re: Official French Open Discussion Thread

quote:

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Except three's definitely not the case. I believe peak Serena's probably the best ever
(1)
but she's not often at her peak. I mean Serena's only 10-7 against Jennifer Capriati, 8-6 against Justine Henin, and 7-6 against Martina Hingis. None of those three players could shine Steffi Graf's shoes yet they were able to have a respectable head-to-head record against Serena.

(2)
And the Robert Horry/Bernard King comparison might be the dumbest comparison ever. Unlike tennis, basketball is a team sport. You can compare tennis players statistically because it's an individual sport. You don't rely on teammates to win matches. You're out there all by yourself unlike a sport like basketball where Horry was lucky enough to win rings playing with prime Shaq, Hakeem, Kobe, and Duncan.

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Not your best effort.


(1)
First of all, if you agree that Serena at her peak is the best ever, then you absolutely agree with (iii). Secondly, why in the world would you respond to that hypo with the above-bolded? The very purpose of the hypo was to avoid a response like the above-bolded. Why do you think I called her Sarah Sparingly?


(2)
It's a perfectly apt comparison. The only way you could have had any problem understanding the analogue of the comparison is if you didn't immediately recognize that Bernard King was a better basketball player than Robert Horry by several orders of magnitude.* Hopefully you did, and you would have understood that it was illustrating how a "trophy room" analysis can lead to absurd results. But this wasn't your best effort, so I guess you didn't.

I mean, if you yourself are applying the alien test and selecting Serena, why did you even reply to my post? The point I'm making is that a prime vs. prime "alien test" analysis is simply a better, more illustrative test. It's more meaningful. It's apples to apples. It's a focused analysis. It doesn't worrry about how many titles Monica Seles won -- it asks whether Steffi at her best could beat Seles at her best -- and so it doesn't disadvantage a player who got stabbed during a changeover. Or, similarly, a player who was injury prone.



*If you didn't recognize that, then that's a major issue we should address another time.