Silly Little Country

CBC Sports and Numeracy - Tennis

I am watching the commentary preceding today's Agassi-Nadal match in Montreal, and a question has come to mind. The "expert" (no doubt an expert on tennis) offered as support for his assertion that Andre Agassi serves remarkably well, something like, "He is fourth overall in aces in this tournament".

This may be evidence of something. But Agassi is a finalist, and therefore is in a round of the tournament only one other player is in (who is also claimed to be a better server than he seems, with no flimsy statistical claims to support that). On the face of it (barring byes) only four players will have played as many matches in the tournament as Agassi has, and so Agassi could be the worst of those with an equal number of matches in which to get aces, hardly a measure of serving quality. Also, if all his matches went to three sets, indicating he was just hanging in perhaps, he would have far more opportunities to get aces. Now perhaps the expert meant aces per some unit that made sense but that is not what was said.

UPDATE: The 'expert' decided to repeat the statistic as meaningful in the second game (even saying "who would have thought?"). I tried out the tournament website for detailed data to see if my hypothesis made sense about who the leading four in aces were - but the website does not seem to expose a player's statistics for this tournament! I am spoiled by Wimbledon - and must send a note to those behind this rather useless website.

Perhaps it is a bit much to expect good sense from sports commentary but it does occur at times.

posted by Alan Adamson @ 2:08 PM