Forehands, titles and what-ifs: How Rafael Nadal broke tennis math

Rafael Nadal broke math. That is the best compliment I can possibly think to give to an athlete in any sport.

Numbers are how I make sense of the world. Through them, you can come to understand how a game is played and what matters the most within it. Each sport has its statistical guidelines, its must-win categories and its unbreakable records. And throughout what will end up going down as about a 23-year career, as Roger Federer was breaking geometry and Novak Djokovic was breaking the laws of flexibility and fitness — and Andy Murray, pushing so hard to reach the top of the sport, ended up breaking himself — Nadal made absolute nonsense out of the numbers that define tennis.

Nadal will retire in the coming days, weeks or months. He has committed to playing in the Laver Cup this fall. He has suggested he is hoping to participate in the Paris Olympics this summer in some capacity. We don’t know where the end will come, exactly, but for every tournament he enters, he’s almost certainly doing so for the last time. And with the French Open starting Sunday, that means that the greatest clay-courter of all time, who has won at Roland Garros an utterly impossible 14 times, is playing there for the last time, too. It makes me want to reflect a bit.

And that means talking about numbers.

Forehand domination

You’d love to hit more winners than your opponent. Suffer fewer errors. Land more unreturnable first serves. But while tennis’ most prevalent statistics mostly track how points ended, tennis players are far more concerned with how points are constructed. That can mean moving your opponent around as much as possible, or targeting your opponent’s weaknesses, whatever they might be. But at a macro level, point construction can often simply mean setting yourself up to hit more forehands than your opponent. Even if your backhand is excellent, and even if your forehand is merely average, the backhand is still a more awkward stroke, and it usually behooves you to manipulate the court in a way that keeps you swinging from the forehand side.

Nadal was never the biggest hitter or most aggressive player on tour. His serve speed never went too far beyond 110 mph. Whereas a big server such as Andy Roddick or Pete Sampras would hit aces about 13-15% of the time, Nadal was at about 4%. Whereas a big hitter like Ben Shelton or Stan Wawrinka might hit winners on 34-35% of points, Nadal was around 28-29% — better than most but not a statistical standout. But because of his left-handedness, and because he had the best wrists in the history of the sport and could generate absurd torque with his topspin, he could put opponents in backhand jail for as long as he wanted.

Tennis Abstract’s amazing match-charting project has collected manual data from more than 13,000 matches and eight million total shots. It gives us a look under tennis’ hood, and it reveals one of Nadal’s superpowers.

In 641 charted matches, Roger Federer hit forehands for 48.8% of his groundstrokes. In 533 matches, Novak Djokovic was at 48.9%. In 302 matches, Andy Murray was at 49.1%. Three of the best players the sport has ever produced were just looking for a 50-50 split here.

In 478 charted matches, meanwhile, Nadal hit forehands 55.0% of the time. In a sport in which even winning one more point for every 50 you play can make you skyrocket in the rankings, that is a world of difference. Nadal had plenty of ways to win a point. His defense was second to none — well, maybe second to only Djokovic — and we all have a nightmare list of otherworldly running passing shots Nadal hit against our favorite player of choice. You don’t win 22 Slams if you aren’t ridiculously well-rounded.

But when in doubt, Nadal could simply whip nonstop forehands into the backhand corner against right-handed opponents (and most opponents are right-handed). Whereas most players find a repeatable edge by figuring out how to win quick points — more than two-thirds of all points last four shots or fewer, after all — Nadal won only 51% of points with 0-4 shots. But he won 54% of points with between 4-6 shots, 55% of points with 7-9 shots and 54% of points with 10-plus shots. He would lean on you, and you would eventually fall.

You can almost blame Nadal for the demise of the one-handed backhand, too. With the torque and height that his forehand generated, even Federer, with just about the most aesthetically-pleasing one-hander of all time, could neither generate proper power with a topspin backhand nor kill the pace and reset the point with a slice backhand. Nadal hit a higher percentage of forehands than Federer in 25 of the 35 matches charted at Tennis Abstract, and while Federer would typically slice about 37% of his backhands, he was lucky to hit 20% against Nadal. In those 35 matches, Federer went 5-5 when he was able to slice at least 20% of the time and 8-17 when he wasn’t.

And if Federer couldn’t counter this weapon, then what chance did one-handed backhand artisans like Stefanos Tsitsipas (2-7 all time against Nadal) or Grigor Dimitrov (1-14) have? That one-hander Dominic Thiem was able to go 6-10 against Nadal was remarkable, but (a) he was only 1-5 in best-of-five matches, and (b) the spin Thiem generated in response was uncommon. It might not be a total surprise that he ended up with the wrist problems that are ending his career this year.

