The Two-handed Backhand

seven out of ten—gravity and weight—control>power

In the second round of the Madrid Masters on Tuesday, Andrey Rublev was in a battle with young Brit Jack Draper. Draper’s lefty game exposed the Rublev backhand and caused plenty of headaches, and Rublev had few answers for much of the match. As I wrote last week, the Rublev backhand is limited in large part due to his technique, and this is primarily why I think he will struggle to climb much higher in the rankings. As I said in that piece, “sometimes taking the next step isn’t possible because your peers just take bigger steps (ask Andy Roddick).” During the second set when the tide was turning in Rublev’s favour, the commentators said this of Draper:

“I suppose this is the next step I guess for Jack Draper. Trying to maintain that consistency, that level he showed in the opening set, all the way through a match like this. We kind of saw it against Djokovic as well at Wimbledon. Just fell away in that second set.”

“Yeah that will come the more times he is in this situation…When his 7/10 game improves. Ultimately, we always say that your ranking is [how you play] on those 7/10 days”

On a 7/10 day you just want to cover the bread-and-butter elements: make returns, reduce double faults, play through the cross-court on groundstrokes. Hustle and grind and perhaps give yourself a chance to find better tennis over the course of a match. It’s not always pretty and it won’t make the highlight reels, but it is the necessary plumbing that great tennis rests upon. Every day a player wakes up and must calibrate their game to the opponent’s style, the court, the balls, the weather, and how their body feels. Some days it comes easy, the racquet feels like an extension of the arm, the ball seems big and slow, and you feel in control. On other days everything feels foreign and just finding decent tennis is a battle. Great technique makes that battle easier. It makes your 7/10 game better than the opponent’s 7/10 game, and in the end, it is reflected in the rankings.

Djokovic’s backhand

While much of the modern game is focused on powerful serves and forehands, the last decade has been dominated by a player who plays with a degree of control we have never seen before. Since 2011 Novak Djokovic has been collecting slams at a clip just shy of fifty percent, and his two-handed backhand has been a trademark of his all-absorbing game. Just as I have written previously about the shared characteristics of great forehands, there are similar threads that separate good from great on the backhand wing; great performance has a signal that we can largely attribute to the technical and physical domains.

Djokovic’s backhand is a wall, built to withstand and redirect. It isn’t eye-catching and it doesn’t generate a lot of winners, but it yields a constant drip of opponent errors through unrelenting pressure. The video below from Top Tennis Training does an excellent job of highlighting three keys in under a minute:

To recap:

1. Djokovic uses a great unit turn to coil his shoulders and hips, storing energy in his kinetic chain and using his weight transfer to his front foot.

2. Djokovic gets his racquet tip high in a power position that will allow gravity to generate the initial racquet head speed. He also gets his backhand into the “slot” where the frame runs down his left leg, allowing him to generate topspin and a feeling of control.

3. Djokovic extends through the shot.

Many players hit these technical markers, but what I think separates the Djokovic backhand from most others—and it isn’t explicitly stated in the video—is that he barely uses his wrists (notice the lack of wrist roll ~30-32 seconds). Watch the second part of this Instagram clip from Joel Myers. Djokovic’s wrist angle is fixed throughout contact. For a more in-depth analysis, you can see the video below in an Alcaraz/Djokovic backhand comparison (wrist discussed ~5:15).

As I touched on in Death of a Forehand - Part I, you want fewer moving parts to have reliable timing, as Knudson states in Biomechanical Principles of Tennis Technique:

“Decreasing the number of body segments and the extent of their motion will increase the accuracy of the movement.” Shorter swings with fewer moving parts make for better timing. Perhaps not surprising, then, that the all-time best hard-court returner of 1st serves is…John McEnroe (34.7%).

Also perhaps not surprising that Djokovic's backhand has been rock-solid throughout his career. No surface, opponent, or situation has been able to break it; he has weathered the Nadal forehand at Roland Garros and the Federer forehand at Wimbledon. He can melt flat winners down the line, block first serves ad nauseum, or roll passing shots cross-court at full-stretch.

