Ivan Lendl was a pioneer back in his mid-1980s heyday, always willing to try new and different ways to maintain his sovereignty. One of his strategies, the Czech Hall-of-Famer revealed to fellow pro Jimmy Arias, was that at break point, his bitter rival John McEnroe served down the middle (T) at a rate of 72.6%. The calculation, at the time, seemed something like spycraft.
“Ivan would do [the math] himself,” Arias recently told me. “Somehow, Ivan would get video tapes of the matches of the guys he was most worried about and chart them to figure it all out. It had to be a lot of work.”
We’ve come a long way since Lendl sledgehammered his way into the International Tennis Hall of Fame. Now we all—from Wall Street to Main Street—worship at the altar of data and analytics. The trend is particularly striking in tennis, the only sport in which you can accumulate more measurable units (points, goals, runs) than an opponent and still lose.
That’s a real quandary for tennis, because not all points are of equal value. Grab more of the important ones in any given match and you win. But the margins these days are so small—“miniscule” may be the better word—that in many percentage-based statistical categories the difference between the leader and sometimes an entire group of lower-rated peers seems more like a rounding error than a valuable data point on which to hang your hat.
Consider this: Rafael Nadal ranks No. 4 overall in the ATP’s career (best) Under Pressure category, behind (in order from the top), Novak Djokovic, Pete Sampras, and Carlos Alcaraz. Worthy rivals all, right? Nadal leads the pack in the break point conversion category, and trails only Sampras in break points saved. The real-world difference: Nadal’s superior BPC percentage of 44.9% means that out of every 300 BP opportunities, he successfully converted 134.7 points. Djokovic, whose BPC is 44.1%, converted 132.3. That’s a difference of just over two more points—over a career.
The truism is that statistics don’t lie. But they often don’t tell you very much, or what you often really want to know. Why does one player win Wimbledon, while another with nearly identical stats does not? The stats like the rankings themselves, are efficiency ratings, crying out for context.
“I used to get annoyed at a player I [worked with] because he would get 80% of his first serves in—the tour leader in 2025 at the moment is Alexander Zverev, at 71.5%—but he won a relatively low percentage of them because he was just spinning the first ball in,” recalled Arias.
Or take the WTA, where in the current rankings Aryna Sabalenka is No. 1 and Karolina Muchova is No. 20. Big difference, right? But the gap in their stats is larger than three percentage points in just one category, break points saved: 64.9% for Sabalenka, 61.1% for Muchova. It’s a telling stat but it hardly accounts for the great disparity in their ranking and record.