Let’s go back to the year-end tournament, the ATP Finals won by Daniil Medvedev, as seen through Craig O’Shannessy’s lens. This analysis compares the Russian’s return position with that of the opponents he defeated and of the players who featured in the 2018 and 2019 editions of the tournament. Here, we complete the analysis begun by Andrea Canella in this article, which focuses on the return and the serve of the Russian.
First off, a technical caveat: we do not have access to the full dataset analysed by O’Shannessy, but only to the data the article provides. This includes the interactive screens of Medvedev’s matches against Zverev (round robin) and Thiem (final). At any rate, the statistics refers to 44 of the 45 matches played in the past three editions of the ATP Finals.
O’Shannessy’s comparison shows that nobody returned serves as far behind the baseline as Daniil Medvedev – he has played eight matches at the 02 Arena, with five of these placing him in the Top 5 of this special ranking.
While the top players returned the first serve on an average 1.9 meters behind the baseline, Medvedev return position was between 4.51 and 5.51 meters off, a record distance registered in his opening match against Zverev, whom he defeated 6-3 6-4.
Medvedev returned so far off the baseline that even the ATP Infosys graphic system struggled to show the dots indicating his position – the Infosys system observe returns up to 5 meters off the baseline. But visual inspection suggests that a few returns happened about 7 meters behind the line: it’s almost the width between football goalposts.
The antipode of the Russian’s approach was Federer’s against Nishikori in 2018, a match won in two sets by the Japanese. Perhaps to save some energies, the Swiss hit 36 returns on the first serve at an average of 22 cm behind the baseline, barely three palms. Federer is obviously a player who contributes to lowering the average returning distance, but despite this, the gap has significantly increased during the 2019 and 2020 editions – not surprisingly, the two years when Medvedev qualified for the Finals.
Average first serve return distance:
• 2018 = 1.41 meters
• 2019 = 1.73 meters
• 2020 = 2.55 meters
Before we get back to Medvedev, let us take a look at the top-players’ stats concerning the return on the second serve. Needless to say, most tennis players place themselves as close as possible to the baseline (or even inside the court) when returning the second serve. Interestingly, tennis players over the past few years have gradually moved back from the baseline to a point where the average return position of the second serve in 2020 equals that of 2018 – but on the first serve!
Average second serve return distance
• 2018 = 0.23 meters
• 2019 = 1.25 meters
• 2020 = 1.43 meters
In 2018, tennis players returned the second serve having their feet inside the court on average 15 times out of 30 (the ATP Finals have 15 matches, meaning 30 performances in return). In 2020, that number dipped to 6 out of 30. Going into details on second serve returns, O’Shannessy makes a controversial point here, suggesting that tennis players nowadays move further and further back when returning the second serve than the first – usually, things are not like this. However, that was the case in this year’s semi-final between Medvedev and Nadal. Let’s have a look to the detailed data:
Medvedev
• distance vs Nadal’s first serve = 3.15 meters
• distance vs Nadal’s second serve = 3.85 meters
Nadal
• distance vs Medvedev’s first serve = 3.58 meters
• distance vs Medvedev’s second serve = 4.13 meters
The Russian and the Spaniard both have a natural tendency to need room on their serve returns, partly because they trust their own ability to return a serve this deep, even far off the baseline, and partly because they are inclined to play closer to the canvas than to the court. Both are extraordinarily defensive players, a behaviour reflected in their return positions. Still, we cannot say that they always take a step backwards on the second serve rather than on the first without analysing the data.
Unfortunately, the ATP does not provide these statistics on a seasonal basis, but the link in O’Shannessy’s article specifies that he’s discussing “historical” data, indicating that Medvedev’s distance on first-serve return was 4.07 meters, while the distance on second-serve return was 2.73 meters. We do not know exactly what those data cover, however – it could be this tournament or the whole of 2020, or, indeed, every match played by the Russian in the tournaments which collect this kind of data. But the sample is large enough to raise doubt that Medvedev actually moves further beyond the court on the second serve than on the first serve.
Moreover, as mentioned earlier, the match between Nadal and Medvedev was statistically anomalous for other reasons as well. Proof of the semi-final’s peculiarity, and of Medvedev’s chameleon-like nature, emerges from the numbers of the final against Thiem, where the Russian’s strategy was almost opposite to the patterns shown in the semi-final against Nadal. He moved forward and very close to the baseline on the second serve, returning at an average distance of 85 cm. What’s more, he got progressively closer on the second serve over the three sets (1,11 m – 0,87 m – 0,50 m) while at the same time increasingly moving back in order to return the first serve (2,87 m – 3,34 m – 3,88 m). It would follow from this that Medvedev tried to exploit Thiem’s technical flaws, e.g. pretty wide backswings, which make he finds it difficult to handle the balls returning to him faster than expected after his serve, especially with the lower bounce of indoor play. Furthermore, the Austrian just needs the slightest chance to crush the opponents with his fast pace, and it is likely that the Russian simply tried to obstruct this.
O’Shannessy emphasises that Medvedev’s tendency to retuning the serve from far behind the court could be an attempt to turn the game into a neutral baseline battle. In this scenario, Medvedev can move like a carp in a freshwater lake (possibly with no fishermen around): “it’s essentially just another groundstroke,” says the expert.
In conclusion, the analysis is interesting (even if only partial), because it tells us a number of things about Medvedev:
- he doesn’t need to stay glued to the baseline to win tournaments
- he moves back and forward on returning depending on game situations and the characteristics of his opponents
- because of him (as well as Thiem), the average return-distance at the Finals is increasing.
But the present numbers are not enough to say that tennis players generally return the serve further from the baseline – larger samples are needed to draw firm conclusions – and that they return the second serve further than the first.
Article by Alessandro Stella; translated by Claudia Marchese; edited by Tommaso Villa
