Game Point is Busted Racquet’s roundup of facts, figures and links from around the web.

Love — Showing little effect from his 0-2 Davis Cup performance, Roger Federer won the ABN Amro event in Rotterdam, defeating Juan Martin Del Potro, 6-1, 6-4 in Sunday’s final. The world No. 3 rallied from a set and a break down in Saturday’s semifinal to Nikolay Davydenko. For his efforts, Federer won approximately $450,000, less than half of his reported $1 million appearance fee at the event.

15 — Andy Roddick dropped to No. 27 in the ATP rankings, his lowest position since Aug. 19, 2001. The 29-year-old American’s 10-spot drop was due to dropping the 500 ranking points he earned with last year’s win in Memphis.

30 — Bar Refaeli, who posed with Rafael Nadal in this year’s Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue, recently played tennis in her underwear. I could pretty much write anything in this sentence since I’m sure nobody made it past the last one.

40 — SI.com’s Jon Wertheim talks tennis with former NFL coach Brian Billick. Not a typo, definitely worth the listen.

Game — Serena Williams tweet of the day:

“Do you have to grunt?” is the new “do you deserve to be No. 1?”

The ascension of Victoria Azarenka to the top of the WTA rankings brings about a number of changes to women’s tennis. One of them is that press conferences involving the world No. 1 will now contain at least one thinks-it’s-more-clever-than-it-is question about grunting instead of a how-do-you-phrase-this-without-sounding-like-a-condescending-jerk question about deserving to be No. 1 without winning a Grand Slam.

To her credit, Azarenka is still trying to creatively defend herself on the grunting issue rather than speaking in platitudes. Consider this exchange from Doha.

Q. [...] [Is grunting] something you could go on the court and adjust like that, or is this something that will be with us for your entire career?

VICTORIA AZARENKA: Well, it will be with me for my entire career.  But let me put it that way: Do you snore?

Q.  I do, actually.

VICTORIA AZARENKA:  Can you control that?

Q. Well, there are ways, I guess.

VICTORIA AZARENKA: There are ways?  But you still snore, right?

Q. Yeah.

VICTORIA AZARENKA:  So it’s natural to you, right?  So that’s natural to me, too, the way I play tennis.  That’s it.

Q. I mean, when people bring this up or people say…

VICTORIA AZARENKA: Sorry, but it probably distracts your wife, if you have a wife, I don’t know, right?

Q. There you go.

VICTORIA AZARENKA: There you go.

The fact that Azarenka’s analogy is ridiculous is besides the point. (I drool in my sleep. That doesn’t make it socially acceptable to do at the dinner table.) What’s important is that she took down that reporter like a Grand Slam qualifier. It was the interview equivalent of a double bagel.

He lobbed up a question with uncertainty and had it smashed back in his face. How do you not fib when asked if you’re a snorer? Even if you saw logs like Paul Bunyan, that’s a must-lie situation.

“I think confidence is very overrated,” said world No. 1 Victoria Azarenka after defeating Sam Stosur 6-1, 6-2 in the Doha finals for her 17th-straight win to open the 2012 season.

That sounds exactly like something the most confident player on the WTA might say. Azarenka won her opening tournament of the season, took home her first Grand Slam, ascended to No. 1 and then consolidated the ranking with the win in Doha. Her rise comes exactly one year after she says her game “was a little bit of a mess.” Now she’s playing through injuries, hitting her groundstrokes with power and precision and putting away top-ten opponents in the first set.

Though it’s too early to make comparisons to Novak Djokovic’s run at the beginning of 2012, the whispers are already there. A win in Dubai this week would turn them into legitimate conversation.

Some facts from Azarenka’s undefeated start:

• She became the first player since 2004 to win her first three tournaments of the year. Justine Henin won Sydney, Australia and Dubai that year. One year earlier, Serena Williams won her first three events (spread out over a longer time frame) in Australia, Paris and Miami.

• The longest win streak to open a season in the past 15 seasons belongs to Martina Hingis. In 1997, she won 37 matches in a row. The streak was eventually snapped in the French Open final.

• Steffi Graf holds the record for the longest season-starting streak. The German won 45-straight matches at the beginning of her dominant 1987 campaign.

• Azarenka plays her next match Wednesday in Dubai. With each successive win, she’ll generate more comparisons to Djokovic and his record start to last season. But you could also make the comparison to Djokovic’s 2012. Through Feb. 21, the world No. 1 is still undefeated on the year. He’s 7-0.

Maria Sharapova is is New York this week for the city’s biannual fashion week. The second-ranked Sharapova dazzled at multiple fashion shows, posing for pictures for the paparazzi, hobnobbing with celebrities and, most importantly, gave me a chance to use the word “hobnobbing.”

