Melog rankings: Pre-Wimbledon 2016

Wimbledon is coming! It's arguably the biggest two weeks of the year in tennis; it's technically no more important than the other three Slams, but there's a certain cachet to Wimbledon that makes it seem weightier, even if it is played on a surface that has practically vanished from the tennis calendar apart from the tournaments they throw in for a few weeks before Wimbledon to give players a chance to remember how to play on grass again after ignoring its existence for eleven months a year.

(Normally, that persistent unfamiliarity also makes it a tournament prone to upsets. But given that the top three seeds in this year's men's draw have a combined 11 Wimbledon titles, plus gold and silver medals won there four years ago, it may be a bit more stable this time around.)

This Wimbledon is a big one. (I mean, they all are. But still.) Novak Djokovic will be going for a third straight title on the turf, and a fifth straight Slam overall. Roger Federer will be facing questions of whether he can still contend for another Slam title, and Wimbledon, as always, represents his best shot. And it may also be Andy Murray's best chance to dethrone the uncontested world #1.

Beyond those three players (and Rafael Nadal, who's sitting out Wimbledon with a wrist injury), there's a ton of movement in the rankings (both Melog and otherwise) for the year so far, and that makes it difficult to pick out other candidates for the title. But big serves have been known to play well on grass in the past, and both Milos Raonic and Nick Kyrgios have had success at Wimbledon before, so they're at least worth watching for the next couple of weeks.

There's a great deal to talk about as Wimbledon begins, so let's spend a bit of time on... things that are not Wimbledon. Namely, the effect of the rest of grass season on the Melog ratings.

	Player	Melog	Rank change (last update)	Melog change (last update)	Rank change (start of yr)	Melog change (start of yr)
1	Novak Djokovic	93.2	0	0.1	0	-8.1
2	Andy Murray	55.1	0	0.1	0	-10.7
3	Roger Federer	48.3	0	-1.3	0	-17.1
4	Rafael Nadal	38.2	0	-1.6	0	-2.0
5	Kei Nishikori	27.5	0	-0.6	3	-4.1
6	Stanislas Wawrinka	24.3	0	-1.3	1	-8.3
7	Dominic Thiem	23.1	3	2.4	23	14.5
8	David Goffin	23.0	0	0.7	11	8.9
9	Richard Gasquet	22.1	-2	-1.3	0	-3.5
10	Tomas Berdych	21.2	-1	-0.5	-5	-15.3
11	Roberto Bautista Agut	20.5	0	0.7	0	2.0
12	Milos Raonic	20.0	1	1.6	-2	1.1
13	Jo Wilfried Tsonga	18.8	-1	-0.4	0	1.0
14	Philipp Kohlschreiber	18.4	0	0.9	2	2.7
15	Nick Kyrgios	17.3	0	0.5	9	6.1
16	Marin Cilic	17.0	1	1.6	6	5.0
17	Gael Monfils	15.8	-1	-0.5	0	0.7
18	David Ferrer	15.4	0	0.3	-12	-18.8
19	John Isner	14.7	1	0.5	-5	-2.2
20	Gilles Simon	12.2	-1	-2.6	-5	-4.2
21	Grigor Dimitrov	9.8	0	-1.3	0	-2.9
22	Jack Sock	9.1	1	0.0	-2	-4.3
23	Fernando Verdasco	8.9	5	0.8	4	-0.5
24	Gilles Muller	8.7	3	0.4	1	-2.4
25	Pablo Cuevas	8.5	5	0.8	15	2.1
26	Feliciano Lopez	8.4	-2	-0.7	6	0.2
27	Kevin Anderson	8.2	-2	-0.8	-15	-10.0
28	Albert Ramos	7.9	-6	-1.5	8	0.5
29	Fabio Fognini	7.7	2	0.0	10	1.1
30	Bernard Tomic	7.6	3	0.5	-7	-3.6
31	Steve Johnson	7.6	9	2.2	-3	-1.4
32	Ivo Karlovic	7.3	-3	-0.6	-14	-6.9
33	Guido Pella	7.3	-1	0.0	25	3.7
34	Alexander Zverev	6.9	4	1.3	50	4.7
35	Marcos Baghdatis	6.7	-9	-1.9	6	0.6
36	Andrey Kuznetsov	6.3	-1	-0.1	55	4.6
37	John Millman	6.0	2	0.4	28	2.8
38	Jeremy Chardy	5.9	-1	0.2	-9	-2.8
39	Alexandr Dolgopolov	5.9	-5	-0.8	-8	-2.7
40	Carlos Berlocq	5.4	15	1.9	31	2.5
41	Joao Sousa	5.1	0	0.1	1	-0.5
42	Mikhail Kukushkin	5.1	2	0.6	25	2.0
43	Borna Coric	5.1	4	0.8	18	1.7
44	Nicolas Almagro	4.8	-1	0.1	10	0.7
45	Kyle Edmund	4.8	6	1.0	54	3.3
46	Juan Martin Del Potro	4.5	22	1.8	58	3.3
47	Federico Delbonis	4.5	-1	0.0	9	0.5
48	Pablo Carreno Busta	4.5	-6	-0.4	20	1.5
49	Juan Monaco	4.4	5	0.8	-4	-0.8
50	Benoit Paire	4.2	-2	0.0	-3	-0.9
51	Andreas Seppi	4.2	-6	-0.3	-16	-3.3
52	Adrian Mannarino	4.0	4	0.7	-1	-0.4
53	Viktor Troicki	3.7	-17	-2.5	-19	-3.9
54	Ivan Dodig	3.6	3	0.3	-2	-0.7
55	Marcel Granollers	3.4	-2	-0.2	46	2.2
56	Martin Klizan	3.3	9	0.6	21	0.7
57	Guillermo Garcia Lopez	3.3	-5	-0.4	-31	-6.2
58	Leonardo Mayer	3.3	-8	-0.5	-20	-3.4
59	Sam Querrey	3.3	-1	0.1	-16	-2.2
60	Mikhail Youzhny	3.2	26	1.2	126	3.4
61	Ricardas Berankis	3.2	0	0.2	32	1.4
62	Jiri Vesely	3.1	4	0.4	-14	-1.6
63	Lucas Pouille	3.1	-4	0.0	24	1.1
64	Thomaz Bellucci	3.0	5	0.3	-18	-2.2
65	Pierre Hugues Herbert	3.0	-5	0.0	16	0.6
66	Guido Andreozzi	2.9	4	0.3	73	2.7
67	Denis Istomin	2.9	-18	-1.0	-14	-1.2
68	Yen Hsun Lu	2.8	8	0.4	-13	-1.1
69	Dudi Sela	2.8	6	0.4	23	1.1
70	Damir Dzumhur	2.7	-8	-0.1	24	1.0
71	Paul Henri Mathieu	2.7	-4	0.0	14	0.7
72	Rogerio Dutra Silva	2.6	8	0.4	75	2.6
73	Hyeon Chung	2.6	0	0.1	-40	-5.4
74	Paolo Lorenzi	2.5	-11	-0.3	1	-0.2
75	Lukas Rosol	2.5	-4	-0.1	-16	-1.0

