On Saturday in Dubai, Stefanos Tsitsipas won his first 500-level title. Just about everything about this was unexpected. He had lost his last eleven finals at ATP 500s. He had dropped four of six matches coming into the event, including three against opponents outside the top 70. He barely deserved to be in the final at all, coming through a quarter-final against Matteo Berrettini in which he won a mere 47% of total points.
Most of all, the Greek shocked fans with the way he won. For the first time in years, his backhand was a weapon. He took big swings, especially on return of serve. The one-hander was suddenly so fearsome that Felix Auger-Aliassime, his opponent in the final, stopped attacking it. According to my backhand potency (BHP) metric, Tsitsipas’s performance in the semi-final against Tallon Griekspoor was his best on a hard court in more than two years.
For me, this is exciting. How often does a player–in his mid-20s, no less–just, out of nowhere, fix their biggest weakness?
One immediate cause is clear: Tsitsipas swapped out his Wilson racket for a stiffer-framed Babolat Aero. I’ll leave it to the gear experts to dissect exactly how much of a difference that has made. But given the Greek’s tactical shift this week, I have to think that the new racket offered a small boost. More importantly, it provided an excuse for Stef to make some long-overdue changes.
Let’s take a closer look at the new-and-improved Tsitsipas game.
Back(hand) from the brink
I wrote about Tsitsipas a year ago, after he crashed out of Indian Wells to Jiri Lehecka. I focused on Stef’s utter helplessness against first serves to his backhand. No one expects ATPers to win a lot of points against the first serve, but this was dire.
The Greek won just 12% of first-serve return points when Lehecka aimed at his backhand. His ten-match rolling average had fallen as low as 16% in that category, compared to career rates around 23%. At the 2023 Tour Finals against Jannik Sinner, Tsitsipas went oh-for-21 when the Italian first-served to his weaker side.
Of course, this was no secret. Most players mix up their serve direction evenly, rarely hitting more than 60% in either direction. In Acapulco last spring, Alex de Minaur hit 90% of his first serves to the Tsitsipas backhand. Most opponents didn’t go that extreme, but it must have been nice to know that there was a weak point to poke under pressure.
Until about a week ago, nothing had changed. Last fall in Basel, the Greek won barely 10% of first-serve return points when Arthur Fils aimed at his backhand. In Doha just two weeks ago, he salvaged only 15% against Hamad Medjedovic. Griekspoor nearly ousted him in Rotterdam by hitting 71% of his first serves in that direction. So the new look is truly sudden:
Match 1st to BH inPlay Pts Won Prev 10 56.5% 57.7% 23.2% QF vs Berrettini 67.7% 57.1% 19.0% SF vs Griekspoor 66.0% 54.8% 29.0% FI vs FAA 64.7% 72.7% 31.8%
The “previous ten” matches are those indexed by the Match Charting Project, and they run between Tokyo last year through the Medjedovic match. That span looks a bit better than early in 2024, when Tsitsipas’s win rate on these points nearly fell below 20%, but some of that is because he faced weaker servers. Apart from Fils, the span includes two matches against Alex Michelsen and one against Mattia Bellucci.
The Berrettini result doesn’t look like much of an improvement (and again, he won only 47% of points in that match), but it is Matteo Berrettini we’re talking about. Against two more strong servers, Tsitsipas not only leapt beyond his own recent rates, he exceeded tour average. The typical player wins 28% of these first-serve return points. Stef did better.
The Auger-Aliassime result is particularly telling. While Stef has now won seven of ten meetings, Felix has piled up some impressive serve numbers over the years. In Marseille in 2022, the Greek won only 12% of first-serve return points on his backhand side. Back in 2019 when the pair met at Indian Wells, Auger-Aliassime sent 21 first serves in that direction, and Tsitsipas won the point only once.
Back(hand) up
The challenge for every returner is to find a balance between swinging big and playing it safe. Tsitsipas, with his fluctuating confidence in the topspin backhand, sometimes leans too hard on his slice. Slice returns aren’t themselves bad–a deep slice return can instantly snatch the advantage away from the server–but Tsitsipas is rarely the stronger baseliner on court. Settling in for a baseline rally is, for him, a losing proposition.
Surprisingly, Stef’s three matches in Dubai do not reflect a change in overall shot selection. From the time I wrote about his backhand struggles last year, he began hitting more and more topspin first-serve returns. Since the European indoor swing last fall, the rate has drifted back down again, though not as far as its low point, which was probably driven by injury.
This graph shows how often Tsitsipas chose to hit topspin backhand returns (as opposed to chips or slices) against first serves. It shows a ten-match rolling average on hard courts, across more than 130 charted matches since 2018:
The current rate is almost exactly at his career average of 56%. Perhaps that understates his current approach a bit–as noted, he faced some big servers in Dubai, and he’ll always end up hitting more slices to defend against players of their caliber.
This was the biggest surprise for me in the numbers. Tsitsipas looked like a completely different player last week. His backhand returns may well have been qualitatively different. But he didn’t try to attack more of them than usual. The same was true in rallies. His career backhand slice percentage (compared to all backhands) is about 20%, and he continued to land in that range for the final three rounds in Dubai.
Back(hand) in black
This is where I get to say that, yes, the margins in tennis are small. Stef’s one-hander racked up points against Griekspoor, rating 5.5 on my BHP scale. (His average over the last 52 weeks is negative, and no one consistently scores as high as Tsitsipas’s rating in that match.) But against Berrettini, his BHP was slightly negative, and against Auger-Aliassime, it was neutral.
The backhands generated by the Greek’s blacked-out racket made for glittering highlight reels. Yet they do not fully explain the title run. Tsitsipas survived the quarters by the slimmest of margins. He dropped 53% of points and probably would’ve lost the match had it not been for a miraculous half-volley winner at 4-all in the decider. The semis, yes, credit to the backhand in all its glory. The final: unusually steady backhand returns that led a flummoxed Auger-Aliassime to target the Tsitsipas forehand instead.
Assuming Stef adopts his new stick and continues to swing freely with it, the best-case scenario is probably a backhand that is … well, average. Average is not a bad thing! Tsitsipas is one of the elite servers on tour, peaking at an 89% hold rate in 2023. His forehand is a reliable weapon. A year ago, it looked like he was becoming a one-dimensional servebot. He may now be able to avoid that fate.
Where, then, is the equilibrium? Opponents have long feasted on the Tsitsipas backhand, and they won’t give up so easily. Expect servers to push him out wide, where he’ll be stuck continuing to slice. Baseliners will test him to see if they can break the shot down. After years of backhand struggles, both mental and physical, I don’t expect he’ll come through unscathed.
But he doesn’t need to transform into Novak Djokovic. The Greek’s backhand has long been among the bottom third on tour. A step up to average would be worth a point or two per match, something that, at the margin, is the difference between a berth at the Tour Finals and another year-end ranking outside the top ten. Tsitsipas has said he wanted to inspire more youngsters to hit one-handed backhands. Winning more matches would be an excellent way to do that.
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Heavy Topspin