I think it’s nearly impossible to provide a definitive answer to this question BUTin an attempt to settle this highly enjoyable debate, I’ve compiled a list of the 8 most relevant ATP statistics - both absolute and relative numbers (to account for age differences between them) and ranked the players from 1 to 3 for each of these categories.
Based on my methodology, the player with the lowest total final ranking score (after considering all 8 statistical measures) is the winner..
.. and the winner (for now) by the smallest of margins is Rafael Nadal.
Now I appreciate statistics doesn’t always tell the full story but as you can clearly see, even when doing a comparison across 8 of the most material statistical measures, the difference between the three players remains razor thin.
Just to illustrate my point – in the event that Roger Federer wins the 2018 Shanghai Masters, the 3 players will be statistically tied on 16 points each… i.e. over a period of more than a decade and using multiple statistical measures to differentiate between the 3 of them, it remains almost impossible.
Some caveats and comments with regards to the above:
- I’ve excluded Grand Slams from big titles as not to double count
- The above employs a very simplistic ranking measure and doesn’t cater for the possibility of one of the players being significantly better or worse than the others in a particular category.
- There are some obvious anomalies.. for example, Novak holds a winning H2H record against both Nadal and Federer but because Nadal’s H2H record against Federer is significant, Nadal has the strongest H2H record of the 3 players when assessed on an overall level (i.e. his wins vs losses record against Federer and Djokovic).
- The above represent a subset of statistics which I consider to be important but it is by no means exhaustive.
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