Nicholas Som
Jan 14, 2025, 01:48 PM ET
Minutes after Jannik Sinner made history at the 2024 Australian Open, Novak Djokovic might have sensed what lay ahead for the red-haired Italian.
Sinner had just dispatched the No. 1-seeded Djokovic 6-1, 6-2, 6-7 (6), 6-3 -- a scoreline that, despite being lopsided, flattered the Serb. Sinner controlled the match from the outset, facing zero break points against one of the greatest returners of all time and thrilling his carrot-themed superfan group. Never before had Djokovic failed to win the tournament after reaching the semis in Melbourne: 10 appearances, 10 trophy lifts.
Sure, Sinner claimed a pair of close wins over the legend at the end of 2023 -- one in the Davis Cup (the men's tennis version of the World Cup) and one in the ATP Finals (its season-ending championship, and arguably the biggest tournament outside of the Grand Slams). But as many overwhelmed opponents have discovered over the years, beating Djokovic in a best-of-five-sets match at a Grand Slam is another thing entirely.
In his postmatch news conference, Djokovic first expressed dismay about his own substandard performance. However, he didn't hesitate to credit Sinner, who he felt had bested him in every aspect that day with his powerful strokes from both wings and newfound poise on the sport's biggest stages.
"He was always very calm, very composed in the court, but I think he struggled maybe to win the big matches in the big moments. But now it's coming together for him," Djokovic said.
It came together for Sinner -- to the tune of one of the greatest seasons for a player on the men's side in recent history. How great, exactly? Well, what better way to sum it up than to compare his 2024 for the ages to the best seasons of the Big Three -- Djokovic, Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal? Let's take a look and see what it means for Sinner's chances of building on that success in 2025.
A different look at Sinner's 2024
For many tennis fans, the calculus of determining success for the top players in the sport is simple: How many Grand Slams did you win? By that metric, Sinner and Carlos Alcaraz were neck and neck in 2024, with two wins apiece. Sinner took the hard-court titles (Australian Open, US Open), while Alcaraz won on grass at Wimbledon and ground out a victory on the red clay of the French Open.
But ask a slight different question -- How many matches did you win, period? -- and the brilliance of Sinner's season becomes clear. His 73-6 overall record, good for a 92.4 winning percentage, skyrocketed him far past the second-placed Alcaraz at 54-13 (80.6%). Even during Alcaraz's 2023 season, during which he deepened his status as a world superstar by defeating Djokovic at Wimbledon in an instant classic, he managed only an 84.4 winning percentage.
Placed alongside the Big Three's best, 92.4% hardly loses any of its luster. In their illustrious careers, Djokovic, Federer and Nadal had a total of four seasons (min. 50 matches played) with better winning percentages. Four seasons ... out of 68 seasons combined. According to ESPN Research, the last non-Big Three player with a winning percentage that high was Ivan Lendl, all the way back in 1986.
Zoom in to the point-by-point data, and Sinner's year continues to stand out. In 2024, he won 55.3% of his points played (per Tennis Abstract), a deceptively phenomenal figure in the same vein as a baseball player getting a hit in 35% of their at-bats. But one issue with total points won % is that it doesn't account for matches when the service point/return point breakdown is unbalanced, a discrepancy that could become even more glaring when viewing a full season's worth of matches for a player.
Fortunately, journalist and data scientist Carl Bialik devised a statistic that addresses the problem. Known as dominance ratio (DR), it is calculated by dividing a player's rate of return points won by their opponent's rate of return points won. To simplify what sounds like a convoluted tennis riddle: a 1.00 ratio is akin to winning an adjusted 50% of the total points, but a player can still win a match with a ratio below 1.00 if they win enough key points (such as break points or tiebreaks).
As an all-encompassing stat to capture a player's overall level of performance, it works pretty well.
Sinner's DR for all of 2024 was 1.41, according to Tennis Abstract. In seasons where the Big Three played at least 50 matches, they finished with a 1.41 or better a combined six seasons (again, out of 68). Finishing in the top seven of seasons by the Big Three in metrics like these is nothing short of remarkable.
Does all that make Sinner the true heir to the Big Three's triple-decker throne? Not quite -- and not just because Sinner hasn't figured out how to sit in three places at once. Unlike Sinner, the big thing that the Big Three had was ... each other. Between 2007 and 2012, the trio claimed 54 of a maximum 72 Grand Slam semifinal spots available to them.
