Melog Rankings: Post-Olympics 2016

So, over the last two weeks, not much has happened on the ATP World Tour. The first week of August saw Nick Kyrgios win the second title of his career by dethroning John Isner in Atlanta, and a week later we visited the opposite end of the age spectrum when the venerable Ivo Karlovic knocked off Feliciano Lopez in the final in Los Cabos. There was some interesting stuff in Challengers as well (young American Frances Tiafoe won his first Challenger title, while even younger Canadian Denis Shapovalov made a quarterfinal and a semifinal in back-to-back events), but outside of that, there's very little to report...

Oh, wait: The Olympics also occurred - and they were rather interesting, to say the least. Andy Murray won his second gold medal, making him the first men's singles player to do that. Kei Nishikori continued establishing himself as a second-tier star by grabbing the bronze; his victory in the third-place match came against Rafael Nadal, whose triumphant return from injury also included a gold in doubles.

And all of that was deservedly upstaged by Juan Martin del Potro, who upset #1 Novak Djokovic in the first round, edged Nadal in the semifinals, and made Murray work pretty hard to secure the gold.

Del Potro entered the Olympics ranked #141 by the ATP, which is not uncommon for a quality player who's working his way back from an injury. And after his stunning run in Rio, he is ranked... #141, because the ATP decided not to award points for the Olympics this year. (In 2012, the silver medal was worth 450 points; Delpo would be in a tie for ATP #53 if the Games were counted the same way this year. Which is a pretty big difference.)

But we're not all bound by the ATP's decision. So let's see what Melog, which does count the Olympics, has to say about the current state of the men's tour as we approach the US Open.

	Player	Melog	Rank change (last update)	Melog change (last update)	Rank change (start of yr)	Melog change (start of yr)
1	Novak Djokovic	85.7	0	-0.6	0	-15.6
2	Andy Murray	58.1	0	2.4	0	-7.7
3	Roger Federer	43.5	0	1.3	0	-21.9
4	Rafael Nadal	36.7	0	2.5	0	-3.6
5	Kei Nishikori	29.3	0	0.5	3	-2.2
6	Milos Raonic	26.3	0	0.9	4	7.4
7	Tomas Berdych	25.0	0	1.1	-2	-11.5
8	David Goffin	23.5	0	-0.2	11	9.4
9	Stanislas Wawrinka	23.3	0	1.1	-2	-9.3
10	Marin Cilic	20.5	1	1.1	12	8.4
11	Dominic Thiem	20.0	3	1.5	19	11.4
12	Roberto Bautista Agut	20.0	1	1.2	-1	1.4
13	Gael Monfils	19.5	2	2.0	4	4.4
14	Richard Gasquet	19.1	-2	0.2	-5	-6.5
15	Jo Wilfried Tsonga	18.1	-5	-1.4	-2	0.3
16	Nick Kyrgios	17.2	1	0.8	8	5.9
17	David Ferrer	15.6	2	0.8	-11	-18.5
18	Philipp Kohlschreiber	15.4	-2	-1.1	-2	-0.4
19	John Isner	14.9	-1	-0.4	-5	-1.9
20	Jack Sock	11.6	0	-0.6	0	-1.8
21	Feliciano Lopez	10.3	4	1.5	11	2.2
22	Pablo Cuevas	10.0	0	0.7	18	3.6
23	Fernando Verdasco	9.6	-2	0.3	4	0.3
24	Steve Johnson	9.5	0	0.3	4	0.5
25	Juan Martin Del Potro	9.2	16	3.5	79	8.0
26	Gilles Simon	8.9	3	0.9	-11	-7.5
27	Gilles Muller	8.5	1	0.3	-2	-2.5
28	Grigor Dimitrov	8.5	-5	-0.7	-7	-4.2
29	Alexander Zverev	8.5	-3	-0.1	55	6.3
30	Fabio Fognini	8.3	0	0.4	9	1.7
31	Andrey Kuznetsov	8.1	1	0.7	60	6.3
32	Ivo Karlovic	7.9	2	0.6	-14	-6.4
33	Guido Pella	7.8	-2	0.1	25	4.2
34	Bernard Tomic	7.8	-7	-0.7	-11	-3.5
35	Albert Ramos	7.7	-2	0.3	1	0.3
36	Marcos Baghdatis	6.8	1	0.2	5	0.8
37	Kevin Anderson	6.4	-2	-0.3	-25	-11.8
38	Sam Querrey	6.0	0	-0.2	5	0.5
39	Carlos Berlocq	5.9	0	-0.3	32	3.0
40	Borna Coric	5.7	2	0.3	21	2.4
41	John Millman	5.4	-1	-0.5	24	2.2
42	Jeremy Chardy	5.4	-6	-1.3	-13	-3.4
43	Mikhail Kukushkin	4.6	3	0.2	24	1.5
44	Kyle Edmund	4.5	-1	-0.3	55	3.1
45	Jiri Vesely	4.3	4	0.2	3	-0.4
46	Nicolas Almagro	4.3	-1	-0.1	8	0.2
47	Marcel Granollers	4.3	9	0.8	54	3.0
48	Guido Andreozzi	4.3	4	0.5	91	4.1
49	Pablo Carreno Busta	4.2	9	0.9	19	1.2
50	Andreas Seppi	4.0	5	0.5	-15	-3.5
51	Federico Delbonis	4.0	-7	-0.6	5	0.1
52	Mikhail Youzhny	4.0	-4	-0.2	134	4.2
53	Lucas Pouille	3.9	-2	0.1	34	1.9
54	Viktor Troicki	3.9	6	0.6	-20	-3.8
55	Martin Klizan	3.8	6	0.6	22	1.1
56	Yen Hsun Lu	3.8	3	0.5	-1	-0.2
57	Ivan Dodig	3.7	0	0.2	-5	-0.6
58	Pierre Hugues Herbert	3.7	-5	0.0	23	1.3
59	Adrian Mannarino	3.6	-9	-0.5	-8	-0.8
60	Alexandr Dolgopolov	3.5	-13	-0.9	-29	-5.1
61	Thomaz Bellucci	3.3	8	0.7	-15	-1.9
62	Dudi Sela	3.2	6	0.6	30	1.4
63	Joao Sousa	3.2	12	0.7	-21	-2.4
64	Taylor Harry Fritz	3.0	7	0.5	8	0.2
65	Nicolas Mahut	3.0	0	0.3	33	1.6
66	Guillermo Garcia Lopez	3.0	0	0.3	-40	-6.5
67	Juan Monaco	2.9	-5	0.0	-22	-2.3
68	Daniel Evans	2.9	9	0.5	39	1.8
69	Gastao Elias	2.8	7	0.3	77	2.7
70	Paolo Lorenzi	2.8	-16	-0.7	5	0.1
71	Hyeon Chung	2.7	-7	-0.1	-38	-5.3
72	Benoit Paire	2.6	6	0.3	-25	-2.5
73	Damir Dzumhur	2.6	-6	0.0	21	0.9
74	Mardy Fish	2.6	-2	0.0	12	0.6
75	Illya Marchenko	2.6	-5	0.0	4	0.1

