The Elo rating system is one of the most popular tools for rating player and team performance. In this post, I show how we can take the Elo system beyond match wins and use it to rate players on the two most fundamental skills in the sport: serving and returning.
Having a metric for match excitement would be a useful tool for separating humdrum matches from thrillers. In this post, I have a look at two indices for measuring match excitement and discuss what’s to like and dislike about each.
The 2017 MLB World Series gave baseball fans a thrill-ride for the post-season. It also gives us an idea of how to size up the excitement of a sporting event. In this post, we look at an ‘excitement’ statistic for tennis and use it to rank the excitement of men’s matches at the 2017 US Open.
Imagine you could measure the quality of every shot during a tennis match. What would it reveal about a player’s performance and where on the court they perform best?
Fighting off fatigue in any Grand Slam match is a challenge. Does this get even harder after multiple matches?
A talk at the recent New England Symposium on Statistics in Sport (NESSIS) made me wonder whether we can observe player fatigue in tennis matches? and how?
Do the numbers on the scoreboard affect how a player performs? In this post, we look at how to measure scoreboard effects and identify some top players who appear vulnerable and others who seem impervious to the scoreboard.
In 2016, Angelique Kerber and Garbine Muguruza shocked tennis with Major wins. This year, Jelena Ostapenko and Sloane Stephens were the unexpected first-time slam title-holders. Who, if any of these winners, were helped by an easier Grand Slam field?
Now that the US Open—the last of the four Majors of the tennis calendar—has ended, it is more clear than ever that the 2017 season has been a strange one.
For the first time in 36 years, the US Open women’s singles event will have an all-American semifinal. What were the odds of this historic outcome?
