better to have numbers and stats at the very least to support your view. Numbers are more concrete and are not subjective like the "eye test" commonly is. So below is a compiled list of the most dominant years in the last decade as well as the years between 2014 and 2017, with the most important stats from the year end top 10 from each of those years. There is an average underneath which only includes the players not highlighted in yellow and the average does not include the most dominant player(s)' stats of that season, in order to give a more accurate view of the level of the rest of the field.
Looking at just these years, it appears that 2015 actually was the best serving of the top 10 and 2011 was the best returning. It appears that serving has improved as the years progressed which confirms the theory that players in later years have been serving better than ever before. Also, both 2014 and 2015 has strong stats overall for the top 10 and does not show any slip in the level of play for those years. Personally, I thought both 2014 and 2015 was rather high quality tennis and never did understand the complaints that the competition was so weak. Where the level begins to dip is in 2016 where service games won and return games won decreased. This probably has a lot to do with Federer being out most of the year and no longer in the top 10. Then, it is a more significant decrease in 2017 in basically every stat across the board with both the return and serving stats being at the lowest of any of the named years. This is really is not a surprise since 4 of the top 5 went AWOL and are MIA from the top 10 altogether, and left the field in somewhat disarray. So, in conclusion I see no evidence to call 2014 or 2015 weak years and only 2016 and especially 2017 qualify. This actually follows the ELO model which shows the dip happening in 2016 and a more noticeable dip in 2017. Now, this does not show the stats for the overall field beyond the top 10, because that would be too difficult to compile, but it does show enough to show trends within the top players. Feel free to chime in but let's be civil and have a real in depth discussion on this.