Melog Rankings: Mid-February 2015

February is not a month in which tennis gets a huge amount of attention from the American sports media. Not only are there no Grand Slams played, there are also no Masters events - and this February, the Davis Cup is also absent.

There are, however, more ATP World Tour events held in February than in any other month on the calendar. And with half of those tournaments now complete, including the first 500-point event of the year in Rotterdam, let's see where we stand on Melog's top 50 players.

Rank	Player	Melog	Rank change	Melog change
1	Novak Djokovic	52.7	0	0.7
2	Roger Federer	37.1	0	0.5
3	Rafael Nadal	23.1	0	0.5
4	Andy Murray	21.0	0	0.1
5	Kei Nishikori	17.8	1	-0.4
6	David Ferrer	17.0	-1	-1.4
7	Tomas Berdych	15.2	0	0.5
8	Milos Raonic	13.7	0	0.9
9	Stan Wawrinka	13.4	0	1.5
10	Grigor Dimitrov	11.9	0	0.1
11	Marin Cilic	9.7	0	-1.8
12	Gael Monfils	7.5	0	0.1
13	Jo-Wilfried Tsonga	6.4	0	0.2
14	David Goffin	6.4	1	0.5
15	Kevin Anderson	5.8	3	0.6
16	Robert Bautista Agut	5.7	1	0.3
17	Tommy Robredo	5.6	-3	-0.4
18	Ernests Gulbis	5.3	-2	-0.4
19	Richard Gasquet	4.7	1	0.8
20	Gilles Simon	4.5	1	0.9
21	Philipp Kohlschreiber	3.9	-2	-0.7
22	Alexandr Dolgopolov	3.3	0	-0.2
23	Viktor Troicki	3.3	0	-0.2
24	Sam Querrey	2.8	11	1.0
25	Steve Darcis	2.8	3	0.5
26	Radek Stepanek	2.7	-1	0.1
27	John Isner	2.5	0	0.1
28	Fernando Verdasco	2.4	3	0.4
29	Jack Sock	2.4	-3	-0.1
30	Martin Klizan	2.3	-6	-0.3
31	Andreas Seppi	2.2	1	0.3
32	Gilles Muller	2.2	7	0.6
33	Adrian Mannarino	2.1	-4	-0.1
34	Nick Kyrgios	2.1	2	0.3
35	Tommy Haas	2.0	-2	0.2
36	Pablo Cuevas	2.0	5	0.5
37	Marcos Baghdatis	2.0	-7	0.0
38	Julien Benneteau	1.9	2	0.3
39	Jiri Vesely	1.9	-2	0.1
40	Feliciano Lopez	1.8	2	0.4
41	Ivo Karlovic	1.8	-7	0.0
42	Leonardo Mayer	1.8	-4	0.1
43	Guillermo Garcia-Lopez	1.7	14	1.0
44	Bernard Tomic	1.3	9	0.4
45	Nicolas Almagro	1.3	0	0.0
46	Jeremy Chardy	1.2	-2	-0.1
47	Steve Johnson	1.2	-4	-0.2
48	Ivan Dodig	1.1	3	0.2
49	Dominic Thiem	1.1	-3	0.0
50	John Millman	1.1	-3	0.0

The changes at the top are not especially large - which makes sense, because the top 3 players were idle for the past fortnight. Kei Nishikori defended his Memphis title, but did so in relatively unimpressive fashion, struggling past Austin Krajicek and Sam Querrey in the quarters and semis, respectively. That's still enough for him to pass David Ferrer, however, as the latter's 2014 title in Buenos Aires drops off; Ferrer is skipping the 2015 iteration of the event, but the two other tournaments he's scheduled to play in the next two weeks will give him a chance to make up the lost ground.

Immediately following Ferrer in the rankings is a trio of Rotterdam semifinalists. The ordinal placements of Tomas Berdych, Milos Raonic, and Stan Wawrinka in the rankings are unchanged from last time, but their ratings all underwent noteworthy increases. Berdych failed to defend his Rotterdam win from last year, but he continued the trend established in his early-season work in Doha and Melbourne: dominate the early rounds, including at least one blowout win of a quality player, then lose a close-but-clear match near the end of the event to a very good opponent. (Berdych has crushing wins over four members of the Melog top 20 so far this season, and his losses are all to top-10 opponents.) Wawrinka, meanwhile, captured his first career indoor hard court title, and makes up virtually all of the ground lost by the failure to defend his Australian Open championship from last season (his rating before the year's first Slam was 13.5).

Just outside the top 10, Marin Cilic's shoulder injury continues to keep him off the court so far in 2015 - and while his most notable success last year was the US Open title, Cilic also won two tournaments in February, and made the final in another one. Two of those three appearances are now outside the dataset, and the third will disappear this week, which means there's a legitimate chance of there being a new member of the top 11 by the end of the month.

There's mild movement in the rest of the top 20, but the most obvious upward leap comes from Sam Querrey, who upset John Isner in Memphis, then came within two points of knocking Nishikori out as well. As a result, he leapfrogs 11 players in the rankings (including Isner), and takes over as the #1 American in the Melog system.

The other significant increase in the lower portions of the top 50 comes from Guillermo Garcia-Lopez, who won the indoor title in Zagreb and followed it up with a decent showing in Rotterdam. Garcia-Lopez leads the three new members of this week's list, accompanied by Bernard Tomic and Ivan Dodig. The players displaced by the new arrivals are Diego Schwartzman (who drops all the way from 50 to... 51), Pablo Andujar, and Juan Martin del Potro. Delpo's Rotterdam appearance last year was one of the last things propping up his ranking, and he's therefore unlikely to reappear on the list until he... starts playing tennis again on a regular basis. (Which seems like a reasonable requirement.)

So that's the first half of February. The second half should be a bit livelier, since every member of the top 10 is scheduled to play at least one tournament over the next two weeks, and Nadal, Federer, and Dimitrov all have titles to defend in that time. We'll be back after those events conclude, just in time to peek ahead at this year's first week of Davis Cup and its first Masters event.