There's Delpo! His rating sports the largest increase of the week, and he jumps all the way to #25 here. (Before adjusting for playing time, the raw Elo-type rating has him as the 13th-best player in the world right now. Which, when he's healthy, is probably about right. Given any kind of health at all for the rest of the year, his rating here is very likely to keep climbing - but health can't really be assumed for him.)

Outside of Delpo's leap forward, the rankings look kind of odd this week - no changes in the order of the top nine, but most of the ratings increase by a little, including those of players who were idle over the past fortnight (Federer, Raonic, Wawrinka, and Berdych). Federer's small jump is particularly odd, since he also didn't play in this time period last year, meaning that the matches under consideration for him are completely unchanged. So what's up with that?

The main thing that's up is that last year's Canada Masters event fell out of the dataset this week. And while that event had a final that looked a lot like plenty of other Masters finals we've seen over the past half-decade plus (Murray over Djokovic in a close one), that concealed the fact that the initial stages of the bracket were a bit of a mess. Four of the top eight seeds (Stan Wawrinka, Milos Raonic, Tomas Berdych, and Marin Cilic) dropped their first matches in Canada last year; some of those losses were understandable (Karlovic over Raonic in two tiebreaks, Kyrgios over Wawrinka due to third-set injury withdrawal), and some were not (Berdych lost to Donald Young, who you may notice is not currently a member of the top 75 table).

All of those losses were eliminated from consideration this week, giving the four players who suffered them a mild boost (their Melog scores all increased by about 1 this week), and consequently also boosting the scores of the people they've played a lot over the past year (largely each other, and the other top players in the world). It's not a huge effect, but it's enough to mostly offset Djokovic replacing a Masters final with a first-round Olympic defeat (especially because the opponents he played to reach the final in Canada last year were notably unimpressive, and the loss at the Olympics was an understandable one).

Coming up this week is the final big event before the US Open. But the Cincinnati Masters will feel quite different this year, as it's being played without both two-time defending champion Roger Federer and five-time losing finalist Novak Djokovic. Which opens the field considerably for both Andy Murray and everyone else who might hope to snare a Masters title thanks to a weakened draw. If Murray wins, the race for #1 gets ever tighter (he would pull within about 800 points in the ATP rankings for 2016 to date); if not, we're likely to see someone else making a big move in this table two weeks from now. But either way, Federer and Djokovic will have very different-looking scores before the US Open than they do today.