Saturday, March 5, 2016

How many games does a team winning 5-0 lose? Interesting tennis league stats

I've written about how often a winning team wins 5-0 vs 4-1 vs 3-2, but I came across a match where a team not only won 5-0, but only lost 12 games, and got curious how often that or similar scenarios occur.

So I went about looking at all matches in 18 & over and 40 & over in 2015 where the winning team won 5-0 and are matches were completed, e.g. no defaults or retirements where the score would not represent a complete match, and did it for both Men and Women, and here is the result.

First the men:
We see that losing just 12 games happened 15 times, so certainly not common, but some teams gave up even fewer, the fewest being just 6 games which happened once.  So losing just 12 is impressive and in the 98th percentile, but not the best that has occurred.

We also see that the mid-point is right around 30 with a big chunk between 25 and 35 which makes sense.  Losing a total of 30 games over 5 matches would mean on average winning 6-3,6-3.

At the other extreme we see a few at/over 50 games lost, the most being 56.  That is a pretty difficult task as that is over 11 games per court being lost without losing a court.  Note that this one was a match where 3rd sets were played out so that made it easier.  The most with 3rd set tie-breaks was 52 with 4 of the courts going to a 3rd set.

On to the women: 
This chart looks very similar, a standard bell curve as you'd expect, but there was a team that gave up 0 games in winning a match!  The match was in a 40+ 3.0 league in Texas and TennisLink shows all courts as completed so if the scores were entered right, it appears it happened.

The mid-point for the ladies seems to be centered slightly lower around 28, but on the high end there was a match where the winning team won every court but lost 60 games!  This was in Southern and yes, they did play out the 3rd sets.  The most where the 3rd set was a match tie-break was 54 and every court did go to a match tie-break.

What are you experiences with a team winning 5-0 and losing very few or a lot of games?

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