Rankings Roulette: What’s the best way to determine who is No. 1?

PRESS CONFERENCE: Rafael Nadal after winning his second Slam of the season.

Many fans have grown accustomed to checking the ATP rankings every Monday morning, to see how the events of the previous week impacted the pecking order. When they tee up the rankings page today, some will find themselves wondering, “What on earth must Rafael Nadal do to earn the No. 1 ranking?”

Nadal is 30-3 on the year. He won the Australian Open. Seeded just No. 5 at the French Open, he claimed that title as well (his mind-boggling 14th at that venue, and a record 22nd major overall), completing the first two legs of the Grand Slam. Yet there Nadal sits, with a ranking of No. 4, like a car stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic behind top-ranked Daniil Medvedev—who has not won a title this year—Alexander Zverev and, now at No. 3, Novak Djokovic. And thanks to a career-threatening foot injury, Nadal may not even get the opportunity to move higher.

Not to worry, though. If you don’t like the ATP rankings, there are two other credible—and in some ways more credible—ranking agencies where the King of Clay currently is the king of the hill: the often overlooked “ATP Race” standings, and the ratings issued by the newcomer to the business of sorting out competitors, Universal Tennis.

This is a particularly awkward moment for the ATP ranking system, which has functioned largely unchanged, at least in its underpinnings, since its inception in 1973. Until recently, the ATP did not even embrace “live rankings,” the methodology that became the gold standard at other tennis websites. The ATP system is a good one, but it has shortcomings.

“At this point, it makes more sense to look at the Race,” ESPN analyst Brad Gilbert told me. The Race—to Turin, Italy, site of the tour’s eight-player season-ending championship—commences annually on the first day of the New Year, with everyone starting on an equal footing. The ATP rankings points each player accumulates going forward week-to-week determine his place in the Race. It’s superior to the official ATP rankings when it comes to producing an accurate snapshot of how the year is developing.

Consider: The top five in the official ATP rankings, in order starting at No. 1, are Medvedev, Zverev, Djokovic, Nadal and Casper Ruud. The top five in the Race: Nadal, 19-year old sensation Carlos Alcaraz, Stefanos Tsitsipas, French Open Ruud and Zverev. For the moment, Djokovic is at No. 9 in the race. He wouldn’t even make the field for the year-end championships.

“At this mid-point of the year, the Race standings are really pretty reliable, and more indicative of who is in top form,” Gilbert said. “Nadal obviously is ranked No. 4 in the ATP only because of how little he played last year (Nadal missed both Wimbledon and the US Open with injury).”

Nadal has been the victim of a ranking system designed to encourage players to compete. The ATP rankings are based on a rolling, 52-week body of data. Each week, a player’s accumulated rankings points replace the points he earned that same week a year ago. The more points a player accumulates in that 52-week window, the higher his ranking.

The top point earner in any year finishes atop the Race, and is also honored as the year-end No. 1. Then he begins the new year as the top dog, but he’s still yoked to the same rolling tally as his peers—and under pressure to defend his large cache of points.

The Race may seem more dynamic but most pundits, including Gilbert, won’t put all of their rankings eggs in that basket. The start-from-zero competition—a true race with clear beginning and end, over a satisfactory period of time—is the soul of simplicity. But it isn’t until a few months into the year that the Race standings really reflect the big picture.

The Universal Tennis rankings may be the most accurate of all when it comes to assessing current form: UTR has Nadal on top, followed by, in order: Alcaraz, Djokovic, Medvedev and Tsitsipas. The major difference between UTR and the other ratings is that the UTR has nothing to do with points. It uses a sophisticated algorithm to rate a player’s performance in his or her 30 most recent matches, based exclusively on the relative quality of the opponent as well as the match scores. UTR is already heavily used below the ATP and WTA level, in collegiate and junior tennis.

“It (UTR) is a very good system,” Gilbert said. “But how do you integrate that ranking system into the ATP, which relies so heavily on points?”

It would take a great deal of time and money to rejigger the ATP rankings system, although the outfit did take a step forward—finally!—in early May, when it added a beta version of live rankings to its website https://www.atptour.com/en/rankings/singles/live. The ATP now updates rankings more-or-less in real time, rather than updating the rankings at the end of each week.

“It was seven years in the making,” Gilbert said. “Meanwhile, many of us have been going to sites that provide live rankings for a long time now. If someone is having a good week, the live rankings tell you that he will move up from, say, 45 or whatever to 32 or something. You don’t have to guess, or wait around until the official weekly rankings are published.”

That’s been a welcome development. With the basic, somewhat misleading ATP rankings unlikely to change any time soon, it’s good to have other yardsticks by which to measure player production.