The Economist uses a difficulty-adjusted metric to argue Nadal's GOAT status. An interesting perspective!

Can someone check my calculations? I haven't gone through all the calculations but the author claims that Nadal's 2013 Roland Garros was worth 1.65 slams because he drew "Mr Wawrinka and a peak-form Mr Djokovic in the quarter-final and semi-final rounds."

I used elo ratings going into Roland Garros for the calculations. The probability that player A defeats player B if player A's elo rating is X and player B's elo rating is Y is 1/(1 + 10Y-X). Source.

Nadal's opponents were

Round Opponent
R1 Daniel Brands
R2 Martin Klizan
R3 Fabio Fognini
R4 Kei Nishikori
QF Stan Wawrinka
SF Novak Djokovic
F David Ferrer

Using the author's methodology...

Round Nadal's clay elo Opponent's clay elo Probability Points awarded
R1 2649 1758 0.994 0.006
R2 2649 1692 0.996 0.004
R3 2649 2022 0.974 0.026
R4 2649 1994 0.977 0.023
QF 2649 2206 0.928 0.072
SF 2649 2413 0.796 0.204
F 2649 2355 0.845 0.155

His total comes out to 0.491 points. Adjusting with the average difficulty of a slam, this becomes 0.399.

/r/tennis Thread Link - economist.com