Big 4 era

 

Big 5 era

 

Weak era

 

Well this graph doesn't show you that all 3 of them were masters of point construction like no other player.

 

Murray

 

FedGod

 

What are FHP & BHP?

 

2025 will mark the first year that none of the Big 3 have won a "Big Title" in more than 20 years of tennis (assuming Novak doesn't play/win Bercy and Turin). It's been an exceptional run, the likes of which we will probably never see again. To mark this, I have created an annotated plot of how each of the Big 3 played, starting from their debut years, taking into account their FHP and BHP based on Tennis Abstract's charted matches.
View attachment 435737

This is annotated from a Federer perspective since he was the oldest and peaked before Rafole. You can see the Federer FH peaking at >10 FHP in 2004-06 before falling off. The only other time he matched that was the 2017 season.

2010-15 is when Novak comes through. He's doing better than Nadal in 2011 and 2012 in terms of FHP and BHP but then Rafa's FH in 2013-14 gets a scary peak. Federer is clearly 3rd best in this timeframe with both his FH and BH worse than the other two.

I know FHP and BHP are not perfect metrics and especially with SHBH like Federer's, when it doesn't take slice BHs into account but I think it still gives a fairly good idea into how the trivalry (if that's a word) ebbed and flowed among the three.

Partial/lacking info vs no info, which is better really? At least the latter doesn't provide ground for faulty reasoning.

 

There's no way Djokovic's backhand was better or more potent in 2024 than it was in 2011 and 2015-2016 so this already shows the data is flawed.

 

Not saying FHP&BHP indexes even mean something, but Djokovic's groundstrokes in 2024 are surely more potent than in 2011 in terms of pace, precision, and general damage.
Tennis evolved massively in 15 years, just like football, basketball, ice hockey, etc.
The intensity of the modern game is much higher than it was 15 years ago. This is what tennis pros are saying. That's what Djokovic will tell you if you ask him.
He even basically said that when describing Alcaraz's tennis not that long ago.

However, if you magically teleport 2011 Djokovic to 2025 and give him, like, 3 months, he'll likely adapt to modern standards, and his groundies will be better than current Novak's.

 

from tennis abstract material

In fact, the 2025 Challenger rate (for double faults from second serves) so far is 9.8%, the first time that the minor leaguers have dipped below double digits.