re: Federer is the #GOAT

Gonna chime in here for a change. Although my opinion is worth as much as anyone else's opinion (nothing), I don't want to die without at least having a written record of my thoughts on this overplayed topic.

It's easy to pile on Federer at this point in his career, but my opinion of him now is not any different than it was two years ago. Had he won 2 or 3 more slams since then, would my feelings have changed? Somewhat, yes.

Unfortunately, I don't feel he's part of the GOAT discussion. There are fans who will defend him to the death because of the visual appeal of his game, or his class, or aura, or some other nonsense. But when it comes to on-court accomplishments, I feel that Novak and Rafa will end up comfortably ahead of him.

He's falling behind in so many stats that his fans are starting to make up their own stats, or come up with achievements that are basically meaningless. "Well, he has the record for the most round-of-16 appearances in slams." I have no idea if that's true or not, but I can picture FedFans saying it.

If you pull up his slam results in finals, you can see that he took full advantage of the weak era, and caught Rafa and Novak a couple times in their early 20's while Roger was closer to peak form. From 2008 to 2019, his record vs. Rafa/Novak in slam finals is 1-8. The rest of his wins in that time frame came against Murray (3 times), Cilic (twice), Roddick, and Soderling.

Since Rafa and Novak still have plenty of time to make their case, there's no use debating their numbers at this point. I would lean Novak, but that's based on him passing everyone in slams, which is no guarantee for sure. I'll try to revisit this in 4 or 5 years.