That level of dominance was hard-earned. Only one of them could win any given tournament, and in order to emerge on top, each had to develop the skills necessary to overcome the formidable opponents they expected to clash with in the latter rounds. Federer, for example, learned to let his one-handed backhand fly, attacking the vicious, high-bouncing forehands of Nadal in the 2017 Australian Open final and winning his first Grand Slam in over four years.
"I didn't want to go down just making shots, seeing forehands rain down on me from Rafa," he told The New York Times.
The end result was a trio of players who pushed each other to unwrap new elements of their game, and greater significance to their accomplishments because of their joint supremacy over the rest of the field. Winning three out of four Grand Slams in a season -- as Djokovic did in 2011 -- means a lot more when it also includes steamrolling your main rivals, who are nearly as unbeatable (Djokovic went 10-1 against Nadal and Federer that year).
With Djokovic's recent decline, Sinner doesn't have any rivals as consistently outstanding, and yet his biggest rival today still managed to prevent his 2024 season from ascending to a higher plane. Alcaraz went 3-0 against Sinner in 2024, defeating him in the French Open semifinals, Indian Wells final and China Open final. Can Sinner truly be considered dominant when his drop-shot-loving firework of a peer has lately been an unsolvable riddle?
Alcaraz and Sinner's peers might be asking similar questions. According to Andy Roddick, players were in awe of Alcaraz at the Laver Cup. "I was amazed at how many players, without even flinching, just said: 'Best top level in tennis right now is Carlos Alcaraz.' Without even a hiccup. ... The general feeling seems to be that once he finds it and has it, you have a massive problem."
Alcaraz presents Sinner with two distinct problems: a knack for elevating his game to win big matches, and an incomparable array of skills that has convinced many that, to borrow an old American proverb, he is him. To claim unchallenged superiority over the rest of the tour, Sinner will need to solve both.
Looking ahead to 2025
A year after Djokovic's postmatch lament, no one is surprised to see Sinner stand at the pinnacle of the sport. The 2025 Australian Open marks the world No. 1's first opportunity to defend a Grand Slam, and he enters it as an undisputed favorite. Progress isn't linear in any sport, and especially not tennis, but Sinner has improved so much, in so many areas, that even a minor drop in level wouldn't change the expectation that he will be walking out of the Rod Laver Arena tunnel on Jan. 25 to defend his crown.
His forehand combines speed and spin to produce a distinctive crack that inspires admiration in even the most accomplished tennis lifers. His backhand is almost equally deserving of praise -- in Tennis Abstract's sample of charted matches, only Djokovic's backhand was more potent among top-100 players. The much-noted evolution of Sinner's serve, from a methodical unraveling of limbs to a simple, efficient expression of power, helped him become the hardest men's player to break. Not even notorious serving extraordinaries such as Ben Shelton and Hubert Hurkacz can match him, and among the Big Three, only Federer matched his 91.5 percentage of service holds over a season (twice, in 2004 and 2015).
Ultimately, Sinner's biggest obstacle to overcome in 2025 could very well be the doping case against him, which has also cast a shadow over his remarkable 2024. In March, he tested positive for a banned substance in two separate tests. The results weren't released until August by the International Tennis Integrity Agency, and Sinner avoided suspension because an independent panel ruled the substance had entered his system unintentionally. But the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) is challenging the decision to the Court of Arbitration for Sport in a closed-door hearing scheduled for April, seeking to ban Sinner for up to two years.
If Sinner avoids a ban, everything is on the table. Retaining his two hard-court Grand Slam titles should be a baseline goal, but the legendary calendar Grand Slam (winning all four Slams in a single year) could well be within reach. It sounds ridiculous to suggest he could achieve something that hasn't been done in men's tennis in more than 50 years, but in both of Sinner's 2024 Grand Slam losses, to Alcaraz in the French Open semis and Daniil Medvedev in the Wimbledon quarterfinals, Sinner finished with a DR above 1.00 (1.06 and 1.14, respectively). A few different bounces, and we might be talking about Sinner's season with the hushed whispers reserved for only the most outstanding accomplishments.
Perhaps the scariest notion for the rest of the men's tour to contemplate is that having a rival as singularly inventive as Alcaraz could push Sinner to find even more avenues of improvement: a better drop shot, softer touch at the net, a new way to squeeze a few more points out of an already stellar return game. And if he does, Sinner's 2024 could become just one of many stunning seasons in the career of an all-time great.
