We have reached the final weekend of the 2025 Australian Open. Novak Djokovic, Alexander Zverev, Jannik Sinner, and Ben Shelton will battle it out to see who takes home the first Grand Slam title of the season.
All four semifinalists have been incredible behind their serves. Across their 19 completed matches, in only one of them did one of our semifinalists have a Serve Excitement Average worse than the tournament average: Novak Djokovic’s 4-set win over Carlos Alcaraz in the quarterfinals. With this trend likely to continue into the semifinals, we expect both matches to have extended sets and be decided by the small margins created by taking advantage of rare opportunities. This means that we will be focusing our analyses on the return game.
Let’s look at the Australian Open men’s semifinals by reviewing how our models evaluated each player’s journey through the draw and ending with a prediction for each match.
(2) Alexander Zverev vs (7) Novak Djokovic
If we are talking about returns, there is no better place to start than Novak Djokovic, the best returner of all time. He seems to finally be losing a step with age, but being technically perfect blunts the impact. In this tournament, he has consistently created opportunities for himself in his return game. His Return Excitement Average has been better than the Australian Open average for every match but one, and he has created over 10 break point chances in all of them. He is also a candidate for positive mean regression. CFOE ratings regress to 2 in victories. Djokovic’s Return CFOE Rating has been below 1 twice and dipped as low as -1.
Alexander Zverev, on the other hand, should not be here. In his quarterfinal matchup with Tommy Paul, Paul served for each of the first 2 sets and won the 3rd going away. But Zverev bailed himself out with a Return CFOE Rating of 5.89 and lockdown play in both tiebreakers. Zverev’s return is performing worse as the tournament goes on. His Return Excitement Average declined from Round 1 to Round 2, Round 2 to Round 3, and Round 4 to the Quarterfinals. With the semifinals featuring some of the tournament’s best servers, that is a troubling trend for the German.
In this match, margins will be small. Therefore, there will be two defining factors: Djokovic’s possible lingering injury and Zverev’s play in big moments. If Djokovic can move well, there will be big moments, likely more on Zverev’s serve than Djokovic’s serve. As a reminder, opportunity conversion tends to be based more on the existence of the opportunities themselves than anything else.
Prediction: Djokovic in 4. Our model has Djokovic’s win probability at 64%. Below are the predicted outcomes
(1) Jannik Sinner vs (21) Ben Shelton
Ben Shelton’s game is not exactly oriented around his return. More than any of the other semifinalists, his primary weapon is his serve. This keeps his margins even tighter than most – out of 18 sets, Shelton has played 7 tiebreakers. In fact, of his 5 matches, his break rate has never been higher than Sinner’s lowest break rate. That is not a good sign for Shelton.
Jannik Sinner has been the big favorite to take home the title since the draw placed Djokovic, Zverev, and Carlos Alcaraz in the opposite half of the draw to Sinner. It will be tough to tell how Sinner’s return will behave against Shelton’s serve using our metrics from this tournament, since Shelton is a tall lefty, all of Sinner’s opponents have been right-handed, and only two of them have been above 6 feet tall. So, for an insight into how Sinner might beat Shelton, we look into his performance against first and second serves. Sinner crushes second serves, with large gaps between his opponents’ first serve win percentages and second serve win percentages and Sinner having won over 40% of his opponents’ second serve points in every match.
Ben Shelton’s first serve will be a major factor in this match. We do not expect Shelton to have an answer for Jannik Sinner’s serve, but Shelton’s own serve has been incredible. Since neither player has been broken in more than 10% of games in a single match so far, this match will likely come down to a few moments. And those moments will be determined by whether Shelton can land timely first serves.
Prediction: Sinner in 3. Our model has Sinner’s win probability at 94%. Below are the predicted outcomes
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