It was just a matter of time before Jack Draper had a run like this. He has been a favorite of the Elo algorithm for months, if not longer. His injuries, retirements, and occasional choices to rest kept him from piling up official ranking points. But Elo recognized that when he stepped on court, he rarely suffered a bad loss. He was fifth on the Elo list before Indian Wells, and with two top-five wins and a title in the desert, he has cracked the top four.
The Brit’s retirements have concealed just how reliable he has been. On a tour where everyone except for Sinner and Alcaraz have turned inconsistent, Draper has been upset-proof for six months, if not longer. The last time he lost a match he “should” have won–excluding retirements–was last September in Davis Cup, when he dropped a close decision to Francisco Cerundolo. That’s hardly an embarrassment, and Draper won 49% of points that day.
Since then, Draper has had good days and bad, but the results are almost always positive. When he’s on, he can be as overpowering as Jannik Sinner. Against Taylor Fritz in the Indian Wells fourth round, Draper won every single one of his first-serve points in the first set. It was one of three matches at the event–including the final!–in which he won 90% or more of his first-serve points. The Brit’s streakiness extends to both sides of the ball: From 4-5 in the first set against Fritz, he reeled off seven straight games.
Draper’s entire effort on Sunday was another such streak. He won 24 of 26 first-serve points against Holger Rune, cracking 10 aces and adding another 20 winners in fewer than 100 total points. He picked off nearly half of Rune’s serve points, converting three of seven break chances. It was an appropriate finish to a fortnight in which Draper lost just one set in six matches, beating four top-20 players, not to mention the fast-rising Joao Fonseca.
For all that, the Brit’s game remains something of a work in progress. His serve can be as dominant as almost anyone’s, but he alternates shutout performances with decidedly mediocre ones. And the tactics don’t always match the talent. While his first strikes offer plenty of opportunities for plus-one putaways, he grinds out rallies like an Andy Murray wannabe.
Let’s take a closer look.
Plus fours
To be clear, Draper in passive mode is a very talented Andy Murray wannabe. He was undersized for much of his junior career, so he developed a defensive game to match. Now he’s six-feet, four-inches tall with the ability to crack serves at 130 miles per hour. But old habits die hard. It’s clear that Draper developed along a different trajectory than, say, Fritz or his quarter-final victim, Ben Shelton.
The result is that Jack can hold his own in long rallies. That gives him a bit of Alcaraz-style flashiness: He can grind it out for a half-dozen strokes, then come forward and wow you with a stop-volley winner. It’s a good skillset to have. But it’s not necessarily a good tactical guide. Here is how Draper’s win percentage breaks down by rally length over the last 52 weeks:
Rally len Win% 1-3 shots 53.3% 4-6 shots 48.1% 7-9 shots 50.3% 10+ shots 48.6%
He does fine in long rallies, but the first row shows where he succeeds. 53% on short rallies doesn’t just mean that a player wins a lot of quick points on serve–of course he does, everybody does. It means he wins more than he allows his opponents.
In fact, only four tour regulars outscore Draper in that category:
Player 1-3 W% Hubert Hurkacz 55.0% Jannik Sinner 54.4% Taylor Fritz 54.2% Novak Djokovic 53.7% Jack Draper 53.3% Alexander Zverev 53.0% Matteo Berrettini 52.8% Carlos Alcaraz 52.5% Lorenzo Sonego 52.5% Jakub Mensik 52.2%
Guys like Hurkacz, Fritz, Berrettini, and Sonego build their entire match strategy around maximizing this stat. (Though they probably wouldn’t describe it that way.) The number tells us how a player executes plus-one tennis on serve, combined with how well they defend against it on return.
Negative results
At his best, Draper is as ruthless as any of those guys. In the sixth game of Sunday’s final against Rune, he held serve with a total of five shots: Four first serves and one forehand winner. But on return, or when the first serve doesn’t find its target, Jack tends to go passive.
The one-number summary is Draper’s Aggression Score of -38. Aggression Score measures how often a player ends the point, for good or ill, excluding serves. A higher number means more aggressive play, with average set to zero. In the last 52 weeks, Denis Shapovalov is +47, while Daniil Medvedev is -96. It is possible to win with a big game and a low Aggression Score: Sinner–surprisingly–is in the minus 30s, and Alexander Zverev (much less surprisingly) is in the minus 40s.
Here’s a scatterplot of the 25 men with the best first-serve percentages in the ATP top 50, along with their Aggression Scores:
I’ll be honest, I expected a clearer relationship here–any relationship! I assumed that the biggest servers would have the most aggressive games, at least as a general rule. Nicolas Jarry is trying, and Reilly Opelka–who doesn’t have the ranking to get himself on this graph–is even more aggressive still.
