I do, and so do most tennis analysts...
i fear i don't concern myself with the unquestioned assumptions of such shallow thinkers
Lol yeah with a wooden racquet lmfao
how have you been on this forum for over a decade but you don't understand how to compare or even discuss players from different eras? what good does it do anyone to imagine Borg playing with a wooden racket against prime Federer on grass?
Different form, different events...
Same reason Djok didn't play well enough to reach peak/prime Fed at Wimbledon...
so you agree then that it's not a matter of fortune and simply the prime-level forms of three players happening to overlap differently? you can't say it was fortuitous for Djokovic to be best on grass from '11-'15 rather than Nadal's '06-'11, but then excuse away Nadal squandering that potential fortune from '12-'17 (and with earlier losses than Djokovic had from '07-'10) - that's inherently prioritizing/deprioritizing performance in certain time periods/at certain ages with no credible basis
Again, Different form, different event... you do know how tennis works right?
you're positing with absolute certainty that Nadal would have beat Djokovic at Wimbly '18 were it not for the roof, and suggesting that Djokovic's win was largely down to the roof, except there's literally no way of gauging the extent of that effect and we already have an example of Djokovic beating prime Nadal outdoors on grass... one might as well say that being indoors helped Nadal's serve not get brutalized by Djokovic, setting him up to be successfully aggressive throughout the match... if you agree that Nadal and Djokovic were both not in their primes, then the question of their forms at the time and the result of the hypothetical roofless match isn't even particularly relevant to the question of "who's better at their best on outdoor grass"...
the Wimbly '18 match doesn't particularly help Nadal in a relative comparison against Djokovic on grass, because it's ultimately one GOATed match they played against each other (out of a whole career of grass matches), that could conceivably have gone the other way, but generally favored the eventual winner (like AO '12 or RG '13), and furthermore had neither in their primes and both making comebacks to grass (or general) relevancy. anyway, given the presence of the roof, the match is in fact also irrelevant to the overall discussion about outdoor tennis
They're not... it's so dumb to pretend all of Nadal's outdoor titles were on clay...
62-24-4 (Nadal, 90) vs 20-52-8 (Djokovic, 80) vs 11-47-19 (Federer, 77)
the point is that Nadal's career-long domination of clay is the reason why he leads the outdoor title count, and so it is double counting to refer to those two things as separate points, not that the accomplishment isn't impressive or that he doesn't deserve to be #1 in that stat
My actual counterargument is that OP said “best outdoor player” and not “best player on outdoor grass and hard court”
OP also didn't say "best player on clay" or "most dominant on a single surface"! if i thought clay didn't matter then i would have obviously went with Federer, no?