Goran Ivanisevic has seen this happen many times over the last four years.
His star student, Novak Djokovic, shows up at training camp in a bad mood, convinced that his game is a disaster, that he needs to improve… in everything. His serve, his offensive game, even his backhand – one of the greatest backhands tennis has ever seen – is all a mess.
There is almost no recognition of the CV, 24 Grand Slam titles, 74 other tour trophies and more than 1,000 match victories. It has to improve, otherwise it’s done.
“He’s crazy,” Ivanisevic said of Djokovic, shaking his head, midway through last year, when Djokovic was in the midst of another of the greatest seasons any tennis player has ever put together and still whining to his coach at every turn. .
Very good tennis players often express a desire to try to improve, and Djokovic is no different. But it’s one thing to say it, it’s another to actually do it, especially after you’ve reached the pinnacle of the sport, over and over and over again.
In 2015, Djokovic produced what is perhaps the most ridiculous tennis campaign any man has ever produced. It’s the season that Djokovic often references when asked to choose the best version of himself. This happens a lot now, as he has challenged the greatest male of all time: the only person left to compare Djokovic to is Djokovic.
He has won the most Grand Slam singles titles, the most Masters 1,000 titles, which are the next major events on the men’s tour, and has spent more weeks (406 and counting) ranked No. 1 in the world than anyone .
He reached all four Grand Slam finals in that 2015 season and won three of them (losing at the French Open to Stan Wawrinka). He has become number 1 in the wire-to-wire world. He played in 15 consecutive finals and won 11 of them. At the time there were the “Big Four” which also included Nadal, Roger Federer and Andy Murray. Djokovic went 15-4 against those three and was 4-0 against Nadal, his main rival.
The normal behavior after a season like this is to continue doing what works. Djokovic doesn’t exactly behave normally, and he doesn’t really play tennis today like he did in 2015, when he defended the court like few others could, then pulled rabbits out of the hat, winning so many points that he had nothing to do. winning.
This is a far cry from Djokovic’s winning formula last season, the one he will likely use to kick off his 2024 this month in Australia. All of Djokovic’s best seasons share a theme: They will begin in January in Australia, where Djokovic is on his way to trying to win his 11th Australian Open men’s singles title. He won his tenth last year, the most in history.
He describes Australia as his “happy place”, a country where he finds his groove and nothing, not even pulled or torn muscles, can take him out of it. He has not missed a match at the “AO” for six years.
“It’s important to have the right start, a kind of launch into the rest of the season,” he said during the United Cup, the mixed team competition he played before the first Grand Slam in 2024. “The more you win in a certain tournament, the more you will feel comfortable and confident every time you arrive.”
But Djokovic’s success is much more than good karma. It’s about figuring out how to change his game to adapt to his aging body, which he acknowledges doesn’t move as well as it once did, and to keep up with the evolution of a sport that is now far less friendly to defenders who want to do it. he chases balls down the field and pulls rabbits out of hats.
With top players hitting with more power and precision than ever before, defending all day, rather than trying to seize the initiative and win points, has become increasingly difficult at the highest level.
Djokovic had three truly epic years: 2011, 2015 and 2023. In each of them he won three Grand Slam finals and a bunch of other trophies.
Luckily for us, his last epic season before 2023 came right after the revolution in advanced tennis analytics, making for a deep and revealing dive into Djokovic then and now.
The metrics are the byproduct of ball and player tracking data collected through high-speed cameras and analyzed in real time by technology developed by a British company, TennisViz, and Tennis Data Innovations (TDI), a joint venture of the ATP Tour and the ATP Half.
These combined efforts have provided fans, players and coaches with information that previous generations could never have dreamed of acquiring, showing whether a player is attacking or defending on every shot; the quality of those shots based on speed, spin and landing spot; how often they win points they shouldn’t: the so-called steal score; how clinical they are at the final point where they should win; and how often they win the all-important baseline battles that so much of modern tennis has become.
The data tells the story of Djokovic’s evolution, from someone who specialized in winning tennis’s wars of attrition, to someone who now looks to attack at almost every opportunity.
