Like a seedling or a Pokémon, Zverev’s game invites you to speculate what final form it might take. Given the breadth of his gifts — his wingspan, his groundstrokes, his serve, his movement and flexibility — it’s easy enough to envision him as the torchbearer of all-court grace: the player who preserves the free-roaming Federer legacy. Zverev tells me that, along with Monfils and his own brother, Roger is one of his favorite players to watch.

But Zverev is not quite that player, and has not shown huge advances toward becoming it. In this, he isn’t alone. For all of Federer’s dominance, he somewhat mystifyingly never inspired many copycats. The one anomaly is Grigor Dimitrov, a keen mimic in techniques and tactics, if not title haul. Lone Bulgarian aside, few newcomers have internalized Federer’s habit of constantly pressuring the opponent by creeping forward to the net.

If the plea for someone to adopt the all-court style is largely aesthetic — i.e., it’s fun and surprising to watch — it must be said that there’s also a more pragmatic argument: This style will help you win. And that argument springs from a fairly reputable source. The morning after winning Wimbledon, Federer — by his own admission a little hung over and perhaps feeling a little benevolent — told younger players how to beat him. Amid the champagne fog, his diagnosis was clear-eyed: You all hit well from the back of the court, but you need to get a little more friendly with the front of the court. “Almost every player I played here wouldn’t serve and volley,” Federer said of his Wimbledon opponents, speaking to the Guardian. “It’s frightening to me, to see that at this level. … I wish that we would see more coaches, more players taking chances up at the net, because good things do happen there.”

It’s a plea echoed by students of the game. “It is quite amusing that there’s not more players doing that,” Craig O’Shannessy, a tennis analyst who has worked for the men’s tour and privately consulted for individual players, tells me. “I think in general a lot of players don’t understand the simplicity of what Roger does. They don’t understand that coming forward works well for everyone, when you look at the win percentages.”

Statistical analysis has been slow to permeate tennis, relative to games like baseball or basketball; the racket sport has not yet been scoured for every possible market inefficiency, which might then be exploited. But O’Shannessy, who is slated to speak next year at Sloan — the industry’s chief sports analytics conference, held at MIT — thinks that Federer has hit upon one such inefficiency, and after due diligence, the analyst has found statistical support. He took the past 16 years of Wimbledon history — a span during which net-rushing has wavered in popularity, though Federer has kept at it throughout to varying degrees — and found that serve-and-volley points were won 68 percent of the time (and over 70 percent across the past four years). By comparison, per the men’s tour, players won all service points just under 66 percent of the time at Wimbledon over the past 16 years (and 66 percent over the past four years). In a game of fine margins, any strategy that offers even a small advantage is too precious to ignore.

But maybe this fruit can be tasted only by those with the sharpest volleying skills? Sure, this strategy might be doable for Federer, a guy whose racket handiwork is routinely likened to wizardry or surgery or saintly miracle, but for everyone else, including our rising talent, this won’t work, right? “Rubbish,” O’Shannessy says. “Look at the serves these guys have. … The returns off that are going to be weak. … You don’t need to have phenomenal volleys to say, ‘Okay, this is a good tactic for me.’ You can have a great serve, and adequate volleys, and a good strategy.” This would be more a matter of adjusting to a new comfort zone than picking up new tricks altogether. “These guys can volley, but it’s not their happy place. Their happy place is further back,” he says. He maintains that just a sprinkle of this strategy is enough to keep opponents guessing — you don’t need to barrel to the net ad nauseam; you just need them to think you might — and that a net-happy approach is viable not just on grass, historically the fastest court surface, but on all surfaces, which he believes, based on average rally length, have converged in terms of speed.