There is no single profile for the low-Aggression Score players. Sinner is patient because he knows he can outhit you. Fritz is also deceptively capable of waiting you out, though he doesn’t have the baseline weapons to effectively play another way. Zverev and Monfils could adopt just about whatever tactics they want to, but they naturally incline to passivity.
I would be surprised if, in two years’ time, Draper still sits right next to Zverev in this graph. Maybe that’s just how he’s comfortable playing, but the results are likely to convince him to adjust. While he’ll probably never go full-Shapo, his best performances tend to spit out Aggression Scores in positive territory. Sunday’s Rune match was almost neutral, at -1. The Fritz demolition was also closer, at -14. When Jack beat Karen Khachanov for the Vienna final last fall, his Agg Score was above zero. On grass last summer, he posted four straight matches at +25 or higher, including the final two contests in his Stuttgart title run.
The quickest path for a higher Aggression Score–one that he has already shown he can execute–would be to step forward behind the second serve. Draper already cleans up his first serves, but he only gets so many of them. Among the ATP top 50, he’s in the bottom third by first serves in. Even if he doesn’t boost that 53.3% win rate on short rallies, he can improve his overall results by moving more points into the short-rally category, out of the long-rally buckets.
Unhappy Jack
I haven’t said anything yet about Draper’s left-handedness. His game isn’t defined by it. He has the ad-court slider in his repertoire, but it is hardly his go-to. His favorite forehand seems to be inside-out, back at the forehand of a right-handed opponent.
In theory, southpaws are supposed to have an advantage on break points. The left-handed serve can drag opponents wide in the ad court, putting them at an immediate disadvantage. Rafael Nadal made this play famous, and Draper’s generation grew up watching him do it.
But Jack doesn’t. He hits break-point serves wide a bit less than 50% of the time, less than he does on ad-court serves in general. (And less than Nadal, who checked in at 60%.) The results, whether due to direction or something else, have been bleak. While Draper ranks 12th among the top 50 in service points won, he’s 44th in break points saved. He wins just 59.4% of those points–less than Sebastian Baez.
In one way, this is remarkable. Key points matter more than others: A player can boost his results by winning disproportionately often at crucial moments like tiebreaks and break points. Draper has climbed into the top ten despite losing a fair number of service games that, without such dreadful break-point performance, he would have won. Even at Indian Wells, he had to fight himself. Excluding the Fonseca match, he saved just 6 of 13 break points.
Here’s a look at the ATP top 25 and the typical relationship between serve points won and break points saved:
Players typically win fewer serve points when facing break point, because better returners generate more break points. But the relationship is fairly predictable. Men above the line (hello Ben Shelton!) have served better in big moments, while those below the line have performed worse.
No one is further from the line than Jack Draper. His nearly 68% rate of serve points won suggests he should have saved about 66% of break points, not his actual sub-60% figure. He has faced about 300 break points in the last year, so he has been broken about 20 more times than his SPW% would have predicted. That’s a lot! That’s one extra break of serve he’s had to overcome every third match he’s played.
There are two ways to interpret this. First is that it’s just bad luck. Players with extreme results in key situations tend to drift back to average. Just as a guy with an 80% tiebreak winning percentage probably isn’t going to keep it up, Draper is likely to start winning more than 59% of his break points faced. Simply regressing to the mean in this category will give him better results: No technical or tactical improvement necessary.
The alternative read is that break points are where Draper is particularly hurt by his lack of aggression. The theory goes like this: At key moments, most players tend to get more conservative. Serves come back, and rallies get longer. Points move out of the 1-to-3-shot category and into the others. The Brit already inclines to passivity, so he’s even more prone than usual to sacrifice the advantage of his big serve.
I don’t know if that’s true. Match Charting Project data, which has been so valuable today by giving us rally-length breakdowns and Aggression Scores, lets us down. In charted matches, Draper wins 64% of his break points faced, not 59%. His charted-match tendencies on break points, then, don’t tell us much. These matches aren’t the problem!
It’s a weaselly way of closing for today, but I suspect the answer is some mix of luck and passivity. Draper’s charted matches tend to be his more important ones, and if he were notably un-clutch, his chokes would show up in those big matches. They don’t. So luck is almost definitely part of it. At the same time, Jack is more passive than he needs to be, and good returners are able to exploit that.
The solution, of course, is to demolish opponents in 70 minutes without allowing a single break point. Sure, that strategy won’t work every time. But as Draper showed on Sunday, he’s capable of removing high-leverage moments from the equation entirely. He’ll do it again. It’s the other matches, the ones loaded with tension, that will determine how high the British number one can climb.
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