novak next year?

2011 - novak cleaned all available titles till may 2011, total 7 titles, got massive increase in total amount of points

2012? - if novak be able to retain his all 7 titles he'd won the previous season, be complete player as the season before, n he'll still get ZERO increase in points.


..i think something need to be changed..
though its quite interesting how will novak features next year.

the rankings award consistnt players tho thats what is good about it imo

Something should change? Like, the ranking should stop being about what you've done in the last year?

May as well do the rankings over 10 years then. Federer's #1 still then.

Lets look at this from another perspective. Novak has won absolutely everything there is to win this season for six months and he is still the #2 ranked player in the world even after winning a grandslam and beating the #1 ranked player in the world 4 times. That was how huge Nadal's lead was at the start of the year. Yes Nadal has had a lot of points to defend and has many more points to defend up till the US open. Everyone says Novak will be under huge pressure to defend points next year. Certainly, he will, but what put Nadal under pressure was not the points he had to defend, he hardly had any points to defend until the start of the clay court season. What put him under pressure was one guy winning everything. If Novak keeps playing this way and has 6000 point gap next year or 5000 points gap, someone still has to win those points over to surpass him.

I think the ranking system as it stands is pretty good - it makes sense to have a one year rolling system with consistent points across various categories of tournament, and I think the differential between winner, runner up etc provides a fair balance for relative performance.

OK, there are a few issues, like the Monte Carlo Masters counting in the 500 series optional events, and the limitation on the number of countable optional events (500 and 250 events).

As it stands, the system allows for fairly rapid movement - at year end, Djoko and Federer were essentially level battling for #2, whereas now Djoko's form means he's a good bet to be #1 by the end of the current tournament, by roughly the mid point of the following season - seems perfectly reasonable to me, especially considering how dominant Nadal was last clay court season (and in the slams), that it should take a bit of time to close the gap.

I agree with dummyhalf, I wouldn't change the system. Personally, I only really look at the year end #1 anyway. That is when the scoring becomes like a points race, there is no points earned last year that get factored in the ranking. And the current ranking system does a good job of balancing the current form of a player against his past performance. Everyone talks about all the points Rafa has to defend that is true, but federer was able to defend 3 grandslam winning years on multiple occassions. If Djokovic didn't improve by leaps and bounds Rafa could have dropped a grandslam and a couple of master's here and there and easily defended all his points. Barring injury, regardless of how many points you have to defend someone has to win those points to close the gap and take the #1 ranking from you.