Melog Rankings (Pre-Olympics 2016)

The tennis schedule is a mess right now - and as a result, so are the rankings.

This was touched on briefly last time, but I probably didn't quite give it the emphasis it deserved. The Olympics are coming up, and the tennis schedule was radically adjusted to compensate for their presence; there will be only one 250-point event this week (Atlanta), and one next week (Los Cabos). The Rogers Cup (held in Toronto this year) would normally have been scheduled to take place next week, but was shifted two weeks earlier, also to adjust for the Olympics - and as usual, no other ATP event can take place in the same week as a Masters.

The results of all those machinations were... interesting. Here is a table showing what the schedule between Wimbledon and the Cincinnati Masters has looked like each of the last two years. (The table is color-coded by surface - hopefully in self-explanatory fashion; blue is hard, brown-orange is clay, green is grass. Davis Cup quarterfinals were played on varying surfaces so they're left in black. Week 3 for 2016 was just completed.)

Week	2015	2016
1	Newport; Davis Cup QF	Bastad; Hamburg; Newport; Davis Cup QF
2	Bastad; Bogota; Umag	Gstaad; Kitzbuhel; Umag; Washington
3	Atlanta; Gstaad; Hamburg	Toronto Masters
4	Kitzbuhel; Washington	Atlanta; Rio Olympics
5	Montreal Masters	Los Cabos; Rio Olympics

Bastad and Gstaad were both held a week earlier than usual. Hamburg, Washington, and Kitzbuhel were both held two weeks earlier than usual, as was the Rogers Cup. Atlanta, meanwhile, is a week late, and Los Cabos, which replaces Bogota on the schedule, is three weeks late.

What that means is that as of now, the ATP rankings (and my rankings, for that matter) include two Rogers Cups (Novak Djokovic won one and lost the final in the other, and temporarily gets 1600 points for the combination), along with two Washingtons and two Kitzbuhels, but no Atlantas or Bogota/LosCaboses. (They also include no Olympics - but that will still be true two weeks from now, as no ranking points are being given for the Olympics this year.)

All of this will come out in the wash two weeks from now... kind of. But the compressed post-Wimbledon clay schedule (especially moving Hamburg to the week after Wimbledon) will have consequences that last for the next twelve months, as the fields in those events were severely diluted (players outside the top 100 received direct entry into several of those 250-point events).

Put it this way: The top seed in the 500-point event in Hamburg was Philipp Kohlschreiber, who came into the event ranked #22 in the world by the ATP. In the first week of this year, the tournament held in Brisbane had all eight of its seeds ranked in the top 20 - and yet Milos Raonic gets only 250 points for winning that title, and Martin Klizan gets 500 from his victory in Hamburg.

(Or put it this way... the final in Kitzbuhel this year was Paolo Lorenzi over Nikoloz Basilashvili. After that match, both of those men lost before the semis in the events they played the next week - which doesn't sound all that uncommon until you realize that both of them were playing Challengers.

Let's get into the mess.

