ATP Tour

Sinner Supremacy: Italian stands above the rest in these Insights...

Jannik Sinner’s record-breaking season was driven by his dominant baseline performance, combining powerful groundstrokes with brick-wall consistency.

While many players may lean into either their forehand or backhand as their strength, Sinner uses both as formidable weapons, as evidenced by metrics provided by Tennis Data Innovations in partnership with TennisViz.

Sinner finished the season in a rare position, topping the leaderboard for both forehand and backhand Shot Quality, which is calculated in real-time by analysing each shot's speed, spin, depth, width, and the impact it has on the opponent. On a scale of 1-10, Sinner’s forehand shot quality scored a 8.87 while his backhand registered at 8.46. Novak Djokovic was not far behind in forehand shot quality (8.67). Alexander Zverev was second in backhand shot quality (8.13).

Sinner, who captured a season-leading eight tour-level titles, was joined by rivals Zverev, Djokovic and Carlos Alcaraz in the Top 5 of both forehand and backhand shot quality.

In the opening week of the season, Grigor Dimitrov won the ATP 250 in Brisbane, his first tour-level title since 2017. The Bulgarian maintained that form throughout the year and returned to the Top 10 after 260 weeks below that threshold, marking the third-longest gap of Top 10 stints in PIF ATP Rankings history. TDI’s insights scored Dimitrov fourth in forehand shot quality (8.5) and sixth in backhand shot quality (7.69).

Taylor Fritz, Jack Draper and Tomas Machac all ascended to a career-high PIF ATP Ranking this season and were featured in at least one of TDI’s shot quality leaderboards. See the full lists below:

Forehand Shot Quality, 2024

Backhand Shot Quality, 2024