Simply Second Best?/ Crisis Center

Morning. This is today's thread for discussing current matches, and general tennis-related topics.

As a small follow-up to my recent post, Simply The Best?, which looked at the efficiency and consistency of the Slam performances of the current top group of ATP players, I'ver compiled a few more statistics. The original post included a number of multi-Slam winners from the Open era, by way of comparison to today's crop of players - with the qualifier that of course, these cover wholer careers and not careers-in-progress - Gustavo Kuerten being the exception, in that he is not officially retired.

The tables here, by request, cover a few more Slam winners from the Open era who didn't make my earlier six-Slams-or-more cut - the statistics are compiled on exactly the same basis.  For full details, please refer to the earlier post, linked above. In the second table, the percentage of times a round has been reached tells us the proportion of times that a player has made that particular round, or better - in the case of the first round, it signifies first-round losses.

It's also worth noting that two of Guillermo Vilas' Slam wins were of the Australian Open, in the days when it had a draw of only 64, and a number of top players weren't making the trip Down Under. Even so, he probably gets the "best of the rest" award from my sample here (there's a case, too, for Jim Courier, albeit Vilas' match-winning percentage was over seven more Slams). There are quite a few Open era Slam winners not included here - I focused mostly on more recent players for comparison.

Looking at the match-winning percentages alone, our "Second Tier" Slam-winning players of today, including Andy Roddick and Lleyton Hewitt , have records that so far seem to compare with the career percentages of Jim Courier, Yevgeny Kafelnikov and Guillermo Vilas - ahead of a number of others on the list. It remains to be seen whether these career percentages will remain as high, take a dip, or improve.

I'm still looking for a way to adequately represent former greats like Rod Laver, and hope to come up with some career statistics for him and some of his contemporaries in the future.

-- Rosangel