Roger Federer’s returns at Wimbledon. Now as I stated before, grass being a faster court means aces are usually more common. However, typically Federer has done well to prevent the ace against him. .

When Federer loses, his average return points decrease quite below the averages. It makes sense, I mean you cannot simply win from your service game alone. A note about the average for losses — if I do not include 2001 or 2002, the average for losses change. Average 1st serve return rises to 25.4% and average 2nd serve return decreases to 40.1%.

Now consider the fraction of total points won, which is the total points Federer won with respect to all the points in the match. Then consider just the return points Federer won and his success rate. With the faster pace, it is typically harder to return serve, especially with big servers. Most of those matches feature plenty of tiebreaks. On the other hand, if you see higher success rates on return points won, these matches were rather quick 3 set matches.

Unfortunately, I could not figure out how to place the score with each data label but I will highlight a few data points in the analysis.

Take a look at the data points with the lowest fraction of return points won. The lowest green dot was the defeat of Soderling with a score of 6–4, 7–6(5), 7–6(5). The next two lowest green dots were in 2009 against Ivo Karlovic and Andy Roddick, respectively. Of the losses, the lowest blue dots were losses to Mario Ancic in 2002, Sergiy Stakhovsky in 2013, and Jo Wilfred Tsonga in 2011, respectively. The highest return rates were typically very quick 3 set matches. The last piece of the puzzle was return placement but the data was too incomplete for me to truly capture any subtle differences over the years and against different players.

Following from the importance of return at Wimbledon, I examined Federer’s ability to save and convert break points. I thought about combining this data into one graph but decided against it because the two visuals tell two different stories. The first explores Federer’s ability to prevent break points faced and generate break point chances. The second explores Federer’s success rate at saving and converting break points at Wimbledon. Of the total points in graph 1, what fraction was saved/converted, which is illustrated in graph 2?

These are the averages during his losses.

From 2001 to 2006, there is a reduction in break points faced and an increase in fraction of break points won. This probably corresponds to Federer’s development. However, there is an increase in break points faced for some time until last year and of these break points faced, Federer saved a majority of them. I do not see as much of a trend with break points gained except he did exceptionally well in 2012 to gain break points and converted around his average number of break points (49%) for the years he wins the title. In all instances, except for the first two years, he gained more break point opportunities than he faced. I will leave you to compare the rest of these numbers with his averages to his losses (remember he had early losses 2002 and 2013).