It’s a longstanding complaint: tennis lags behind other sports in data. This article published last week—Why Tennis isn’t ready to play Moneyball—enumerated the reasons why it’s so hard to come by uniform stats. If predictive analysis is a challenge in normal times, imagine the difficulty today. If we can’t get a reliable winners-to-errors count, what hope do we have for acquiring more meaningful metrics like “match record after spending 14 days in a Hyatt single room in strict quarantine” or “mindset amid a global pandemic”?
All of which is to say that handicapping a tennis tournament—a fool’s errand, if a fun and expected one—is always a fraught exercise.