Melog rankings: Pre-Australian Open 2015

As promised, I'm going to try doing biweekly (or thereabouts) updates to my tennis rankings this year. The rankings will contain the last year's worth of tennis from Grand Slams, the ATP and Challenger tours, and the Davis Cup World Group.

Due to slight changes in the ATP schedule this year as compared to last, there may occasionally be oddities in what I classify as the last year's worth of tennis - it may not always match the ATP's interpretation precisely, and I will try to point out such differences when they arise. This week's rankings cover exactly the same tennis as the ATP's, as they include everything from last year's Australian Open to the tournaments that were just completed on Saturday.

Numbers first, commentary later. Here are Melog's top 50 leading into the Australian Open:

Rank	Player	Melog	Rank change	Melog change
1	Novak Djokovic	50.0	0	1.9
2	Roger Federer	40.2	0	3.2
3	Rafael Nadal	25.4	0	-1.8
4	Andy Murray	20.7	0	0.8
5	David Ferrer	19.0	0	2.6
6	Kei Nishikori	17.8	0	1.6
7	Tomas Berdych	16.0	1	3.1
8	Stan Wawrinka	13.5	-1	0.5
9	Grigor Dimitrov	12.3	0	0.5
10	Milos Raonic	12.2	0	0.9
11	Marin Cilic	11.2	0	0.5
12	Gael Monfils	8.0	0	-1.0
13	Jo-Wilfried Tsonga	7.6	0	0.1
14	Tommy Robredo	6.5	1	0.5
15	David Goffin	6.0	1	0.1
16	Ernests Gulbis	5.8	-2	-0.4
17	Roberto Bautista Agut	5.6	0	-0.1
18	Philipp Kohlschreiber	4.8	0	-0.6
19	Kevin Anderson	4.7	0	0.6
20	Alexandr Dolgopolov	4.2	0	0.6
21	Richard Gasquet	3.9	0	0.7
22	Gilles Simon	2.9	0	0.1
23	Viktor Troicki	2.8	7	1.3
24	Martin Klizan	2.5	0	0.4
25	John Isner	2.2	-2	0.0
26	Adrian Mannarino	2.2	9	0.9
27	Steve Darcis	2.2	6	0.7
28	Jack Sock	2.2	-3	0.1
29	Radek Stepanek	2.0	-3	0.1
30	Sam Querrey	1.9	-3	0.0
31	Pablo Cuevas	1.9	-2	0.2
32	Jiri Vesely	1.8	20	1.1
33	Julien Benneteau	1.8	-5	0.1
34	Leonardo Mayer	1.8	2	0.4
35	Jeremy Chardy	1.7	-1	0.3
36	Fernando Verdasco	1.7	-4	0.2
37	Tommy Haas	1.5	2	0.2
38	Ivo Karlovic	1.5	7	0.6
39	Fabio Fognini	1.5	-2	0.2
40	Pablo Andujar	1.4	6	0.5
41	John Millman	1.4	3	0.4
42	Nicolas Almagro	1.3	-4	0.0
43	Marcos Baghdatis	1.2	-1	0.1
44	Feliciano Lopez	1.2	-3	0.1
45	Dominic Thiem	1.1	4	0.2
46	Nick Kyrgios	1.0	-3	0.0
47	Denis Istomin	1.0	-16	-0.5
48	Gilles Muller	1.0	2	0.2
49	Andreas Seppi	0.9	4	0.2
50	Carlos Berlocq	0.8	-2	0.0

Since this is the first after-two-weeks update I've tried, part of what I'm examining is the magnitude of the changes overall. The main thing that jumps out to me from this table is that 44 of the current top 50 saw their Melog ratings increase. That's partly selective sampling, as two players dropped out of the top 50 and their scores both declined, but it's not like 42 out of 50 is much less impressive.

The reason? The top guys almost all performed well in the first week, with Federer, Wawrinka, and Ferrer all winning titles (Brisbane, Chennai, and Doha, respectively), and Berdych, Raonic, Nishikori, and Dimitrov also posting deep runs before losing to top-tier opponents. By comparison, last year saw several of these players absorb early losses in these events - Berdych lost in the first round at Doha, Murray and Ferrer in the second, Dimitrov in the second in Brisbane. Those results were replaced with generally improved outcomes at the top, and since the top players spend so much time facing each other, all of their draws for the last 52 weeks look more impressive than they did a fortnight ago.

Looking at individual players, Nadal and Monfils lose ground thanks to the removal of last year's Doha event (Nadal beat Monfils in the final). Denis Istomin's fall is smaller in the raw numbers, but larger in the ordinal rankings, because his neighborhood is more closely packed, and he no longer has quarterfinals in Brisbane and Sydney working for him. Nadal's slide doesn't move him out of the third spot - but he could slip from that spot soon, depending on how the Australian Open goes; he made the final there last year, with wins over Nishikori, Dimitrov, and Federer along the way.

Offsetting those tumbles are the increases for Viktor Troicki (Sydney title) and Adrian Mannarino (Auckland final). More notably, the top 50 welcomes Czech youngster Jiri Vesely, a 21-year-old lefty who bested Mannarino in the Auckland title match to capture his first ATP World Tour crown.

Vesely is one of two newcomers to this group; one of the two players who drops out is Juan Martin del Potro, whose Sydney title last year was supplanted in the data set by a quarterfinal this year. Del Potro has also pulled out of the Australian Open, so he'll slip farther in two weeks; his making the second round and losing to an unseeded player didn't seem too impressive when it occurred, but that unseeded player was Roberto Bautista Agut, who now sits in the 17th spot in the table at the top of this post.

So now we have updated rankings, I have the spreadsheets built to generate them with relative ease in the future, and we have a sense for how much two weeks of normal ATP play can change things. Next up, we have two weeks that are... slightly more important than normal ATP play, and we'll see how much the Australian Open shakes things up.