Game, set and match: evaluating the efficiency of male professional tennis players

We exploit the natural distinction between the attacking and defensive aspects of tennis to get a better understanding of the origins of relative inefficiency. Attacking is simply when a player is serving and defending is when a player is returning serve. We use data envelopment analysis (DEA) to compute the attacking, defensive and overall efficiencies of the top 100 male professional players for the 2009 season. An analysis of the efficiency scores using non-parametric kernel smoothing suggests that there are four groups of players in the sample- those that are relatively efficient in attack and defence; those that are relatively inefficient in attack and defence; and those that are relatively efficient in attack or defence. Truncated regression equations for the technical and super attacking, defensive and overall efficiencies as a function of off-court variables (e.g. height, age, etc.) suggest that being a left-handed player has a significant positive effect on the overall efficiencies.