Melog Rankings: Mid-February 2016

The ATP held its first 500-point event of the year last week. It featured one of the greatest players of all time, and a solid selection of other players including two additional members of the top 10.

Oh, wait - that was the 250 in Buenos Aires. The 500 point tournament in Rotterdam had no top 10 players in the draw after Roger Federer and Richard Gasquet both withdrew. But that won't stop the ATP rankings from acting like Martin Klizan's title was twice as impressive as Dominic Thiem's.

Of course, those are only two of the six ATP events played in the last two weeks, not to mention the four Challengers. There's plenty to discuss, so let's get to the numbers and save the commentary (and sarcasm) for a bit later...

	Player	Melog	Rank change (last update)	Melog change (last update)	Rank change (start of yr)	Melog change (start of yr)
1	Novak Djokovic	108.1	0	2.0	0	6.8
2	Roger Federer	71.6	0	1.2	1	6.2
3	Andy Murray	67.8	0	0.9	-1	2.0
4	Rafael Nadal	42.3	0	2.2	0	2.0
5	Kei Nishikori	31.6	2	2.3	3	0.1
6	David Ferrer	31.6	0	0.8	0	-2.6
7	Tomas Berdych	30.6	-2	-2.8	-2	-5.9
8	Stanislas Wawrinka	27.3	0	-1.9	-1	-5.3
9	Roberto Bautista Agut	24.8	0	1.5	2	6.2
10	Richard Gasquet	22.6	0	-0.5	-1	-3.0
11	Milos Raonic	21.4	0	-0.6	-1	2.5
12	Jo Wilfried Tsonga	21.3	0	1.0	1	3.5
13	John Isner	19.5	0	0.3	1	2.7
14	Gael Monfils	18.7	1	0.9	3	3.6
15	Philipp Kohlschreiber	18.6	2	2.8	1	2.8
16	Gilles Simon	17.5	-2	-0.5	-1	1.1
17	Kevin Anderson	15.9	-1	-0.8	-5	-2.3
18	David Goffin	15.8	0	0.6	1	1.7
19	Marin Cilic	15.4	1	1.3	3	3.3
20	Jack Sock	14.7	-1	0.2	0	1.3
21	Grigor Dimitrov	14.6	0	0.7	0	1.9
22	Dominic Thiem	12.9	2	2.1	8	4.3
23	Nick Kyrgios	12.0	-1	0.4	1	0.7
24	Ivo Karlovic	11.2	1	0.4	-6	-3.0
25	Bernard Tomic	10.9	-2	-0.6	-2	-0.4
26	Alexandr Dolgopolov	10.1	0	0.6	5	1.5
27	Gilles Muller	10.0	0	0.6	-2	-1.1
28	Fabio Fognini	9.3	2	0.4	11	2.7
29	Jeremy Chardy	8.8	5	0.5	0	0.1
30	Pablo Cuevas	8.6	5	1.1	10	2.2
31	Hyeon Chung	8.4	-3	-0.8	2	0.4
32	Steve Johnson	8.3	1	-0.1	-4	-0.7
33	Fernando Verdasco	8.2	-4	-0.7	-6	-1.1
34	Albert Ramos	8.1	2	0.6	2	0.7
35	Feliciano Lopez	8.0	-3	-0.3	-3	-0.1
36	Viktor Troicki	7.5	3	1.0	-2	-0.2
37	Guillermo Garcia Lopez	7.4	-6	-1.4	-11	-2.1
38	Juan Monaco	7.3	2	1.2	7	2.1
39	Joao Sousa	7.2	-2	0.4	3	1.6
40	Leonardo Mayer	6.6	-2	0.1	-2	-0.1
41	Teymuraz Gabashvili	6.2	0	0.3	8	1.5
42	Thomaz Bellucci	6.1	2	1.0	4	0.9
43	Andreas Seppi	5.4	0	-0.1	-8	-2.1
44	Benoit Paire	5.3	1	0.4	3	0.2
45	Marcos Baghdatis	5.3	1	0.7	-4	-0.8
46	Lukas Rosol	5.2	1	0.6	13	1.7
47	Paolo Lorenzi	5.1	14	1.8	28	2.4
48	Nicolas Almagro	5.1	9	1.7	6	1.0
49	Sam Querrey	5.0	-7	-0.7	-6	-0.5
50	Martin Klizan	5.0	36	3.0	27	2.3
51	Adrian Mannarino	4.7	5	1.1	0	0.3
52	Federico Delbonis	4.4	1	0.7	4	0.5
53	Taylor Harry Fritz	4.1	2	0.4	19	1.2
54	Vasek Pospisil	4.0	-6	-0.5	-10	-1.2
55	John Millman	4.0	13	0.8	10	0.7
56	Pierre Hugues Herbert	3.9	2	0.5	25	1.6
57	Denis Istomin	3.9	-8	-0.2	-4	-0.2
58	Mikhail Kukushkin	3.9	16	1.2	9	0.8
59	Aljaz Bedene	3.9	-5	0.2	-9	-0.8
60	Guido Pella	3.9	-9	0.1	-2	0.2
61	Yen Hsun Lu	3.8	-1	0.4	-6	-0.1
62	Pablo Andujar	3.8	0	0.4	-5	0.1
63	Carlos Berlocq	3.7	-4	0.3	8	0.8
64	Jiri Vesely	3.6	3	0.5	-16	-1.1
65	Ivan Dodig	3.6	-15	-0.2	-13	-0.7
66	Andrey Kuznetsov	3.5	-2	0.3	25	1.8
67	Robin Haase	3.5	-2	0.3	7	0.8
68	Simone Bolelli	3.5	-16	-0.1	-31	-3.3
69	Thanasi Kokkinakis	3.5	0	0.4	0	0.5
70	Borna Coric	3.4	-4	0.2	-9	0.0
71	Tommy Robredo	3.4	-1	0.3	-5	0.3
72	Pablo Carreno Busta	3.3	7	0.8	-4	0.3
73	Alexander Zverev	3.0	14	1.1	11	0.8
74	Dusan Lajovic	2.8	1	0.1	2	0.1
75	Paul Henri Mathieu	2.8	6	0.6	10	0.8

