well, he did face Nadal at the FO in 2015 (and beat him) but he wasn't peak Nadal at that point. So Djoker actually has a win vs him + he nearly beat a healthy Rafa in 2013 (9-7 in 5th)

You are right. The main part of my point there was that Fed never lost to anybody at the FO during those years except peak Nadal. Djok lost to Stan.

Apart from peak Nadal, Fed has more claim to best on clay than Djok does imo, during their peak years where they won 3/4 GS's.

10 French Opens is absurd.

Skipping the clay was a great decision from Federer. I really hope Wimbledon does the smart thing and makes sure Nadal/Fed are on opposite sides of the draw, because a finals meeting between those 2 is the most epic thing you can get in tennis.

lol, no i didn't mean to reup the 2015 djok vs. 2006 fed argument, but i will say one thing on that: the match that stan played in 2015 was arguably one of the greatest tennis matches any human being has ever put together. he LOST the first set and then put together 3 of the greatest sets of tennis in human history, as he had to in order to beat djok. stan hasn't hit that level of amazeballs tennis since except maybe for a set or two here or there. but 3 straight? may 2015 was the last time anybody saw that level of tennis. he blew peak djok off the court. clear off the court. the stats don't even come close to showing how much of a dominant performance stan put forth for those 3 sets. johnny mac even said after the match that nobody could have beaten stan that day, not nadal, not anybody.

and again, nobody's seen that level of tennis since. if stan could keep that specific level up each and every time he played, he'd literally never lose. so saying that djok didn't lose to peak nadal is a red herring. he lost to somebody who had a 0.0001% game that day.

bg often says "5% of the time, you wake up and nobody can beat you. 5% of the time the other guy wakes up and nobody can beat him. the other 90% of the time, the match is up for grabs." well djok woke up WITH HIS 5% of the time and stan STILL beat him. it was that strong of a performance.

Stanimal confirmed GOAT, close thread

Lol. Yes, Stan played great. Peak Nadal would beat him on clay at the FO. Don't think that's controversial.

i think different opens handle seeding and draws differently; however, i'm pretty sure it's randomized given a specific set of rules. those rules i believe are:

- 1 & 2 on opposite sides
- 1 draws 4; 2 draws 3 (though i think some opens flip a coin here IIRC wimbledon doesn't and just puts them at 1/4 on one side and 2/3 on the other)
- THEN they flip a coin two times for each of the 5-8 and assign them quarters. i don't think they auto assign 8 to 1, 7 to 2, 6 to 3, and 5 to 4.

does anybody have confirmation on exactly how wimbledon does it?

either way, i don't think the tourney organizers have a choice in the matter in terms of who is on what side for #2 and #5. they just follow their algorithm. so who knows what those rules are?

you're right and you're wrong. you're right that it's not controversial, but you're wrong as to who would have won. that single match that stan played was unbeatable by anybody. even peak nadal would have lost in that spot. every once in a while a great player can play amazingly well and be unbeatable. of all those times, this ONE time, this ONE guy did so to such a degree that nobody could have beat him.

just look at these points. especially the 6th game in the 3rd set (and the silly accurate shot in the 8th game of the 3rd set):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pn4Rsx9Qq0A

ETA: i just watched this whole thing again and it's absolutely insane what wawrinka did there. he was down a break in multiple sets and came back to win two of them. the last point of the match too was amazing. that was 100% peak djokovic. and it was 100% the best game djok could have brought. virtually no lulls. all breaks of djok's serve were straight up taken by stan whereas stan gave up a few baaad games. and even with those games, still put together a strong enough game to "comprehensively" defeat the greatest player in the world at the time having the greatest year of tennis of all time and who beat BOTH murray AND nadal to get to that final. and yes, that wasn't PEAK nadal, but that match djok played against not peak nadal resulted in a 3 set victory. and djok arguably played BETTER than that against stan and STILL lost lol. i really don't think anybody's best game ever could have beaten stan if he played like he did in the 2015 FO final.

In regards to seeding would it make more sense to place seeds based on power rankings rather than current rankings. Particularly in. Year like this when you have Fed, Rafa and Delpo all making string recoveries and players like Murray and Djoker playing substandard to their ranking. Why isn't this done?


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I thought seedings and ranking were routinely not the same thing. Thus the organizers have some leeway because they control seeding.

Don't you think it's illogical to believe that the best tennis ever played was played by a guy who has never been ranked higher than 3rd in the world?

There's something that happens when you watch tennis in cases like these that I think can be misleading. Sometimes a player can look great playing against one player, and then look like nothing special against another. That other player hits with more spin, hits a little deeper, hits a little harder, and this has a great effect. I watched the first 2 points of that highlight package (busy watching NBA finals now but later I'll look at the rest) and felt Djokovic was hitting a lot of very average groundstrokes, not very deep and not very hard hit. That may be part of why Stan looked so good that day.

that's not my understanding. i can be wrong here but i thought each open/atp tour stop had their own way of doing it but that within each, there are specific rules. those rules rarely change year to year and are set in advance so that there isn't any monkeying with the seeds.

for example, some atp tour stops give automatic #1-4 seeds to the winners and semi finalists of the tournament last year. that's rare, but it does happen.

i do know that seeding is definitely done differently in the US open than it is in wimbledon. i don't recall the specifics, but i believe a) there are rules for each seeding structure for each slam/open/etc., and b) there is no leeway for organizers to choose who goes where beyond the set rules for that tournament.

definitely not. that's certainly not illogical. watch the whole highlight reel. stan turned a great deal of djok's A+ game directly against him with a barrage of 100+mph ground strokes.

and beyond that, the highlight reel misses a TON of the intervening moments of stan's amazing greatness that day. i remember him taking a bunch of djok's first serves that would normally be aces and hitting 100+mph winners from them. yes, he mostly was forced by djok's insanely good serving to punch a lot of them back, but a few big ones he really got a hold of were unhittable.

anyways, no it's not at all illogical that somebody who went toe to toe with nadal AND djok year after year in australia for 5.5+hrs each would be able to put together the greatest tennis performance of all time even if he wasn't ever ranking 1 or 2.

that's possible. but watch the whole reel. and if you have time, watch the whole match. djok played exceptionally well overall hitting deep and heavy balls that stan simply turned around on him again and again and again. stan's never played that well for that long since.

