🎾 How far can joy take Carlos Alcaraz?

My Week in Sport(s): 'battles' in men's tennis, Australian rugby union and WNBA tip-off

Welcome to My Week in Sport(s) — a regular newsletter from Plot the Ball.

In this edition:

• 🎾 How Carlos Alcaraz talks about his game — and what the data shows

• 🏉 Men’s rugby union in Australia, in a tough spot

• 🏀 Breanna Stewart, driving and scoring

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🎾 How far can joy take Carlos Alcaraz?

Shortly after writing about Tiger Woods a couple of weeks ago, I realised that the phrase I’ve been reaching for all year — in that piece, and my piece about LeBron James — is ‘competitive stamina’.

All it took was listening to LeBron use the term himself in the first episode of his superb new podcast, Mind the Game — which he hosts alongside former NBA player JJ Reddick.

‘Competitiveness’ is often used as if it’s synonymous with a straightforward desire to win — but I don’t think that fully captures what James is discussing here.

From personal experience, few things are as regenerative as the pure joy you get from the neat execution of a difficult sporting skill — making a sweet connection with the ball, for instance, or syncing your movement perfectly with a teammate’s.

And the competitive energy which LeBron still draws from these building blocks of basketball — whether he’s executing them himself, or watching his peers — comes through so abundantly when he speaks on Mind the Game.

Just listening and watching others who interact with the game on those terms is infectious — and there are few athletes who epitomise that joyous streak more, in my mind, than Spanish tennis player Carlos Alcaraz.

Last September, he articulated his relationship with the sport in a way that really caught my attention:

“Obviously, I want to win every match that I play, but at the same time, I want to have fun, try different things, make the people enjoy watching tennis and watching my matches. Sometimes I talk to myself about what is most important: if I win or doing great things.”

We’ve been here before in this newsletter, though.

What elite athletes say and what they do are two different things — and one of my guiding principles is that we should always pay closer attention to the latter than the former.

And Alcaraz’s record to date doesn’t suggest that he’s at all ambivalent about winning.

He started out in men’s tennis at a blazing pace, winning singles matches at a much faster clip than any of the sport’s ‘Big Three’ did at the equivalent stage of their respective careers.

With 33 victories in total, the Spaniard recorded a higher win percentage in his first 50 ATP tour matches than all of Roger Federer, Novak Djokovic and Rafael Nadal.

And while he’s hit a (relative) slump in recent months, Alcaraz has basically kept pace with the trio who have defined men’s tennis in the 21st century.

Heading into the French Open, he’s still won 37 — or 74% — of his last 50 matches.

Is it really plausible that a player who’s already this good is leaving wins on the table in a quest to entertain? And, if so, should he change his ways?

At last year’s US Open, that’s essentially how Washington Post sports columnist Sally Jenkins put it:

“At a certain point, Alcaraz will have to stop toying around quite so much. When his first-round opponent, Dominik Koepfer, was forced to retire, Alcaraz was actually disappointed. “I want to play battles,” he said. But the demands of Grand Slam pursuits will necessarily require that his next development cycle includes efficiency, shortening matches, avoiding the battles and conserving his body and mental energy.”

Bracketing off the question of what Alcaraz ‘should’ do¹, I’m fascinated by the idea of his love for ‘playing battles’ — and curious about how we could find evidence for or against this in the statistical record.

Thanks to the website Tennis Abstract and its crowd-sourced Match Charting Project — coordinated by Jeff Sackmann, whose stellar work at the website I’ve referenced before — we can assess whether it’s true at the most fundamental level.

If Alcaraz really does relish those ‘battles’ more than other top players of recent times, I’d expect that it would manifest itself in longer rallies than his peers — and the Match Charting Project makes it easy to access this data² for a substantial sample of his ATP matches.

Additionally, if he tends to go long in rallies when he feels in control, we’d expect to see him win a higher proportion of those points than peers do.

And it’s probably also worth restricting our analysis to service points — where, as the initiator of the sequence, the player is in more control of the rally from the outset.

What you find when you plot this data is rather interesting.

Compared to Nadal and Djokovic, Alcaraz’s service points don’t actually tend to go long very often: rallies last seven or more shots 19.1% of the time, compared to just under 25% for Djokovic and just under 29% for Nadal.

But he wins the service points which last this long more frequently than any of the ‘Big Three’ — at a rate of 61.2%, a full percentage point better than Nadal who ranks second among this cohort of players³.

It’s not, then, that Alcaraz extends rallies deep with unusual frequency.