Melog is apparently at least somewhat impressed with Klizan's efforts, given that he joins the top 75 for the first time this year. (It helps that while the Rotterdam draw didn't include any ATP top 10 players, it did feature three who started the week in Melog's top 15 - and Klizan beat two of them on the way to the title. He also made the semis in Sofia a week earlier, which likely contributes to his leap upward as well.)

Thiem doesn't seem to gain as much ground, but he's also starting from a higher initial point. He's been progressing steadily upward in the Melog rankings so far in 2016 and continues to be a player to watch; the system's reticence about him was in part due a draw largely bereft of top-level competition, and a win over Rafael Nadal on clay goes some distance toward assuaging that concern.

Thiem is a part of the bigger story of the last two weeks: success from young players. Alexander Zverev jumps into the top 75 on the strength of a semi in Montpellier (beating Marin Cilic along the way) and a quarterfinal in Rotterdam (upending Gilles Simon to make it there). He's going again this week in Marseille, which features a highly loaded draw despite being, yes, a 250-point event. (Last year's Rotterdam finalists, Stan Wawrinka and Tomas Berdych, both skipped Rotterdam this year, but both are slated to play Marseille. The eighth seed is current ATP #22 Benoit Paire.)

Also on indoor hard courts in Europe, Pierre Hugues Herbert won the Bergamo Challenger event last week. Herbert has had more success in doubles to this point in his career, but he's shown promise in singles as well, and is looking to climb back into the top 100 with several more Challenger appearances over the next few weeks.

More notable than either of those two efforts, however, is the run by Taylor Harry Fritz to the Memphis final. As noted by Tennis Abstract, Fritz joins the following list of Americans who have made a tour-level final before turning 19 in the last 30 years: Andy Roddick, Pete Sampras, Andre Agassi, and Michael Chang. I mean... that's a good list, right? Every player on it spent time in the top 2 of the rankings and made at least four Grand Slam finals. Obviously that's not guaranteed to be Fritz's future, but he at least looks to have a good one. And his run in Memphis pushes his ranking to a career-high 102; with a wild card into the Delray Beach event this week, he has a decent chance of breaking into the top 100 with less than six months as a full-time professional under his belt.

So Melog must be pretty excited too, right? It was already quite a bit higher on Herbert and Fritz than the ATP rankings were, and after their quality results this week, it bumped them up...

Two spots each. Not exactly a ticker-tape parade, even in a metaphorical sense.

The reason? Melog already expected this level of play from both guys. The Memphis draw was incredibly weak (only three ATP top-50 players); Melog wouldn't necessarily have predicted Fritz to make the final, but it would have expected him to play close matches against the competition he faced (Steve Johnson, Benjamin Becker, and Ricardas Berankis), and he did (losing over half of the total points in two of his victories). Herbert had a less-difficult time winning his Challenger, dropping only one set on the way, but he also faced only one seeded player, and his semifinal opponent was a qualifier. With that set of opponents, you would hope he'd win - and he did. Melog looks at those two events and sees players it already liked doing roughly what it expects them to do, and therefore keeps their rankings about where they already were.

February's second half will bring us three more 500-point tournaments along with a trio of 250's, all of which will, of course, have fields of wildly variable quality (the top seed at the Sao Paulo 250 is currently slated to be Fabio Fognini, who would be unseeded if he were playing the aforementioned Marseille 250). We'll check back in at month's end to get Melog's thoughts, and set the stage for the year's first Masters events in March.