Tracking the contenders at the 2015 Australian Open

The 2015 Australian Open is the first Slam in recent memory where it’s all but guaranteed there will be championship points up for grabs in both fields.

The defending women’s champion, Na Li, has retired, and Stan Wawrinka is, per Advanced Baseline odds, a long shot to defend the men’s title. You could probably guess the major names that are in a position to take advantage, and you’d be mostly right, with a couple notable exceptions.

The women’s side continues to boil down to guessing when Serena Williams will slow down -- and it really is a guess at this point. The aging curve just doesn’t seem to apply to her. But on the men’s side, the Big Four has finally started to show some cracks, and the cracks aren’t coming from who you might have expected.

Below are 52-week tracking graphs of the hard-adjusted Advanced Baseline ranks of the top contenders from last year’s Australian Open until now. It’s a quick way to see what’s changed at the top of the ladder, and how and why it might be different this year. Ratings have been updated to reflect most recent results since last week’s rankings update.

That is not a happy curve for Rafael Nadal. The cliff has showed signs of emerging, right on schedule. Three losses to qualifiers in the last five tournaments will dent your ranking, and there aren’t a lot of recent high-profile wins to counterbalance them either.

Nadal has a ton of mileage on him by now, both from his volume and playing style. And for the time being, it’s enough to drop him to sixth in the AB hard court rankings, behind both Kei Nishikori and Milos Raonic.

Compare that to Federer, who remains ageless at 33. He won his tuneup earlier this week en route to his 1,000th (!) career ATP victory, and he is doing it in his trademark efficient style. Combine it with his finely tuned schedule, and he may very well stay on the scene for another two to three years.

Djokovic is still the likely favorite in a best-of-five tournament, but the two are neck and neck to the point where luck of the draw may very well decide which of the two makes it to the final.

Aside from the weak-ish No. 3 and No. 4 seeds described above, Fabio Fognini is reprising his role here as the top-16 lottery ticket for the draw. He typically amasses enough points from clay tournaments to get seeded high at the Slams, but he never does well outside of clay.

The lower seeds are the most stocked with clay specialists I’ve seen in a while, meaning there are a lot of points up for grabs in the first three rounds in their sections. I wouldn’t be surprised to see more unseeded players than usual making it to the fourth round this year.

Maria Sharapova sits right below Serena in theory, but that’s a matchup that hasn’t exactly felt competitive in a while. The one upside of Li Na’s absence is that the door is much more wide open for Simona Halep than it was last year. She has a higher seed this time, and she’s made strides in the last year to put herself in position to contend. She could face a rough challenge in the quarterfinals, however; former No. 1 Ana Ivanovic, a top-5 hard-court player, was given the No. 5 seed and landed in her portion of the draw.

Strangely enough, Sara Errani is playing Fognini’s near-identical role of “over-seeded Italian clay specialist” on the women’s side. She had arguably the biggest drop-off in her AB ranking between the US Open and now, so this one is a little under the radar. If she doesn’t improve fast, I’m not sure she’ll even be seeded in September anymore.

Other than that, the women’s draw isn’t too unbalanced anywhere; Venus is always under-seeded from her low match volume, Garbine Muguruza is still somehow underrated, and Caroline Wozniacki is the player no one will want to face anywhere. (Wozniacki also got a wretched draw: not only did she land in Serena’s section, but she will face Taylor Townsend in the first round and the winner of Vika Azarenka-Sloane Stephens in the second. The unseeded Azarenka was guaranteed to be someone’s bracket land mine, and she landed quite close to Woz in the draw.)