re: The Unofficial 2018 US Open Thread

the talk about the heat is getting nauseating

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This brings us to the next most overrated factor in analyzing a match: the most recent results. For some reason we (myself included) have a tendency to put too much stock into what we’ve just seen from a player. It’s pretty incredible how often we say, “Man, this guy is on fire”, he proceeds to get rolled in his next match, then next week we do the same thing again with a different player as if it never happened. Maybe part of it is just naturally wanting players to play at their best all the time. I don’t know. I can’t explain the psychology behind it.

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I'm not going to quote your entire post, because it's pretty long and i'm not sure what the word limit is on a single post, but I am going to respond to it generally. I chose the above-quoted portion because it's a nice jumping off point.

So, I actually disagree with you re: recent results. A tennis player being at their absolute best is a wildly tenuous equilibrium that relies on physical health, freshness, confidence, and motivation. If someone had a bad serving day in round 1, there is probably a reason for that. Maybe they are in their own head. Maybe they have an ailment that is affecting their motion. But more often than not, whatever prevented them from serving well in round 1 will still be there in round 2.

Returns are different but still telling. Unlike serving, which is a proactive exercise, returning a serve is a purely reactive exercise. Nerves come into play in the former, not the latter. So when somebody is winning return points at a greater clip than you would expect him to against a given opponent, this basically means that the he's playing well generally. Because, again, the way one returns is unlikely to be particularly variable as it is not subject to the whims of confidence.

Anyway, point is...I do think a more temporally localized analysis is worthwhile.

But I don't disagree with bayou's conclusion. I would just get there in a slightly different way. To me, it isn't that overvaluing thiem in this match would be a conclusion that flows from better results in his previous four matches. Because his results haven't been better than Rafa's. It would be from giving way too much weight to the scoreline in the KA match.

Two points on KA in this tournament:
1) he had not looked that great in his previous matches. (see e.g. harrison match)
2) he was surely physically exhausted after the harry match and then the shapo matchon top of that.

With those things in mind. What would the scoreline have looked like if it had been Rafa playing KA instead of Thiem? It would have looked nearly identical. So, I think the way I would couch the analysis, is that the KA match result needs to be taken with a grain of salt.

So what else do we know about Thiem on hard courts? We know he's pretty mediocre, to be quite honest. At the Aussie, he nearly got beat by Kudla and then did get beat by Tennis Sandgren. He's played very few hard court tournaments this year. He lost early in IW. Skipped Miami. Lost early in Canada. Skipped Cincy.

There's just nothing that I can point to that supports a conclusion that he's as good a hard court player as Rafa. And while he has had some success against Rafa, those have been in situations where Rafa was completely worn out and in all honestly, those losses were doing Rafa a favor. Contrast those performances with how their matches at RG have played out.

I think both guys are in fine shape. Theim is younger so you expect him to be able tohandle heat and humidity a bit better, but this is TGGRN we're talking about. I don't see him pulling a Fed and just wilting in the conditions and giving up.

I say Rafa in 4.

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I say Rafa in 4.

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You try to hard to impress people...


Rafa in straight sets............

Does Rafa play after Serena?

Tennys/krajicek lost

Spike Lee with the 49ers hat, of course.

Serena has turned it around on this Euro trash. Rafa should be up in the next 20 minutes.

You're anti-Serena, right? I don't hate anymore. The GOAT arguments are long gone. And she seems to have matured a lot in the last few years.

Why are there so many empty seats?

Thiem coming out HOT