Melog Rankings: Post-Monte Carlo 2016

For a couple of weeks in which there wasn't an overabundance of high-level tennis played, quite a bit has actually happened since the last Melog update. Former top-10 player Juan Monaco kicked his injury comeback into high gear by winning the title in Houston. Youngsters Jack Sock and Borna Coric both reached finals, something neither player has done very often in their careers to date. American teenager Stefan Kozlov reached his second career Challenger final in Le Gosier, solidifying his place in the top 300 in the ATP ratings.

And that was just the first week. Week 2 brought us Monte Carlo, which featured the return of Roger Federer, the non-return of David Ferrer (whose withdrawal led to a quarterfinal appearance from lucky loser Marcel Granollers), a first-match upset for defending finalist Tomas Berdych, a run to the final for Gael Monfils (whose loss in the last match dropped his record in tour-level finals to 5-19) and a return to the winner's circle for Rafael Nadal (whose won his ninth career Monte Carlo title, tying his own record for titles at one event).

Have I stalled enough yet? Because the biggest story of the last two weeks wasn't any of those things - it was that Novak Djokovic lost.

Sure, Novak loses sometimes; he now has six defeats in the last year. But one of those losses was due to health (an eye infection in Dubai this year), and another was in the round robin of the Tour Finals last year - an event that he would go on to win despite the defeat. This was the first completed match to eliminate Djokovic from title contention since August of last year.

It's more than that, however. Djokovic lost to Jiri Vesely in the round of 32. Vesely entered the match ranked #55 in the world by the ATP. Djokovic hadn't lost a match to a player ranked outside of Grand Slam seeding territory (the top 32) since 2010, which is before he first reached the #1 ranking. That is a VERY long time.

Let's see what this rather startling defeat does to the rating for the #1 player in the world.