It goes beyond rallies, though. Think of what it means to be able to pull an opponent off the court with your absurd lefty kick serve on the ad court, where a vast majority of break points you face will come. While right-handers can do that in the deuce court, they’re at less of an advantage in the ad court. And while all points matter, in tennis some matter more than others.

Wide first-serve percentage on break points (via Tennis Abstract): Nadal 60%, Federer 47%, Djokovic 46%, Murray 42%

Break points saved: Federer 67%, Nadal 66%, Djokovic 65%, Murray 62%

With a serve far slower than Federer’s, Nadal was almost equally adept at saving break points.

Titles

Nadal will likely finish his career with 92 ATP titles. That’s obviously an awesome number, but it ranks a mere fifth all time behind Jimmy Connors (109), Federer (103), Djokovic (98) and Ivan Lendl (94). But that lefty kick was patently unfair on clay courts, where he set records that might never be broken.

He hasn’t just won the most French Opens; he has won more than twice as many as anyone else in the Open era. Bjorn Borg, the single most dominant figure during tennis’ explosion in popularity in the late-1970s, won six titles at Roland Garros. On the women’s side, Chris Evert won seven. If you go back to the early-1900s, long before there was any sort of tour formality in tennis, a man named Max Decugis won eight. Nadal won 14.

Since the 1910s, only one man has won more than three Monte Carlo Open titles: Nadal, who won 11, including a stretch of eight in a row.

Only two people have won more than three Italian Opens: Djokovic has six, and Nadal has 10. He has the most Madrid Open titles, too, but somehow the fact that he won only five of those feels underwhelming. That’s what he did to title math. “Five titles at one of the sport’s preeminent clay-court events? I guess that’s decent.”

As he heads into his final French Open, Nadal is 539-66 all time on clay. That’s a win percentage of 0.891, which is pretty ridiculous in itself. But it includes going 72-25 from 2001-03 and going 5-3 this year. In between the start and (presumable) finish of his career, he went 462-38, a win percentage of 0.924. He was unbeaten on clay in 2006 and 2010, lost just once five times (2007, 2008, 2012, 2017 and 2018) and lost just twice five times (2005, 2009, 2011, 2013, 2022). Quick reminder: He played in the same era as what might have been the other two greatest men’s tennis players of all time. And he still owned about one-third of the tennis calendar for nearly two decades!

What-ifs

Indeed, when we talk about any one of the Big Three — Federer, Nadal and Djokovic — it’s easy to get caught up in the sheer volume of their individual achievements. But the fact that they achieved all these things despite having to share the stage with each other is almost disorienting. And it leads us to some spectacular what-ifs.

Nadal is going to retire with the second-most men’s Slam titles ever (22). But he lost four Slam finals to Federer and four more to Djokovic. He also twice lost to Djokovic in the semifinals of a Slam that Djokovic ended up winning.

Federer won 20 Slam titles but lost six Slam finals to Nadal — four at the French Open, plus one each at Wimbledon (you might remember that one) and the Australian Open — and another four to Djokovic. He also lost to one of them seven times in the semifinals of a Slam the victor would go on to win.

With 24, Djokovic will end up winning the career Slam titles race. But he still lost four finals to Nadal and one to Federer, and he still lost five semis to the eventual Slam winner.

To be sure, each of these titans had an effect on each other. Nadal had to aspire to the level Federer first set and then craft a game that could top him. Then Djokovic did the same. That they all had to figure out ways to beat each other inevitably raised each of their individual games. But it’s impossible not to think of the totals one of these players might have generated had one of the others decided to take up, say, basketball or golf or something.

One last dance

Math can be awfully cold. I can use stats to point out just how much Nadal’s immortal return game and defense have fallen off during his latest comeback from his latest round of injuries. Back in 2018, when he went 26-1 on clay, he broke serve an otherworldly 47% of the time and won 48% of return points; this year he’s at 30% and 40%, respectively. He still spends a lot of points looking like the version of himself we grew accustomed to, but the cumulative effects of age and injury are pretty clear. And the fact that he drew Alexander Zverev in the first round is rather cruel.

Zverev has won three of the past four complete matches the two have played, including one on clay. He lands the most first serves of any top-50 player and holds serve more than anyone besides Jannik Sinner (the best player of 2024 so far) and Hubert Hurkacz, who blew Nadal off the court 6-1, 6-3 in Rome last week.

Math tells us pretty dire things about what will probably happen when Zverev and Nadal meet. But if there’s any hope in seeing Nadal make one last run in Paris, it stems from a pretty obvious place: Math has never mattered much when Nadal’s involved.