Source: wiki articles:

• Grand slam winners
• Big three: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Big_Three_(tennis)

Tools: datawrapper, photopea

Edit: link to wiki articles added Edit2: formatting

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Federer with the steepest curve

The stall out of Federer’s line makes sense. Looks like the others are just getting started.

seems like a good tobogán

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Personally I don't like that the 2 charts use the same greenish and blueish colours for both charts. I get that it would look less cohesive with 7 colours though.

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When three of them have won cumulative 64 grand slam tournaments in 20 years but none of them have The Grand Slam.

Fun fact - last man that achieved The Grand Slam in single's game was in 1969.

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The double use of the same colours is confusing. Also, the legend for the lines is too small and out of the way.

Suggestion: Keep the three colours for the players, enlarge the legend and bring it closer to the lines, then change the bottom win distributions to monochrome shades by tournament, based on the colour associated with each player.

Nice idea, thanks for the feedback. Will do something like that next time.

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It would seem the US Open is the hardest venue to dominate consistently

Should have a line for non big 3 winners over this time period

You need to use different colors for the top and bottom section. Took me a full 60 seconds to understand anything.

Nice chart, but my god the color scheme is atrocious.

If any one of the Big Three wasn't around, how many grand slams would the other two have? How many grand slams would Andy Murray have?

The Big Three have all been in 30-33 grand slam finals and won 20-22; it's amazing how similar that is. Agassi was in 15 grand slams, won 8. Sampras was in 18 but won 14, which is crazy. Lendl was in 19 finals and only won 8, wow. Andy Murray has been in 11 finals (!!) but only won 3 because...yeah.

I had forgotten how many finals Murray's been in.

All three of them have extended periods of no titles - Djokovic has -two-!

I would imagine that players need that time to recuperate, it must be damn near impossible to stay at such a high level consistently for many years at a time.

Nobody in tennis calls it “the grand slam”, they would say “calendar year grand slam” to refer to winning all four in a year, just an fyi!

Yeah! Nobody has defended a title there since Federer in 2008. That’s cuz it’s at the end of the season and the best players (Novak, roger and Rafa) are consistently playing later into tournaments thus they come in a little more fatigued/beat up/injured than the competition who loses a few rounds earlier.

And then it levels off -fast- as Djokovic and Nadal hit the scene.

It would be small. Murray and Wawrinka are the only multi slam winners who aren’t in the big 3…and they both only have 3 slams apiece lol.

Other single slam winners include alcaraz, thiem, cilic, and medvedev. So there would be a few people stuck at one too. Just seems irrelevant compared to big 3

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All of this is to say, poor Andy Roddick…

Have all of them share one line. A running total of non-big 3 winners

This had me intrigued, here is how steep each one is starting each from the first year a title was won. (not winning any awards for my graph, took a minute) https://imgur.com/a/7W0PTgW

It's crazy that all 3 of these guys played at the same time. Had they not had to play each other, they would likely have had many more. They're not even generational talents. They are all-time greats, and they had to play each other.

Remove stats of Australian Open, French Open and Wimbledon from Djokovic, Nadal and Federer and you get 12, 8, 12 grand slams each. Kinda shows that Federer and Djokovic are well adapted on surfaces that aren’t their forte.

Agree, didn't see the key in the upper left, and thought the line graph corresponded to tournaments for a second.

Imagine if he was in any other generation of players, that slope probably wouldn't have leveled off so quickly

Seems like federer did all his damage while djokovic was still up and coming

Right sentiment, wrong Andy.

<g>

Quite possible.

Or maybe he just gets bored and retires?

Always interesting to wonder to what extent the Big Three pushed each other to improve.

Bjorn Borg had the record for most grand slams in the Open era, at 11. His last Grand Slam was 1981. That record stood for 18 years, until Sampras won his 12th in 1999.

19 years after that, *three* players had passed Sampras.

Kinda feels like that record may stand for a while. The only current players with more than one Slam win: Murray and Wawrinka, and they are zero threat to win another Slam.

One of my favorite stats - after winning his first Slam at Wimbledon in 2003, Federer won 12 of the next 17 slams. He won 13 slams his first five years. Heck the seven slams he won over the last 13 years would be a good career in and of itself!

To take Djokovic as an example, he has 22 slams and 17 losses to other big 3 players at slams. So I'm guessing maybe 35 slam wins for him if the others didn't exist, and he's nowhere near finished either. Could've been 40.

Murray has 20 losses to the big 3 at slams, almost all of which were in the semis or final, and 3 titles. He also destroyed his body trying to compete with the big 3 and would likely have had a longer career as a top player without them. He would've had a real shot at Sampras' record and being the GOAT if they all didn't exist.

No, I meant Andy Roddick.

3 Wimbledon finals losses to Federer, plus one Wimbledon SF loss to Federer.

1 US Open final loss to Federer.

3 Aus Open SF loss to Federer.

It's Andy Murray, and it's not close.

5 grand slam finals lost to Djokovic

3 grand slam finals lost to Federer

8 semi-final losses to Nadal, Djokovic or Federer.

Hard agree on this. He was this close to being an all-time great, except he happened to live in an era of not one, not two, but three all-time greats. If any one of the Big Three aren't around, I think Murray has double-digit grand slams. He lost in 10 semi-final matches, 8 of which were to one of the Big Three (the other two: Wawrinka and Roddick. No freebies anywhere).

Murray winning Wimbledon was one of my favorite tennis moments of my life, and I'm not even British.

Agassi won 8 grand slams. He probably should have had at least 12 if he had taken tennis & fitness more seriously earlier in his career. How many AOs did he leave on the table by not even playing?

I’m not comparing them.

AR won one slam.

Damn, I didn't even know Federer had such a big flat spot. Those must have been some difficult years!

Note that “grand slams” are four consecutive wins in majors (traditionally, all in the same year, not split across years). The tournaments themselves are not “slams”, but “majors”.

This is what my comment intended

Ok thanks. Didn't know how it was called in english (in my native language this achievement and the tournaments are somehow differentiate) but I see you figured out what I mean.

Could be that there is a different wording in different countries. But if you check the link I used as a source https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Grand_Slam_men%27s_singles_champions , you can see that is called Grand Slam Champions.

Eh, I guess you’re right. Though I think it’s a bit of a weird metonym. But it’s the same in horse racing, with the Triple Crown referring to the races as well as a winner in all three in the same year, so yeah.