	Player	Melog	Rank change (last update)	Melog change (last update)	Rank change (start of yr)	Melog change (start of yr)
1	Novak Djokovic	97.0	0	-7.6	0	-4.3
2	Andy Murray	62.0	1	1.4	0	-3.8
3	Roger Federer	61.2	-1	-0.2	0	-4.2
4	Rafael Nadal	40.6	0	2.1	0	0.4
5	Stanislas Wawrinka	32.2	1	1.4	2	-0.4
6	Kei Nishikori	31.4	-1	-0.4	2	-0.2
7	Richard Gasquet	25.1	1	0.0	2	-0.5
8	Jo Wilfried Tsonga	24.9	1	0.0	5	7.1
9	Tomas Berdych	24.5	-2	-3.7	-4	-12.1
10	Roberto Bautista Agut	23.1	0	-0.9	1	4.6
11	David Goffin	23.0	1	0.2	8	8.9
12	David Ferrer	22.1	-1	-1.8	-6	-12.0
13	Gael Monfils	21.5	3	1.9	4	6.4
14	Philipp Kohlschreiber	21.5	-1	0.0	2	5.7
15	Milos Raonic	19.4	-1	-0.8	-5	0.5
16	John Isner	19.3	-1	-0.3	-2	2.5
17	Marin Cilic	18.6	0	-0.3	5	6.6
18	Nick Kyrgios	18.2	0	-0.1	6	7.0
19	Gilles Simon	18.1	0	0.4	-4	1.7
20	Dominic Thiem	17.8	0	0.8	10	9.2
21	Grigor Dimitrov	15.1	0	-1.3	0	2.3
22	Jack Sock	12.2	1	-0.4	-2	-1.2
23	Kevin Anderson	12.1	-1	-1.0	-11	-6.1
24	Pablo Cuevas	11.3	0	0.3	16	4.9
25	Ivo Karlovic	9.6	1	-0.1	-7	-4.7
26	Fabio Fognini	9.6	-1	-1.0	13	2.9
27	Gilles Muller	9.2	0	-0.2	-2	-1.8
28	Feliciano Lopez	9.2	1	0.2	4	1.0
29	Alexandr Dolgopolov	8.6	-1	-0.6	2	0.0
30	Bernard Tomic	8.5	0	-0.4	-7	-2.8
31	Marcos Baghdatis	8.4	5	1.1	10	2.3
32	Hyeon Chung	8.1	5	1.1	1	0.1
33	Guillermo Garcia Lopez	8.1	5	1.1	-7	-1.4
34	Fernando Verdasco	7.5	-1	-0.3	-7	-1.9
35	Jeremy Chardy	7.4	-3	-0.5	-6	-1.3
36	Albert Ramos	7.4	-5	-0.7	0	0.0
37	Steve Johnson	7.4	-2	-0.1	-9	-1.6
38	Leonardo Mayer	7.1	1	0.2	0	0.4
39	Joao Sousa	6.9	-5	-0.8	3	1.3
40	Andrey Kuznetsov	6.8	2	0.4	51	5.0
41	Thomaz Bellucci	6.5	-1	-0.3	5	1.3
42	Guido Pella	6.4	3	0.3	16	2.7
43	Benoit Paire	6.1	6	0.7	4	0.9
44	Teymuraz Gabashvili	6.0	-3	-0.6	5	1.4
45	John Millman	6.0	1	-0.1	20	2.7
46	Paolo Lorenzi	5.7	4	0.3	29	3.0
47	Viktor Troicki	5.6	-3	-0.5	-13	-2.0
48	Andreas Seppi	5.5	0	-0.1	-13	-2.0
49	Pablo Carreno Busta	5.2	6	0.9	19	2.2
50	Federico Delbonis	5.2	-3	-0.7	6	1.3
51	Lukas Rosol	5.2	0	0.0	8	1.7
52	Alexander Zverev	4.9	2	0.5	32	2.8
53	Marcel Granollers	4.8	4	0.5	48	3.5
54	Sam Querrey	4.7	-11	-1.6	-11	-0.8
55	Juan Monaco	4.5	21	1.6	-10	-0.7
56	Jiri Vesely	4.5	10	0.8	-8	-0.3
57	Mikhail Kukushkin	4.4	-1	0.0	10	1.3
58	Borna Coric	4.3	1	0.1	3	1.0
59	Denis Istomin	4.3	-6	-0.3	-6	0.2
60	Robin Haase	4.2	0	0.2	14	1.5
61	Pablo Andujar	4.2	-3	0.0	-4	0.5
62	Martin Klizan	4.0	-10	-0.9	15	1.3
63	Adrian Mannarino	4.0	1	0.1	-12	-0.5
64	Pierre Hugues Herbert	3.9	8	0.7	17	1.5
65	Yen Hsun Lu	3.9	-2	0.0	-10	-0.1
66	Paul Henri Mathieu	3.8	9	0.7	19	1.8
67	Taylor Harry Fritz	3.8	-6	-0.2	5	0.9
68	Vasek Pospisil	3.6	-1	-0.1	-24	-1.6
69	Lucas Pouille	3.5	16	0.9	18	1.6
70	Nicolas Almagro	3.5	-8	-0.4	-16	-0.6
71	Ricardas Berankis	3.4	12	0.8	22	1.7
72	Dusan Lajovic	3.4	-3	0.1	4	0.8
73	Ivan Dodig	3.4	-3	0.1	-21	-0.9
74	Damir Dzumhur	3.2	6	0.5	20	1.5
75	Carlos Berlocq	3.2	-7	-0.2	-4	0.3

He's still #1! (Not that there was any question about that, really. The loss to Vesely is still the only completed match he's lost to a non-top-10 opponent in the last 12 months, and everyone else in the top 5 also has at least one loss to a player outside the top 50.)

With that said, Novak's rating still took quite a hit this week. Which really demonstrates how impressive the 12-month span leading up to this defeat was - one bad match took a giant chunk out of it, because he hadn't had any genuinely bad matches in the preceding year. If he starts absorbing losses like this more than once a year, then we might eventually see a change in the top spot.

In lower down the rankings news, Lucas Pouille joins then top 75 this week after making the round of 16 in Monte Carlo. The 22-year-old Frenchman upset Richard Gasquet to reach that stage, giving him his third top-20 victory of 2016 so far (he's also upended a pair of Davids, Goffin and Ferrer). All three of those victories have been tightly-contested three-set matches, but then, playing repeated close matches against quality opposition is a good sign to begin with.

In not as far down the rankings news (but getting farther), Tomas Berdych continues his decline, as he joins Ferrer in dropping out of the top 8. The two stalwarts of the Big Four era second tier are both having highly disappointing 2016s to date - neither has reached a final of any kind yet, and only one of their four combined semifinal losses is to a top-20 opponent. Both men have a lot of defending to do during clay season, and at our next update (in three weeks, after the Madrid Masters), we'll check on whether either man has managed to reverse the slide.