GIG provided data to The New York Times on players who had been in at least 10 matches on the seven show courts from 2012 to 2016. The young American star Madison Keys’s average forehand speed ranked first among the women but also ahead of all men except Tomas Berdych. Keys’s average backhand speed was also higher than any of the men’s, ranking just behind the now-retired women’s star Li Na.

In another surprise, GIG also provided foot speed data to The Times that showed Milos Raonic, a big server not known as a particularly quick mover, had the highest recorded maximum speed over the five-year span and that even his average foot speed of 10.1 miles per hour was slightly above Murray’s.

Stephanie Kovalchik, the data scientist at GIG responsible for much of the new research, said a player’s height (Raonic is 6-foot-6) could be a factor.

“We know from sprinting that the benefits and costs with height are complex,” she said. “The complexity in tennis is likely greater since movement is more sporadic and in all directions.” She also said the movement research did not account for “how a player was moving.” She added, “If some players cover more distance forward versus laterally, for example, it could impact how their speed characteristics compare to each other.”

Data analytics have become de rigueur in major sports. Tennis has been slow to embrace the trend and when it has, the information has often been restricted for commercial reasons and too seldom released to the public, frustrating many statistically-minded fans.

“If you contrast something like tennis to Major League Baseball, it really seems the openness of the data is the main barrier,” said Kovalchik. “If you look at tennis, everything is so siloed. There’s almost an infrastructure problem. We are limited, of course, to only the Australian Open series, which is one type of surface and one region and that has its limits in terms of representation of the tour, but we still think there’s insight there in terms of measurement compared to how it’s been in the past.”