	Player	Melog	Rank change (last update)	Melog change (last update)	Rank change (start of yr)	Melog change (start of yr)
1	Novak Djokovic	86.3	0	1.6	0	-15.0
2	Andy Murray	55.8	0	-4.7	0	-10.0
3	Roger Federer	42.2	0	-1.2	0	-23.2
4	Rafael Nadal	34.1	0	-4.4	0	-6.1
5	Kei Nishikori	28.9	0	0.9	3	-2.6
6	Milos Raonic	25.4	0	-0.1	4	6.6
7	Tomas Berdych	23.8	1	0.0	-2	-12.7
8	David Goffin	23.7	-1	-0.3	11	9.6
9	Stanislas Wawrinka	22.2	1	0.8	-2	-10.4
10	Jo Wilfried Tsonga	19.4	1	-1.2	3	1.7
11	Marin Cilic	19.4	3	0.5	11	7.3
12	Richard Gasquet	18.8	1	-0.6	-3	-6.8
13	Roberto Bautista Agut	18.8	-1	-1.1	-2	0.3
14	Dominic Thiem	18.6	-5	-4.8	16	10.0
15	Gael Monfils	17.5	4	3.9	2	2.4
16	Philipp Kohlschreiber	16.5	-1	-1.4	0	0.8
17	Nick Kyrgios	16.4	-1	0.1	7	5.1
18	John Isner	15.3	0	-0.2	-4	-1.5
19	David Ferrer	14.8	-2	-1.2	-13	-19.3
20	Jack Sock	12.2	0	1.1	0	-1.2
21	Fernando Verdasco	9.3	8	1.4	6	0.0
22	Pablo Cuevas	9.2	1	-0.1	18	2.9
23	Grigor Dimitrov	9.2	-2	-0.3	-2	-3.5
24	Steve Johnson	9.2	0	-0.1	4	0.2
25	Feliciano Lopez	8.8	0	-0.3	7	0.7
26	Alexander Zverev	8.5	1	-0.3	58	6.4
27	Bernard Tomic	8.5	-1	-0.6	-4	-2.8
28	Gilles Muller	8.3	3	0.4	-3	-2.8
29	Gilles Simon	8.0	-7	-1.4	-14	-8.4
30	Fabio Fognini	7.9	0	0.0	9	1.3
31	Guido Pella	7.7	1	0.0	27	4.1
32	Andrey Kuznetsov	7.4	1	-0.1	59	5.6
33	Albert Ramos	7.4	-5	-0.9	3	0.0
34	Ivo Karlovic	7.2	5	1.5	-16	-7.0
35	Kevin Anderson	6.7	-1	-0.1	-23	-11.5
36	Jeremy Chardy	6.7	-1	0.0	-7	-2.1
37	Marcos Baghdatis	6.7	-1	0.4	4	0.6
38	Sam Querrey	6.2	2	0.5	5	0.7
39	Carlos Berlocq	6.2	2	0.6	32	3.3
40	John Millman	5.9	-3	-0.3	25	2.7
41	Juan Martin Del Potro	5.7	-3	-0.2	63	4.5
42	Borna Coric	5.4	0	0.0	19	2.1
43	Kyle Edmund	4.8	2	-0.2	56	3.4
44	Federico Delbonis	4.5	7	0.1	12	0.6
45	Nicolas Almagro	4.4	2	-0.4	9	0.3
46	Mikhail Kukushkin	4.4	-3	-1.0	21	1.3
47	Alexandr Dolgopolov	4.4	-3	-0.7	-16	-4.3
48	Mikhail Youzhny	4.2	14	0.6	138	4.5
49	Jiri Vesely	4.1	-1	-0.6	-1	-0.7
50	Adrian Mannarino	4.1	2	-0.3	1	-0.3
51	Lucas Pouille	3.7	-5	-1.2	36	1.8
52	Guido Andreozzi	3.7	14	0.7	87	3.5
53	Pierre Hugues Herbert	3.6	8	-0.1	28	1.3
54	Paolo Lorenzi	3.5	17	1.1	21	0.8
55	Andreas Seppi	3.5	3	-0.3	-20	-4.0
56	Marcel Granollers	3.5	-1	-0.5	45	2.2
57	Ivan Dodig	3.4	0	-0.4	-5	-0.8
58	Pablo Carreno Busta	3.4	-9	-1.3	10	0.4
59	Yen Hsun Lu	3.3	5	0.2	-4	-0.6
60	Viktor Troicki	3.3	-4	-0.6	-26	-4.3
61	Martin Klizan	3.2	2	-0.1	16	0.5
62	Juan Monaco	2.9	-3	-0.9	-17	-2.3
63	Paul Henri Mathieu	2.8	11	0.4	22	0.8
64	Hyeon Chung	2.8	5	0.2	-31	-5.3
65	Nicolas Mahut	2.8	2	-0.1	33	1.3
66	Guillermo Garcia Lopez	2.7	-1	-0.4	-40	-6.8
67	Damir Dzumhur	2.7	1	-0.1	27	1.0
68	Dudi Sela	2.6	4	0.2	24	0.9
69	Thomaz Bellucci	2.6	-9	-1.2	-23	-2.6
70	Illya Marchenko	2.6	20	0.9	9	0.2
71	Taylor Harry Fritz	2.6	-1	0.1	1	-0.3
72	Mardy Fish	2.6	7	0.4	14	0.6
73	Denis Istomin	2.5	-20	-1.7	-20	-1.6
74	Sergiy Stakhovsky	2.5	11	0.6	-12	-0.8
75	Joao Sousa	2.5	-25	-2.1	-33	-3.1

I'll hold off on analyzing too much because again, there's some schedule-based nonsense in here. (Primarily, Murray still has credit for winning last year's Rogers Cup, which will vanish two weeks from now; he didn't play in this year's event, allowing Djokovic to more than double the gap between them in the race for ATP year-end number 1.) But a glance through the table shows that Melog is far less impressed with the recent tournaments than the ATP. Most notably, Martin Klizan's Hamburg title (and his other results) only served to bump him two spots in the rankings here, as compared to 17 in the ATP rankings. Also with disparate ranking bumps were Ivo Karlovic (+12 ATP, +5 Melog), and on the flip side, Fabio Fognini (-5 in the ATP despite winning a title, as he made the Hamburg final last year; holds steady in Melog).

July is usually a down month anyway, though. The big names will be back on court this week... well, kind of. Roger Federer has announced that he's sitting out the rest of the year due to knee issues (which means he'll end 2016 without a title, and almost certainly outside the top 10, both of which haven't happened to Federer in a WHILE). Beyond that, Tomas Berdych, Milos Raonic, and Richard Gasquet have also pulled out. But that still leaves three of the Big Four plus a solid collection of second-tier players (Nishikori, Wawrinka, Tsonga, Goffin, Monfils, plus 2012 bronze medal winner Juan Martin del Potro) to fill out the bracket.

Which makes it a bigger event than the recently-complete Rogers Cup. Which still counts for 1000 more points to the champion than the Olympics will.

We'll be back in two weeks to examine how the Melog ratings are affected by Rio, and see if they're even more skewed in comparison to the ATP rankings than they are now.