In numerical terms, the changes may seem, on the surface, incremental, but in a sport that counts a handful of points in each game, seemingly small changes can lead to big differences. Remember, Djokovic won 14 of his 24 Grand Slam titles From 2015.
It starts with the service.
Djokovic’s serve is almost unrecognizable from 2015. All of this goes to Ivanisevic, who possessed a lethal serve when he played and has worked tirelessly with Djokovic since 2019, achieving astonishing results. Djokovic’s first serve averaged 120.1 mph in 2023, up from 115.4 in 2015.
It’s not about improving racket technology or lighter balls. The tour average barely changed, going from 116.1 mph to 116.7.
Djokovic’s serve is not only faster, but it also lands in better places: five centimeters closer to the lines in 2023 than in 2015 and eight centimeters closer to them than the tour average. This is important regardless of the surface he is playing on, but can be particularly potent on the fast, agile surfaces of Melbourne Park, where it serves to slide side corners off the pitch almost instantly.
Djokovic has long been one of the greatest returners in tennis history. Now he’s better at this too. His return on his opponent’s second serve came on the backhand wing with 47% of points in 2023, compared to 39% in 2015, putting him in a much better position to attack.
Once the points took shape last season, Djokovic won an attacking position 26% of the time, up from 21% in 2015. Tennis fanatics refer to a player’s ability to win points from an attacking position attack as on the “conversion rate”. Last season, Djokovic’s conversion rate was 72.1%, the highest in the sport and 3.3 percentage points higher than his 68.8% conversion rate in 2015. The tour average it is 66%.
How did he become so clinical? His right has increased by two miles per hour in the last eight years. This helps.
Furthermore, his offensive position is 60 centimeters further inside the pitch than in 2015, meaning he hits the ball much earlier than before, stifling opponents by stealing fractions of a second from their recovery and preparation times.
The result of his increasing aggression was a decrease in how much he had to defend, how many balls he had to chase, and how many rabbits he had to pull out of hats. Tennis fanatics call this a player’s “steal score,” which is the percentage of points a player wins after being in a defensive position.
As exciting as it is to regain a point that seems lost, it is exhausting and seriously difficult for a 36-year-old body. Nobody knows this better than Djokovic.
In 2015, Djokovic and Nadal led the sport with a recovery rate of 43.3%. It’s crazy to think about: almost half the time their outgunned opponents had Djokovic and Nadal on the run, those poor, overwhelmed souls still lost the point.
Last season, Djokovic’s recovery rating was a much less miraculous 36.4%, still above the tour average of 34% and much kinder to the knees of a 36-year-old. In other words, he’s still better than others at making magic happen when he needs it, but he’s become so much more efficient that he wins without expending as much energy.
It’s a logical strategy for any great aging. Federer has become more aggressive, and Nadal has tried to do the same, reaching the net to win points when the opportunities are there. But Djokovic has been more successful than either of them, winning many of the sport’s biggest titles at this point in his career.
For his opponents, there is only one solution: attack before he attacks, make him run and force him to play more defensively, as he did during his previous life as a tennis player.
Easier said than done, of course.
The winning formula sees Djokovic setting big goals for 2024. “It’s no secret that I want to break more records and make more history,” he said. “It’s something that continues to motivate me.”
He wants more Grand Slam titles, an Olympic medal, which somehow eluded him, a Davis Cup with Serbia. He likes to target young talent: tennis players two generations removed from him, who can’t understand how he refused to give way.
Djokovic battled a wrist injury during the United Cup. But anyone counting on that to stop him should remember his Australian Open victory last year with a serious hamstring injury that Ivanisevic said would have caused him to abandon than most other players and, in 2021, with a tear. in an abdominal muscle.
“I know what I need to do to keep my body, mind and spirit in the optimal state to have the opportunity to break records and go further,” Djokovic said.
He still loves playing tennis, but winning continues to be his main motivation, especially when he is traveling and away from his family for weeks.
“That mentality isn’t going to change for 2024 or potentially the next year I play,” he said.
How he actually plays the game, well, that might be another evolving story.
Ask Ivanisevic.
(Top photo: Manan Vatsyayana/AFP via Getty Images)