Of the top 4 players in Clutch Factor over Expected per Point in the Australian Open men’s draw, 2 are in the semifinals, with all 4 semifinalists in the Top 10. We look at tonight’s men’s semifinalists by looking at how our model evaluated each of their journeys through the draw, leading to a prediction for each match.
(1) Novak Djokovic vs (4) Jannik Sinner
The tournament’s two men’s semifinals have two very different storylines to them. This one is purely on-court, with the two players who arguably have been the best in the world since the 2023 US Open. They have played each other three times in that period, with Djokovic taking the final of the World Tour Finals and Sinner taking the other two, in the Davis Cup and the Round Robin stage of the World Tour Finals. But Best of 5 is a different beast, especially with Novak Djokovic, and especially in Australia, where he is 20-0 in semifinals and finals.
Novak Djokovic is coming off the best season by a male player in our entire 10-year dataset in Weighted Grand Slam Performance Rating, winning 3 Grand Slams and losing in a 5-set epic in the Wimbledon final. This year, he has come out flying again. In pursuit of his 11th Australian Open title, he has ranked 2nd in Clutch Factor over Expected per Point over this tournament. However, he has shown some vulnerability twice, in 4-set wins over Dino Prizmic in Round 1 and Taylor Fritz in the Quarterfinals.
There have been 120 completed matches (excluding retirements), yielding 240 player-matches. In the two matches in which he was vulnerable, Djokovic ranked 68 and 77. In his third-round match against Tomas Martin Etcheverry, he ranked 36. Even at one break per set and a third set tiebreaker, the match was never particularly close. The other two matches, wins over Adrian Mannarino and Alex Popyrin, ranked 10 and 14. Given his wrist injury, Novak Djokovic looks more vulnerable in Australia than he has in a while, but that is still not very vulnerable.
Jannik Sinner, on the other hand, has blown out all comers. He is the only male player not to have dropped a set yet. He ranks first in Clutch Factor over Expected per Point among men, and the distance from him to Novak Djokovic in 2nd is greater than the distance from Novak Djokovic to Fabian Marozsan in 7th. His last 3 matches, wins over Sebastian Baez (7th), Karen Khachanov (3rd), and Andrey Rublev (13th), all ranked inside the top 15. None of his matches ranked outside the Top 30. Sinner has been the picture of outright dominance.
The courts in Australia are fast relative to the rest of the tour’s outdoor hard courts (although some have said that they are not quite as fast as they were last year), and I have played with some Technifibre balls – when they are new, they feel like rocks, and it is incredibly easy to get them to run through the court, especially a fast one. These should all play to the advantage of the man who hits the ball incredibly hard and holds a higher rating in Clutch Factor over Expected per Point, Jannik Sinner. If the opponent were anyone else, I would be predicting a comprehensive victory. But it’s not anyone else. Sinner has a well-documented history of cramping and losing his legs, and it is frequently said about Djokovic that “first he takes your legs, then he takes your soul.” That is a bad matchup.
Prediction: Djokovic in 4. Picking against Novak Djokovic in Australia is a terrible idea. Sinner will probably have a shot at the first two sets, but he will have to hit a lot of extra balls. If he can win them both, he will have a couple of looks at one or two of the following sets. But if Djokovic has already won a set by the time Sinner’s legs start to go, it is probably over.
(3) Daniil Medvedev vs (6) Alex Zverev
Alexander Zverev should not be here. On the court, he has been pushed all the way to the brink with two fifth set tiebreakers against Lukas Klein and Cam Norrie, and before both of those matches, Domink Koepfer pushed him all the way through their first round match. Off the court, he arguably should never have been here in the first place, since he is due to stand trial in Germany in May for domestic violence. But one benefit of him being in the semifinal is that Daniil Medvedev gets a shot at him. The two men do not like each other very much, and we should have an entertaining clash tonight. This is their 19th time playing each other, but the first at a Grand Slam level. Medvedev leads the head-to-head 11-7.
Despite Medvedev being ranked 6th and Zverev 10th in Clutch Factor over Expected, neither one has had a clean path through the draw. Medvedev came back from two sets to love down late at night to beat Emil Ruusuvuori in Round 2, turning in a performance ranked 118th, the worst of any men’s semifinalist, but he has otherwise been solid. His other four matches rank above all but one of Zverev’s performances – his third-round win over Alex Michelsen, which ranked 32nd. None of Zverev’s other player-matches ranked inside the top 75. That includes his quarterfinal win against Carlos Alcaraz, in which he was 7/10 on break points, all of which he needed to win him the match, but other than those breaks, he made very little progress in the Alcaraz service games. On the other hand, Medvedev’s best performance, his own third-round victory over Felix Auger-Aliassime, came in way ahead of any of the others, ranking as the 11th-best performance of the men’s main draw of the Australian Open.
Prediction: Daniil Medvedev in 4. Given their mutual hatred of each other, Zverev will get one set out of the deal. But Medvedev has been consistently better over this tournament than Zverev. He could easily dig himself a very deep hole, but Zverev has done the same thing to himself and should allow Medvedev to jump out to a big advantage. If Zverev takes a set, I believe that it will be the third.
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