Past Melog Rankings: 2014

During this tennis season, I'll be updating the Melog ratings roughly every other week. In the off weeks, I'll generally try to put up at least one tennis-related post - and since I now have 19 complete years' worth of backward-looking data, a good number of those posts will be rankings from past seasons.

I've posted 2014 rankings before, so there's some old ground being covered here. The differences will be in the matches that weren't counted before (Davis Cup Group 1 and World Group Playoff matches), and the change in the baseline to the median player rather than player #75. (The median player of 2014 was Go Soeda, a veteran Japanese player who's among the all-time leaders in Challenger titles won and who has spent only a brief time in the top 50 in his career.)

Let's get to the numbers.

Rank	Player	Melog	ATP Rank	ATP Pts
1	Novak Djokovic	71.6	1	11360
2	Roger Federer	61.0	2	9775
3	Rafael Nadal	43.3	3	6835
4	Andy Murray	37.1	6	4675
5	David Ferrer	31.7	10	4045
6	Kei Nishikori	30.5	5	5035
7	Tomas Berdych	26.5	7	4600
8	Milos Raonic	25.4	8	4440
9	Stanislas Wawrinka	25.4	4	5370
10	Grigor Dimitrov	24.5	11	3645
11	Marin Cilic	24.0	9	4150
12	Gael Monfils	18.3	18	1900
13	Jo Wilfried Tsonga	17.2	12	2740
14	Tommy Robredo	15.8	17	2015
15	David Goffin	15.8	22	1599
16	Roberto Bautista Agut	15.0	15	2110
17	Ernests Gulbis	15.0	13	2455
18	Philipp Kohlschreiber	13.7	24	1415
19	Kevin Anderson	12.0	16	2080
20	Alexandr Dolgopolov	9.6	23	1455
21	Richard Gasquet	9.0	26	1350
22	John Isner	8.6	19	1890
23	Gilles Simon	8.5	21	1730
24	Sam Querrey	8.0	35	1090
25	Jack Sock	7.1	42	934
26	Pablo Cuevas	6.7	30	1222
27	Julien Benneteau	6.5	25	1365
28	Jeremy Chardy	6.5	29	1240
29	Fabio Fognini	6.3	20	1790
30	Radek Stepanek	6.2	68	715
31	Feliciano Lopez	6.1	14	2130
32	Adrian Mannarino	6.1	44	898
33	Fernando Verdasco	6.0	33	1135
34	Leonardo Mayer	5.7	28	1299
35	Martin Klizan	5.6	34	1094
36	Ivo Karlovic	5.5	27	1320
37	Denis Istomin	5.3	49	850
38	Viktor Troicki	5.1	101	558
39	Nick Kyrgios	4.7	52	830
40	Gilles Muller	4.7	47	855
41	Andreas Seppi	4.6	45	870
42	Marinko Matosevic	4.4	75	682
43	Jiri Vesely	4.4	66	743
44	Yen Hsun Lu	4.2	38	993
45	Paolo Lorenzi	4.2	64	759
46	Marcos Baghdatis	4.2	85	610
47	Pablo Andujar	4.0	41	950
48	Steve Johnson	3.9	37	999
49	Dominic Thiem	3.8	39	989
50	Santiago Giraldo	3.8	32	1175
51	Edouard Roger Vasselin	3.8	87	600
52	Tommy Haas	3.6	77	675
53	Diego Sebastian Schwartzman	3.5	61	775
54	Nicolas Almagro	3.5	71	700
55	Lukas Rosol	3.5	31	1210
56	Carlos Berlocq	3.5	72	700
57	Sergiy Stakhovsky	3.4	58	781
58	Guillermo Garcia Lopez	3.3	36	1040
59	Juan Monaco	3.2	62	770
60	Simone Bolelli	3.1	55	810
61	Albert Ramos	3.1	63	761
62	Jerzy Janowicz	3.1	43	915
63	John Millman	3.1	156	328
64	Jan Lennard Struff	3.0	59	781
65	Vasek Pospisil	3.0	53	830
66	Ivan Dodig	3.0	95	575
67	Blaz Kavcic	3.0	105	551
68	Steve Darcis	2.9	160	317
69	Thomaz Bellucci	2.9	65	753
70	Lleyton Hewitt	2.9	50	845
71	Mikhail Kukushkin	2.8	70	705
72	Benjamin Becker	2.8	40	973
73	Juan Martin Del Potro	2.6	137	385
74	Maximo Gonzalez	2.5	103	554
75	Bernard Tomic	2.5	56	797
77	Mikhail Youzhny	2.3	48	850
78	Jarkko Nieminen	2.1	73	693
79	Donald Young	2.1	57	796
87	Andrey Golubev	1.5	74	691
88	Pablo Carreno Busta	1.5	51	841
89	Marcel Granollers	1.4	46	860
90	Federico Delbonis	1.4	60	775
101	Dusan Lajovic	1	69	711
102	Teymuraz Gabashvili	1	67	730
131	Joao Sousa	0.2	54	822

You may have noticed that I went further than the top 75, and did so in an odd-looking way. The reason is that I also wanted to get all of the ATP's top 75 on the list, which required me to add an extra 10 players. And since we've already seen the 2015 season play out, it might be instructive to examine some of the disagreements between my rankings and the ATP's.

(It should be noted that Melog is intended for use as a backward-looking evaluation tool. I'm checking it for forward-looking capability solely for the sake of my own curiosity. Any real attempt to project player performance going forward should account for factors like age and injury, which Melog only takes into account to the extent that they affect the player's past performance.)