Federer Vs Murray in the Wimbledon semi a few years ago served so well that he was much more unbeatable than Stan was in that French open. He still lost the final as he obviously couldn't recreate it vs Djoko.

UpHill - if you're going to make claims like that you're probably going to want some numbers or something to back it up. You're also probably not going to want to say something like 'the numbers don't even back this up' and then just make up your own numbers

I think the way Stan played that day could have been enough to beat an average day from peak Nadal. But I'm sure peak Nadal had better days than Stan had that day.

agreed. that was one of my favorite matches too. but murray wasn't peak djok there.

i never made up any numbers, nor would i.

my point is that the numbers don't show how clutch stan was at key points in the match. you can see how he played more forcefully in sets 2-4 vs. set 1 pretty easily. he forced way way more unforced errors from djokovic in those sets than in set 1 and he had far fewer unforced errors himself (a net >1 ratio in sets 2-4 vs. a <1 ratio in set 1).

further, he basically dominated on serve in sets 2-3 (not as much as fed did in that murray match but here he either won 19/21 first serve points or he won 89% of his second serve points in those two sets).

the reason i say the numbers don't show the true performance is that you don't get to see how he frustrated djokovic in set 4 in those numbers. the service stats are ok, but not phenomenal. but he absolutely destroyed djokovic that set AFTER he lapsed in one service game to drop 3-0 in the fourth. from that point on it was an epic display.

it's an astonishing performance b/c djok arguably played as well or better than he did vs. nadal and murray, both of whom played well (though that wasn't peak nadal as has been pointed out), and stan STILL beat him despite being down a break in multiple sets.

i couldn't find the avg forehand and backhand speed, but those had to have been off the charts. his serve was stronger than novak's that day, but not by much.

the most impressive thing to me and the reason why i keep saying it's the best performance i've ever seen is how he dominated the best player that year on the baseline. djok was not used to seeing balls that heavy (with speed vs. spin) coming at him like that. he overcame nadal's heavy (spin) forehands, but couldn't come up with an answer to stan's weighty groundstrokes coming at him regularly at 90+mph

http://2015.rolandgarros.com/en_FR/s...20/1701ms.html

that Stan win vs Djoker was amazing, definitely one of the best performances I've ever seen. Stan hulking out was sick.

however my favorite FO match (and maybe my favorite match ever) is the Nadal 5 set win over Djoker. Nadal loses the 4th set tiebreaker, goes down a break deep in the 5th but rallies and wins 9-7. probably the most impressive WIM I've ever seen out of anyone. for Rafa to overcome that score and scenario against that opponent was crazy, GOAT mental toughness combined with physical tools. reminded me of Michael Jordan, crazy physical tools combined with an insane (in a good way) person

Yeah that was the big thing in that final. Roger serves as good as he didn against Andy he wins. Just didn't get near to those high heights in the final sadly.

lol @ stan hulking out. love it. that's exactly what happened. too bad he can't do that on demand!

the nadal/djok FO match was definitely epic as well and SUUUCH a nail biter. i still would say my favorite match of all time is the highly touted, and for good reason, nadal/fed wimbledon in 2008. 9-7 in the 5th as well IIRC after just an INSANE performance by both, especially for fed to force a 5th set by winning the 4th set tiebreaker 10-8 or something like that (9-7? 11-9?). i was jumping up and down yelling at the tv for the entire match.

and i was SOOO happy w/ the fed/nadal aussie open this year. seeing fed mentally tune in like that, overcome nadal's heavy balls by stepping in early w/ his backhand both from the baseline and on service returns, and overcoming a break down in the 5th?! amazing.

A tight match can make key points look more impressive. Last weekend Nadal just destroyed Stan. He didn't even seem to be playing that well, but he scored nearly twice as many points. It was an erasure. There were moments where it was embarassing to watch a top tier pro manhandled like that. Really that's more impressive than battling to a fierce 5 set victory.

The ones saying that Stan would beat Nadal if he played like he did agains Joker clearly havent seen how Nadal plays against the one handed backhand. When Nadal was at his peak he pretty much erased the 2nd best claycourter of all time and the most complete player by exploiting his only weakness.

irrelevant. a) fed's backhand was a relative weakness in the naughts and really until the aussie open when he started stepping in early so much so that nadal didn't know how to handle it, and b) stan's backhand, especially during that match, was WAY better than fed's. it wasn't that nadal was great against a 1 handed backhand, it was that fed didn't know how to handle shoulder height balls with his backhand when he was standing behind the baseline. now he's addressed that by stepping inside the baseline and taking the ball on the rise.

anyways, fed's relative past weakness doesn't mean nadal would be automatically great against all 1handers. stan's absolutely insane performance in that match really would have been enough to beat anybody as far as the announces and i are concerned lol