What does the new stat “Hunting 3rd-shot Forehands” tell us about how the modern game has evolved?

Eagle-eyed tennis junkies watching the Australian Open broadcasts may have noticed a new statistic in the tournament’s match summaries this year. Down near the bottom, among the winners and errors and serve percentages and total points won, is a stat line that sounds very different—maybe even a little jarring:

“Hunting 3rd-shot forehands.”

The category was created by Game Insight Group (GIG), a joint venture between statisticians at Victoria University and Tennis Australia, which runs the Australian Open. GIG has been pushing the advanced-stat envelope at the event for the last half-decade; in 2024, it started keeping track of nine new metrics. Some are self-explanatory—“pressure points won,” “early breaks converted”—and others more abstract—“break force,” “ultimate defender,” “physical battle.”

“Hunting 3rd-shot forehands” is mostly self-explanatory. It measures the percentage of times the server hits a forehand on the first shot after the serve (the third shot overall in the rally). According to GIG, this number is worthy of our attention because it’s an indication of a player’s “desire to dictate the point.”

Why add the highly non-mathematical word “hunting” to it? Presumably the 3rd-shot percentage simply records the number of times a player hits a forehand after the serve, and doesn’t try to judge whether he or she made a special effort to hunt it down. But it does make it sound exciting.

“Hunting” also gives us a better idea of why the statistic is more significant now than it has been in the past. Pro tennis in recent years has been all about the forehand. Players are told to hit it early and often in every rally; to run around their backhands whenever possible; to use their serves as a way to set up their forehands. The “serve plus one” is now at the heart of almost everyone’s strategy.

The vogue for forehands and the serve-plus-one grew out of the analytical insight—promoted most famously by Craig O’Shannessy, former stat man for Novak Djokovic—that the vast majority of points last from between one to four shots. No matter how often we hear complaints about today’s endless rallies, most of them are over in a hurry. We notice and remember the long ones; the short ones not so much.

This means you want to be the player who gets the first strike in. Which means you want to hit the ball from your stronger side as soon as you can. In most cases—but certainly not all—that’s the forehand side. The theory has numbers to back it up. As Jeff Sackman at the Tennis Abstract blog writes, 57.5 percent of third-shot forehands result in a point won, compared to 50.9 percent of third-shot backhands.

Still, how desperately you hunt forehands will depend on how good your backhand is. According to Tennis Abstract, Rafael Nadal has hit 77.7 percent of third-ball forehands in his career (second only, in recent years, to Lorenzo Sonego, at 78.6 percent). By contrast, while Djokovic looked for more forehands with O’Shannessy, and improved that shot along the way, he has still hit just 56.2 percent of his first rally shots from that side. He likes his backhand, for good reason. Alexander Zverev and Daniil Medvedev like theirs even more. Zverev has hit 51.1 percent of third balls with his forehand, Medvedev 50 percent. The third-shot forehand is not essential if it doesn’t make sense for you.

How about the women? Traditionally, in the WTA, the two-handed backhand has been a weapon of equal value with the forehand. In the stat lines I’ve seen from Australia, there has been a wide variance in third-shot percentages among the top women. Aryna Sabalenka hit 80 percent of her third-shots with her forehand in one match, Coco Gauff did it 67 percent of the time in another, and Iga Swiatek hunted down a forehand just 42 percent of the time in beating Sofia Kenin in the first round. Sabalenka may be a harbinger of bigger women’s forehands, and more serve-plus-ones, to come. For now players like Gauff and Swiatek are probably well-advised not to avoid their backhands.

The forehand and backhand have waged a back-and-forth battle for supremacy over the course of the Open era. It began with the rise of the two-handed backhand in the early 1970s. Pioneers like Chris Evert and Jimmy Connors turned it into an offensive shot. In the 1980s, Steffi Graf and Ivan Lendl, neither of whom had a two-handed backhand, launched a forehand counterattack by using it to go inside-out. In this century, there was something of a split: Nadal and Roger Federer dictated with their forehands like no one had before, while Serena Williams was happy to use her lethal two-handed backhand as often as she could.

The new emphasis on the forehand has brought about other shifts. The wide serve in the deuce court is more important now, because it’s the best way to get a forehand on your third shot. From the baseline, the ideal recovery point in a rally is no longer the hash mark at the center of the baseline; players will try to cheat a few steps to their left, to make it easier to find a forehand.

In any individual match, the percentage of third-shot forehands a player hits doesn’t tell us all that much. In general, we can say a higher number is better, because it indicates aggressiveness. But should Swiatek’s third-shot percentage have been higher than 42, even though she won that match? And should Medvedev’s number be higher than 50 percent, even though he’s No. 3 in the world doing what he does?

Yet codifying this new forehand-centric theory of tennis into a stat that goes alongside winners and errors is still an interesting development. The search for forehands, in my opinion, has helped produce more proactive, exciting, athletic baseline tennis. If this leads more players to go hunting, that’s OK with me. If points are going to be short, they might as well end with a blazing forehand winner.