So, here we go - the largest disagreements between Melog and the ATP system in 2014. Any player whose ranking is 50% higher in one system than the other will be listed.

Melog was higher on:

Viktor Troicki (38 in Melog to 101 in ATP; age 28 at the end of 2014). Troicki played half a season in 2014 due to a suspension, but he played very well in that half season. He ended 2015 ranked at #22, which is... a noteworthy improvement.

John Millman (63 to 156; age 25). Millman ended 2015 at #92, which is... kind of right between the two systems.

Steve Darcis (68 to 160; age 30). Ended 2015 at #86, which is closer to the Melog figure. He was also on the team that lost the Davis Cup final, for whatever that's worth.

Radek Stepanek (30 to 68; age 36). Had injury issues and ended 2015 at #197. (Which doesn't exempt Melog from culpability for his higher ranking - it's fonder of injury-prone players than the ATP system, so if you're using it to project performance going forward, you'll run into cases like this where the injured guy stays injured or gets injured again. So, you know, don't place huge bets based on this system without checking to see whether a player is healthy first.)

David Ferrer (5 to 10; age 32). #7 in 2015, despite missing some time with injury; I'm tempted to call that a win, but 7 is almost exactly the geometric mean of 5 and 10, so it's probably more of a draw.

Juan Martin del Potro (73 to 137; age 26). Another injury case; Delpo barely played last year and was nowhere close to either of these numbers.

Marcos Baghdatis (46 to 85; age 29). Ended 2015 at... #46. So Melog had him pegged pretty well, apparently.

Marinko Matosevic (42 to 75; age 29). Ouch. Matosevic's 2015 was an utter disaster, barely keeping him inside the top 300. He had a losing streak of at least a dozen matches that spanned about half the year. Not a good choice.

Edouard Roger-Vasselin (51 to 87; age 31). Another bad one - ended '15 at 123.

Jack Sock (25 to 42; age 22). Near-exact win for Melog; Sock had a strong 2015 despite missing the first two months and ended at #26.

Blaz Kavcic (67 to 105; age 27). #151 in 2015. Not great.

Jiri Vesely (43 to 66; age 21). Ended 2015 at #41. Very nice step forward.

Gael Monfils (12 to 18; age 28). #24 in 2015, so a step back but not a huge one. (And Melog liked him again.)

Andy Murray (4 to 6; age 27). #2 in 2015, and arguably Melog's best pick of the year; even in a relative down year for Murray, Melog not only had him in the top 4, but saw a solid gap between those top 4 and the rest of the world (still), and Murray, at least, confirmed that view over the succeeding year.

So that's 14 total players; I'm saying Melog "wins" on Troicki, Darcis, Baghdatis, Sock, Vesely, and Murray, "loses" on Stepanek, Del Potro, Matosevic, Roger-Vasselin, Kavcic, and Monfils, and draws on Ferrer and Millman. Which is an exact tie. (On the other hand, Melog essentially nailed the two youngest players it liked, which is something to watch. And if you make the standard for a "win" an improvement in the player's ATP rating, Melog wins 8 of 14, which is... still not exactly decisive.)

Next up, the players Melog was the most down on relative to the ATP:

Joao Sousa (131 to 54, age 25). Ended 2015 at #33, which is an improvement over his ATP standing, and a bit of a thumb in Melog's eye.

Stan Wawrinka (9 to 4, age 29). Came in at #4 again, winning yet another Grand Slam in which he beat both of the top two seeds. Really, his 2014 and 2015 were very similar; he didn't win a Masters in 2015 but replaced the Monte Carlo title with a pair of 500-point tournaments, and still managed to work in more than his fair share of perplexing early losses.

Feliciano Lopez (31 to 14, age 33). #17 in 2015. This is going great!

Marcel Granollers (89 to 46, age 28). #84 in 2015.

Benjamin Becker (72 to 40, age 33). Finished the year at #97.

Lukas Rosol (55 to 31, age 29). Completed 2015 at #55. OK, that's three good results for Melog, two of them almost unsettlingly so.

Pablo Carreno Busta (88 to 51, age 23). Slipped to 67, right in the middle.

Guillermo Garcia Lopez (58 to 36, age 31). Improved to #27 - and did a much better job selling Melog on his performance in 2015 than he had the year before.

Mikhail Youzhny (77 to 48, age 32). Dropped all the way to #127.

Santiago Giraldo (50 to 32, age 27). Dropped to #70 - and Melog's 2015 numbers have him as overranked even in that spot.

Teymuraz Gabashvili (102 to 67, age 29). Jumped to #50.

Federico Delbonis (90 to 60, age 24). Improved to #52.

That's 12 players; four of them improved their ATP rankings in 2015, one stayed the same, two dropped but not as much as Melog might have expected, and five declined significantly. Again, roughly a draw between the two systems.

So with 26 players' worth of data, the main result seems to be that it's a bad idea to do a blind projection based on past performance without accounting for other factors. Which is... not a shocking result.

We'll touch on this again as we get to rankings further back in time, but we'll also spend a bit more time exploring the seasons themselves and look more deeply at where differences between these rankings and the ATP's come from. (Which is something I did in the last post about the 2014 rankings, which is linked in the header.)

For the moment, the plan with past rankings is just to work straight backward, but I'm open to the possibility of changing that if there's an outcry in favor of jumping around the last 20 years. But barring that, you can expect 2013 rankings about 2 weeks from now.