Two Types of Backhand

Based on the grip the right hand takes on the two-handed backhand, two distinct swings tend to emerge. As the 1-minute video below explains, the Kyrgios backhand ‘works’ without any racquet head drop because he takes a more open right-hand (and left, perhaps) grip.

We tend to see this flatter backhand style emerge far more often from hardcourt-raised players. Norrie, Tiafoe, Paul, Mannarino, Murray, and Kyrgios all play a version of this flatter backhand that excels at blocking returns and handling flat and faster balls, and it is a great example of how the environment you learn in can nudge your stroke development. However, there are great examples of players who have used a more conservative right-hand grip but still managed an extreme degree of racquet head drop. Kei Nishikori is probably the best example. At his best he had an incredible attacking backhand that married pace and directional control in equal measure. His left hand was high on the handle which provided a greater degree of racquet head maneuverability (there was perhaps a one-inch gap between his hands) and I think this high left hand was part of the reason he could achieve so much drop with his grip set-up.

In contrast to the continental right hand, the Djokovic backhand can get more spin by virtue of the more extreme right-hand grip; it closes the racquet face and promotes a steeper swing path. Guess who also uses this grip and gets a huge amount of racquet drop? Rafael Nadal.

Many other players achieve a great drop in their backhand swing including Sinner, Millman, and Auger Aliassime. However, most do not maintain wrist positions as well as Djokovic, instead they ‘wipe’ their left wrist over the ball like a left-handed topspin forehand (for a right-handed player). This isn’t wrong. It helps them get more spin, but it comes at the expense of timing and directional control. The differences are minute, but it’s another example of why Djokovic’s backhand is such a rock; he’s stealing the best characteristics of both backhand styles and blending them together. He’s picking up enough topspin with his grip and in the initial drop into the slot, and then maximizing timing and control through his fixed-wrist extension.¹

Physics Matters

The final ingredient of Djokovic’s incredible control is one that is not often discussed, but one that I believe plays a role, however minor: his racquet. In Death of a Forehand Part I I highlighted the NextGen trend toward lighter frames compared to their pre-1990-born competitors. Here are the reported weights, balances, and swingweights of some current (and former) players:

The static and swingweight numbers for young players is trending lighter. Is this hurting their performance?

While I 100% agree that the “racquet doesn’t make the player”, when you get a professional group of athletes looking for one-percenters to gain an advantage, the racquet might start to matter. The Tennis Warehouse learning centre has done experiments on racquet properties and their effects on control and power. Here is one of the concluding paragraphs from the study in the link (emphasis added):

This experiment has shown that both control and power are increased by adding mass to the racquet in order to increase the hittingweight at the impact point. A higher hittingweight can be obtained by either selecting a racquet that has a high swingweight and twistweight or by customizing an existing racquet by adding lead or tungsten tape to the frame. A racquet with a high hittingweight at the impact point will twist, rotate, and translate less than a racquet with a lower hittingweight. That means a truer, faster bounce — in otherwords, more power and control.

As I have stated before, great performance has a signal that has its origins in athleticism, technique, and perhaps even equipment.² The Djokovic backhand will go down in history as the greatest backhand of all time, and after close inspection, it shouldn’t be all that surprising. He has maximized the ‘7/10’ in every possible way.

I’ll leave you with some of the fastest backhands on record. Most of these come from the best technical backhands of all time, and most have very high swingweights. Enjoy.

1. Even in their (Djokovic and Nadal) equipment you can see where they have gravitated toward control v spin. Djokovic uses a bigger grip and lead tape at 3/9 to help with torsional stability. Djokovic uses a tight string pattern, natural gut strings, a higher tension, and a low flex rating; he is sacrificing spin for control and feel. In contrast, Nadal uses a small grip, lead at 12 for a polarised or ‘hammer’ like setup, a more open string pattern, and a bigger head size.

2. This isn’t to say that mentality is not important! It absolutely is.