By Nick Georgandis / Tuesday, December 10, 2013

 

Serena Williams posted a pretty impressive 2013 campaign, with a 78-4 record and two Grand Slams to add to her collection.

Photo credit: Getty

Last week, we explored Rafael Nadal's 2013 season in terms of how it stacked up to the greatest seasons in Open Era history using a formula that weighted players' success in Grand Slams, Masters, overall record and record against Top 10 opponents.

This week, we apply the same formula to Serena Williams' 2013 campaign that saw her go 78-4 with two Grand Slam wins and six victories in seven Premier events.

Although the WTA uses Premier events instead of Masters, the formula and the theory are the same, just by a different name with the GPTO acronym.

WTA records before 1980 are pretty hazy on opponents' rankings week to week, but using the GPTO formula, we can measure that Williams' 2013 season was tied for the ninth-best campaign of the last 30 years, receiving a rating of 0.8063 (of a possible 1.000), tying her with Monica Seles' 1991 season.

According to the formula, it's not even Serena's best season, that honor going to her 2002 campaign in which she won all three of the Grand Slams she entered and went 56-5 overall. That year earned a rating of 0.8517, sixth-highest of the last 30 years.

In what should come as a surprise to no one, the top five seasons of the last 30 years belong to Steffi Graf and Martina Navratilova. Graf's incomparable 1988 season, in which she won all four Grand Slams and the Olympic gold medal, rates not only as the best season in WTA history, but the best in Open Era history for both men and women, with a rating of 0.9559.

Navratilova holds the second and third spots in the rating system, with her 1983 campaign garnering a 0.9346 and her 1984 a 0.9218.

We see a lot of the same names repeated in this top 10 list, which just shows that these women proved to be the best and most dominant over an extended period of time.

1. Graf - 1988                    0.9559
2. Navratilova - 1983          0.9346
3. Navratilova - 1984          0.9218
4. Graf - 1989                    0.9068
5. Graf - 1995                    0.9065
6. S. Williams - 2002          0.8517
7. Graf - 1996                    0.8455
8. Seles – 1991                  0.8063
9. S. Williams - 2013          0.8063
10. Navratilova – 1982       0.8018