Monday, August 17, 2015

Extension to the Cluster Analysis done earlier

As an extension of the Cluster Analysis piece, I had tried to pitch the various serve and return statistics for each of these clusters to see how the combination works.


The ideal state for players to be across all the scatters is the top right corner as all variables considered are %s that are good-to-have-it-high. Unsurprisingly, the group that the big 3 of Roger, Rafa and Novak belong dominate this position in 2 of the 4 scatters (brown dots). The other interesting thing to note is the Pink group being in the centre of almost all the scatters and seem to be breathing under the neck of the brown dots. No wonder it is the cluster to which multiple few time GS champs like Murray, Stan, Cilic, Hewitt belong!

In the battle of the On & Off ones (involving Grigor, Haas etc.) against the consistent journeymen (comprising the likes of Seppi, Chardy etc.) the presence of Red UNDER Green easily explains who wins the battle of the return games. While the Reds are better in terms of Serving stats (the fact that their dots are mostly to the RIGHT side of Green ones), they would be better off getting better return stats.

The next thing I had done was to just select the best group (Brown) and dissect the same stats by players under this group. This is what it resulted in:

Again, the ideal state is the top right corner and the worst place to be is at the bottom left. No wonder, Verdasco, a clear outlier in this group fits to the bottom left in all 4 plots.

Novak, Roger and Rafa place themselves closer to the ideal section of the plot in at least 3 of the 4 plots. If you compare by the Return Stats (visualise drawing a horizontal line to include only the dots at the top), the guys owning up the best numbers are Rafa, Novak with the surprising presence of David Ferrer and Davydenko above Roger in all these categories! So, you now know where Roger's hiccup lied in. 

Similarly for Rafa, the presence of many names to the right of him in the first serves won % shows where his primary problems lie. Juan staying at Bottom-middle or Bottom-right indicates he has miles to go with his return game before he can actually add some legend tag against him. The positive news is, he has made his presence felt in the cluster. The bad news is, he is still recuperating and one knows not if he would be the same old Juan when he gets back on court!


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