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US Open Men's Field: Hardcourt Form, Season Match Load, and Surface-Transition History

A weekly rebuild of the men's field along the three axes that actually predict a hardcourt major, kept separate rather than blended into a single rating. Hardcourt form is carried as serve and return splits on hardcourt only — hold percentage, break percentage, and the resulting hold-break gap — over a rolling twelve months, because a player's clay results tell you almost nothing about how the same game translates to a faster, lower bounce. Match load is the fatigue side: matches and minutes played this season, best-of-five matches contested in the last twelve months, and the longest stretch without a seven-day break, which matters at a tournament that requires seven wins over two weeks with best-of-five from the first round. Surface-transition history is the least-covered axis and the most specific to this event: each player's historical performance in the North American hardcourt swing measured against their own baseline in the weeks immediately preceding it, which isolates who adapts quickly off the European clay and grass block and who needs three tournaments to find the timing. Method: match-level results are aggregated from official tour archives and event draws, serve and return splits recomputed from point-level match statistics restricted to hardcourt, minutes summed from official match durations, and the transition metric constructed by differencing each player's swing results against their own trailing baseline rather than against the field.