Also today: Wild cards and doping bans; Miami preview podcast Carlos Alcaraz in the 2022 US Open final It is not easy to analyze the drop shot. Players don’t hit it very often, they sometimes hit it from very favorable or very unfavorable circumstances, and the goal of the shot sometimes extends beyond winning the point at hand. We can point to someone who hits droppers well and seems to win a lot of points doing so, but how much is the skill really worth? Carlos Alcaraz is the poster boy for the modern drop shot. He loves to hit it–possibly too much–and when he executes, it’s one of the most stunning shots in tennis. At the business end of his Indian Wells campaign last week, he went to the well seven times against Alexander Zverev, ten times against Jannik Sinner, and three more in the final against Daniil Medvedev. He won 11 of those 20 points. That doesn’t sound so impressive, but Alcaraz could hardly complain about the end result. To get a grip on drop shot numbers, we have a lot of work to do. What is a good winning percentage? Do any players suffer because they hit the drop shot too much? Is there a lingering effect from disrupting your opponent’s balance? Finally, once we have a better idea of all that, how does Alcaraz stack up? Drop shot basics To keep the data as clean as possible, let’s be specific about which strokes we’re looking at. While one can hit a drop shot in response to another drop shot (a “re-drop”), and it’s possible to hit a drop shot from the net in reply to a short volley or half-volley, those aren’t typically what we’re referring to. There are probably players (starting with Alcaraz!) who are better at that sort of thing than their peers, but those low-percentage recoveries aren’t today’s focus. In this post, when I say “drop shot,” I mean a drop shot from the baseline , excluding all shots from the net, including responses to earlier drops. The Match Charting Project gives us over 4,600 men’s matches to work with since 2015. Those 750,000 points include almost 35,000 drop shots. That works out to a drop shot in about 4.6% of points. Or from the perspective of a single player, it’s 2.3%, 1 out of every 44 points. The player who hits the drop shot ends the point immediately (via winner or forced error) about one-third of the time, and 19% of the droppers miss for unforced errors. Overall, the player who hits the drop shot wins the point 53.8% of the time. From the 60 players with the most charted points to analyze, here are the 15 who win the highest percentage of points behind their drop shots: Player Drop Point W% Kei Nishikori 69.6% Richard Gasquet 66.2% Nicolas Jarry 65.3% Sebastian Baez 63.2% Carlos Alcaraz 62.1% Rafael Nadal 61.3% Lucas Pouille 60.3% Roger Federer 59.7% Alejandro Davidovich Fokina 59.3% Roberto Bautista Agut 58.9% Marton Fucsovics 58.2% Pablo Carreno Busta 58.1% Jannik Sinner 57.7% Dominic Thiem 57.5% Andy Murray 56.7% Alcaraz does well here! Despite the presence of Kei Nishikori at the top, the list is heavily skewed toward clay-courters. Drop shots are a more central tactic on clay than on other surfaces, which works in both directions: Clay-courters are more likely to develop good drop shots, and players who have dangerous droppers are more likely to succeed on dirt. Another skill that contributes to a spot on the list is good judgment. Nicolas Jarry doesn’t hit many drop shots, so he is probably picking the ripest opportunities when he does. There’s almost zero correlation between frequency of drop shots and drop shot success rate . Call it the Bublik Rule. From the same group of 60 tour regulars, here are the top 15 ranked by frequency: Player Drop/Pt Drop Point W% Alexander Bublik 7.2% 45.4% Benoit Paire 5.4% 41.7% Carlos Alcaraz 5.4% 62.1% Alejandro Davidovich Fokina 5.2% 59.3% Lorenzo Musetti 5.1% 50.7% Holger Rune 4.8% 50.9% Sebastian Baez 3.9% 63.2% Robin Haase 3.9% 55.1% Fabio Fognini 3.7% 54.7% Matteo Berrettini 3.5% 52.0% Nick Kyrgios 3.3% 54.9% Andy Murray 3.3% 56.7% Novak Djokovic 3.3% 50.4% Botic van de Zandschulp 3.2% 51.4% Frances Tiafoe 3.2% 54.1% Bublik may be turning things around: In the Montpellier final last month, he attempted 18 droppers and won the point 14 times. For a consistent high-frequency, high-success combination, though, we’re back to Alcaraz. Only Carlos, Alejandro Davidovich Fokina, Sebastian Baez, and Andy Murray (barely) appear on both lists. Here are all 60 players in graph form. The top right corner shows players who hit a lot of drop shots and win most of those points. The closer to the bottom, the lower a player’s success rate; the closer to the left, the fewer droppers he attempts: As a percentage of all points played, Bublik wins the most behind his drop shot. But it comes at a cost, since he hits so many of them, often sacrificing points because of it. If we assume that each