Rather, when he does go long, he’s more in control of the outcome than even the sport’s modern greats.

Based on this analysis, I would probably worry less about Alcaraz ‘toying’ with opponents and leaving points on the court that he could be winning.

If he extends a rally on his own serve, you can actually be more confident that he’ll win it than just about anyone.

You can look at this with either a negative or a positive slant, I suppose.

There’s maybe less to be gained from ‘tidying up’ this side of his game than some observers have suggested — and, therefore, his potential peak purely from the perspective of wins and losses may be lower than we thought.

But he’s already so good that it might not matter too much — and Alcaraz seems to have so much fun haring around tennis courts for a living that he should have the competitive stamina to continue for years to come.

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🏉 Run the Numbers

One side-effect of rugby league’s dominance in Australia is a limit on the flow of young sporting talent into its sister code, rugby union.

In theory, this should level the playing field between its professional union teams and neighbouring New Zealand’s — which, as a country with just 20% of Australia’s population, will have much less sporting talent to begin with.

New Zealand’s rugby pathways tend to be exceptional at extracting value from its talent base, though — and it’s historically been Australian teams on the receiving end in Super Rugby, the men’s club competition in Oceania.

That said, seasons following Rugby World Cups — as this one is — can be harder than usual to predict, with lots of playing talent heading to financially stronger leagues at the conclusion of the sport’s flagship international tournament.

And New Zealand lost more of their top talent than Australia did at the end of the last cycle. Only 14 players from their 23-strong matchday squad for last year’s World Cup final have been contracted to Super Rugby franchises this season; on the other hand, 20 of Australia’s 23 from their most important World Cup game⁴ have been turning out for their domestic sides in the competition.

There has been a minor shift in Australia’s favour between last year and this year. Super Rugby teams from New Zealand are only beating their Australia opponents by around 10 points per game on average so far in 2024⁵ — down from an average margin of around +12 in 2023.

If you zoom out, though, the picture is still a pretty bleak one for Australian men’s rugby union.

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🏀 Watch the Games

So far, the opening week of the WNBA season has been difficult for Caitlin Clark and the Indiana Fever — and it won’t get any easier with a second consecutive game against the New York Liberty later today.

The Liberty made last season’s Finals, and have started 2024 strongly with two away wins at Washington and Indiana.

One of their stars, Breanna Stewart, was the last player to achieve what Clark is attempting to do this year — make Team USA as a WNBA rookie — and there’s little danger of her missing out on the Olympic team later this summer.

She’s not a guard, so won’t be competing directly with Clark for a spot — but, despite her size, she can go toe to toe on the perimeter with almost anyone in the league⁶.

Stewart put those skills to use to get her first bucket of the year last Tuesday night.

Early in the first quarter, the two-time MVP is untroubled by a Mystics defender closing down the available space on her right-hand side at the three-point line — a necessary precaution, given her shooting touch.

For a player of Stewart’s skill, the decision is a simple one: she puts the ball on the floor and drives sharply towards the basket with her weaker hand, taking the space that the defender is willing to give.

Her opponent can’t keep up as she turns the corner — and, with a lithe left-handed finish at the rim, the Liberty star’s season is off and running.

You can watch a clip of this sequence here.

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The next edition of My Week in Sport(s) will be published on Saturday May 25th.

1. He’s free to pursue his professional career in whichever way gives him the most fulfilment, and — in my own opinion — it would be great if an athlete as good as he is continued to challenge the conventional ‘winning is everything’ framing when discussing his approach to sport.

2. It’s worth emphasising that this sort of data is only available because observers decided that the statistics in the sport’s traditional ‘box score’ were insufficient — as we saw in the recent edition of this newsletter on Connor Bedard, which relied heavily on the work of

Corey S.

of

All Three Zones

.

3. Nadal, Djokovic and Federer are all tightly bunched, winning between 59.9% (Djokovic) and 60.2% (Nadal) of rallies with these characteristics; the closeness of their distribution — albeit over a larger sample of tracked matches — makes me fairly confident that what’s being picked up in Alcaraz’s game is a real trend.

4. They didn’t make the knockout stages, so I’ve used their game against Wales — who ended up in first place in the pool.

5. The exact figure after Friday’s game between the Rebels and the Chiefs was +9.8 points per game in favour of Kiwi teams; last year, the average scoreline was +12.1 in their favour.

6. Per

Her Hoop Stats

: “Her combination of guard skills in a big's body, the ability to shoot from anywhere and impact a game with her defense, has made her one of the best players in the league ever since she was drafted back in 2016.”