Speed and Spin in Men's Pro Tennis 2023

Jim Fawcette

Crowning of new Wimbledon champs provides a good, if brief, pausing point in pro tennis before the hard-court swing into the US Open, a good time to check some metrics. Tennisplayer.net has been a pioneer in measuring speed and spin of pro shots, so let's look at those for groundstrokes for the current top players. Then I'll add some match statistics from Wimbledon at the end for context.

Because of the inconsistency with which the headless beast called pro tennis shares stats with its fans, I've had to dig around the web. First, I pulled average speed of shots from matches at Roland Garros this year because it has that metric for the top 10 players from the ATP. Wimbledon does not share that.

I combined those speed numbers with shot spin averages for the first quarter of the year from the ATP site. Gathering each separate number required searching for stats for each player, squirreled away in the score archives for different matches at the various web sites. We'll address WTA players' numbers in an upcoming article.