The First Slam DRAFT with Alex Gruskin | Monday Match Analysis

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Gill Gross (1:53)

Welcome, everyone, to this special edition of Monday Match Analysis brought to you by Fitnexa. I'm Gill Gross. Today's episode is a draft with Alex Gruskin of Cracked Racquets.

What slash who are we drafting, you ask? First time major champions. The goal is to predict which players will be next to win their first major.

If you've won a major before, obviously you are off the board, you are unavailable to be drafted. The only requirement, and we're gonna include men and women in this exercise because we both agree that it would be more fun that way. But the only requirement is that said player has not won a major and we think they might win one very soon. All right, Gruskin, what are we calling this thing? The first slam draft?

Alex Gruskin (2:43)

That's not horrible. It's definitely a draft. I agree. The nomenclature beyond that is drafting first time champions. That's what I was thinking because that is the objective ultimately. And I think people know we're talking majors and not 250 So if we leave that out for the sake of brevity, okay. But no, it's always fun to get to do a draft. And yeah, it was ruminating things we could draft together. This felt like the perfect topic given where we are on the calendar.

Gill Gross (3:11)

Our last draft was two years ago. It was the 22 and under non-Sinner Alcaraz draft. And that was great. We had fun, but we didn't really set a way to really quantify who won the draft.

I think we can look back at it. Maybe we will soon. Maybe we'll do it next year. We'll look back and we can try to argue who won that draft. But this one should be a little bit more straightforward. We can systemize this. So that's another thing I wanted to throw your direction. First to three wins, first to four.

Alex Gruskin (3:48)

Let me ask, that's a great place to start because, and I texted you this beforehand, my question was going to be, is it harder to win one on the men's side or the women's side moving forward? We would have to judge, like we have to put a limit on the time span, right? Because anything can happen in the next 10 years, certainly in the next 15 years. In fact, in the next 15 years, probably a first time slam champion we don't currently know the name of may emerge.

Next five years, the prospect of getting to four, that's a big number. Like you think we got four first time slam champions in the next five years?

Gill Gross (4:26)

We definitely do.

Alex Gruskin (4:27)

Oh. Okay, explain.

Gill Gross (4:30)

But I actually, I appreciate your skepticism here because it is an important thing to note. A lot of people that we are going to draft will not win a slam ever because, I mean, we're going to go, I think, seven rounds deep.

And there's no way we have seven, we don't have 14 major champions in front of us.

Alex Gruskin (4:50)

Seven, it's, you know, again, it's, we were looking at it from two different points of view, right? Because it is different stories on the men's and women's side. And I think the men's side is more intuitively straightforward. The gap between Sinner, Alcaraz, and the rest of the field that will be competing for the next five plus years, it's immense. And accordingly, the idea of multiple players bridging that gap successfully for two weeks at a major, just feels unlikely, given the track the rest of the field has been on, not just this season, but the last two years. And by the way, like the next five years are ages 25 to 29, 25 to 30 for Yannick Sinner. For Alcaraz, it's ages 23 to 28, 29 years old. Like we're talking about men who will be at the peaks of their powers. And if they're not there yet, what does the gap look like between them and the rest of the field in five years? And that prospect is particularly daunting for the men's side. The women's is a different story, but I imagine you feel similarly about the men.