John Yandell: The Aggressive Margin

If a tennis player wants to gain a real understanding of his wins and loses in competitive match play, he needs to understand how he wins and loses points from a quantitative, or statistical perspective. In the first article in this series, we explained the critical role of the forced error in understanding match statistics. This article introduces another key statistic, the “Aggressive Margin.” Andre Agassi has the games best groundstrokes but his Aggressive Margin is the key to understanding why he wins or loses against Sampras Let’s see what the Aggressive Margin is and what it tells us about the classic Sampras/Agassi confrontation at the 2001 U.S. Open. Then we’ll compare that to the margin in some of their other classic match ups over the years. In a future article, we’ll see how it illuminates who wins and loses at other levels of play. The Aggressive Margin was first developed decades ago by the father of modern tennis statistics, Bill Jacobsen. It’s a composite statistic that combines how a player wins and loses all points into a single index. Understanding this one key number allows any player to see exactly what happened in a given match, and how. Basically…