The top 6 remain untouched, although Federer, Nadal, and Wawrinka all lost a little bit of ground over the last three weeks (Federer failed to defend his title in Halle, Nadal missed Stuttgart which he won last year, and Stan was his usual inconsistent self in a medium-sized event).

Meanwhile, as the tour shifted to a surface that doesn't favor him as much as clay, Dominic Thiem... continued playing really well, beating Federer and Kohlschreiber to take the Stuttgart title, then reaching the semis in Halle before collapsing in exhaustion (OK, losing in straight sets, but the exhaustion was a likely factor). As a result of his first career successes on grass, Thiem grabs the 8 seed at Wimbledon - and the luck of the draw puts him in the same quarter as Wawrinka, who, while a formidable foe, is not exactly in the class of the top 3, especially not on grass (the Stuttgart title gives Thiem one more turf-won trophy than Stan has amassed in his entire career).

Thiem has had an unbelievable 2016 to date, and he's doing it in a pretty interesting way: he's playing at a good level (not a spectacular one, necessarily; he's 17th in raw Melo rating before adjusting for games played), and he's playing ALL THE TIME (he has nearly 200 more service games in the last 12 months than any other player on tour, 2382 to Djokovic's 2198). Thiem has played 16 ATP events so far in 2016 - and that's not counting Davis Cup, which he also played. He's currently fourth in the ATP's Race to London (AKA the rankings based on 2016 points only); none of the other players in the top 10 on that list have played more than 13 events, and some have played as few as nine.

Thiem has climbed 23 spots in the Melog ratings since the beginning of the year, and he has earned every one of them. But playing a schedule that taxing can be a double-edged sword; not only does it lead to fatigue, but the structure of the ATP ratings makes it nearly impossible for a top-10 player to climb significantly through small events, as the best players in the world are only allowed to count 6 results outside of Slams and Masters. (For Thiem, right now, all six of those results are titles. Two of those are from 2015; if he doesn't play those events again this year, his ranking would fall by all of 140 points as his two semifinals in 500-point events replace them. Meanwhile, of his 12 entries for Slams and Masters events, 10 of them are worth 90 points or less, and 6 are either 45 or 10. But most of those low scores are results from late last year, and Thiem will have a chance to amend them as 2016 progresses. He will need to do so to gain much more ground, both in the ATP ratings and in Melog.)

In other young player news, Thiem wasn't the only youth to upend Roger Federer in the recent grass stretch; Alexander Zverev bested him in the Halle semis, then promptly conceded the final to Florian Mayer, which is a bit of a step down (though Mayer is a fine grass player in his own right when healthy, which he apparently is now). Zverev's other results were mixed enough that he gains a mere four places in the Melog ratings - but his ATP ranking is now good enough that he's a seed at Wimbledon, which opens up the possibility of a good run over the next two weeks.

But then, before the event starts, that possibility is open for everyone in the draw - even Marcus Willis, the qualifier who has no ATP or Challenger main draws in the last 12 months, and therefore doesn't actually appear anywhere in the Melog ratings at the moment. Two weeks from now, we'll know who actually had good runs, and we'll check in on what effects those runs have on the ratings.