The announcement of a 6-week suspension of the ATP Tour was just the latest in a series of disruptions of the tennis calendar owing to the COVID-19 pandemic. With no official decisions on whether players will retain their current ranking, I consider what the possible impact would be if the tours were to decide to carry current rankings forward for a prolonged period.

Since introducing the Research Paper Competition in 2010, the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference has become one of the biggest stages for statistical research in sport. In this post, I review the methods used by the finalists and reflect on what this could suggest about current trends in statistical analysis in the sports industry.

In a recent article on Liverpool’s dominance of the English Premier League, John Burn-Murdoch created a visualization of the height and weight of EPL, NBA and NFL players. This got me interested in how current ATP players compare to the build of those other professional athletes and whether the build of top players has changed since the beginning of this century.

In her debut match after nearly 8 years out of professional play, Kim Clijsters impressed many by taking Garbine Muguruza to a second set tiebreak. Neither player was winning more than 60% of points on serve, which made me wonder how likely a tiebreak was in this case. In this post, I use a simple Monte Carlo model to examine the most likely set scores for a variety of server matchups.

By the time of the Australian Open quarterfinals, Dominic Thiem had already played 10 hours and 23 minutes putting him in the top 20% of match time played to get to the quarters among men competing in Grand Slams in the past decade. And he only got further in the tail of total competition load as the event progressed. In this post, I look at whether the intensity of Thiem’s journey likely made his prospects for the title even more difficult.