Sharapova didn’t walk the runway, but was front and center at the Vera Wang show, sitting next to Vogue editor Anna Wintour (above). If Wintour can’t be with her favorite tennis player, Roger Federer, the glamourous Sharapova is the next best thing. (As a bonus, they have the same taste in jackets.)

A gallery of photos featuring Maria at fashion week:

For an event that prides itself on exclusivity, there sure are a lot of fashion weeks. New York, London, Milan and Paris have two per year, one in the spring (for the fall collections) and one in the fall (for the spring collections). That means it’s fashion week somewhere in eight of the 52 weeks of the year. That’s two months and more than 15 percent of all weeks! Imagine if Shark Week tried the same tact.

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Game Point is Busted Racquet’s roundup of facts, figures and links from across the web.

Love — Caroline Wozniacki lost her first match since falling from No. 1, blowing three match points in a 4-6, 6-4, 7-6 loss to Lucie Safrova at the Qatar Open.

Chris Skelton tweeted a fascinating stat after the loss: In between the 2010 and 2011 editions of Wimbledon, Wozniacki lost two total matches before the third round of a tournament. In the seven months since Wimbledon 2011, she has already lost six such matches. The knock on Caro was always that she didn’t have the game for the full-field events. No one ever doubted her ability to win the lesser ones. Right now, she’d love to contend in a second-tier event.

15 — Here’s another stat: Wozniacki has a 20-10 (67 percent) record since she started dating Rory McIlroy. In the 11 months before she met him, her record was 74-12 (86 percent).

30 — Andy Roddick was victorious in his return to the tennis court. Playing for the first time since pulling out of the Australian Open with a hamstring injury, the 29-year-old American held off 19-year-old Denis Kudla in three sets at the San Jose Open. The final score was 6-7, 7-6, 6-4.

40 — It took one match for Roger Federer to advance to the quarterfinals in Rotterdam. The world No. 3 defeated Nicolas Mahut 6-4, 6-4 in the first round of the Dutch event and then moved into the quarters after Mikhail Youzhny withdrew from the tournament with a foot injury. Federer will face Jarko Nieminen in the quarters and could see either Tomas Berdych or Juan Martin Del Potro in Sunday’s final.

Game — The US Open Series has a new title sponsor. Emirates Airlines signed a seven-year deal with the USTA to sponsor the run of summer events in North America. The Wall Street Journal reports the deal is for more than $90 million and includes major promotions tied to the US Open.

Ana Ivanovic wished me a happy Valentine’s Day.

Sure, it was on a YouTube video posted by the WTA and available to anyone with an Internet connection, but I felt the spark. It’s undeniable.

If you want a V-Day greeting from Caroline Wozniacki, Victoria Azarenka, Sam Stosur or Agnieszka Radwasnka, you’ll enjoy the video below.

I’m just kidding about Ana. The only valentine in my life is sitting next to me right now. And I swear she didn’t make me write that.

Rafael Nadal will be gracing the pages of Sports Illustrated’s annual swimsuit issue. The magazine, which hits newsstands on Valentine’s Day, includes a spread of Israeli supermodel Bar Refaeli posing with different athletes. Nadal is featured in “Bar & The Boys” along with Olympic champion Michael Phelps and NBA star Chris Paul.

Ten pictures of Rafa and Refaeli are featured on SI’s swimsuit website. The spread was shot in Montreal by famed photographer Walter Iooss Jr.

Judging by the way things have gone for Nadal over the past 13 months, it’s only a matter of time before we learn that Novak Djokovic did a 20-shot pictorial with Kate Upton.

You can never have too many Whitney Houston tributes.

In 1997, the late singer performed her hit “One Moment In Time” at the grand opening of Arthur Ashe Stadium. Her rousing vocal capped off an hour-long ceremony that paid tribute to the American tennis hero and celebrated the opening of the $254 million stadium.

Venus Williams made her US Open debut that year, advancing to the final before losing to Martina Hingis, 6-4, 6-0.

On Saturday night, Serena Williams tweeted a message about Houston’s death that referenced the song she sang at the Ashe opening.

Serena was attending the Clive Davis pre-Grammies party at the Beverly Hills Hilton, the same hotel where Houston died on Saturday night.

Racquet clap to Beyond the Baseline

Switzerland’s Roger Federer and Stanislas Wawrinka both went 0-2 in this weekend’s Davis Cup tie against the United States. According to Federer, only one of them deserves blame. I’ll give you a wild guess about who Federer believes was responsible for the surprising American sweep.

From the Associated Press, detailing Federer’s statements to the French media after he and Wawrinka lost their doubles match to Mardy Fish and Bob Bryan on Saturday:

[Federer] claimed not to be too disappointed while pointing a finger at Wawrinka, who slumped back in his chair looking every inch the junior partner in the relationship.

“I played well enough in doubles, but Stanislas not so much,” Federer said, adding that Wawrinka “didn’t have his best match in singles. It’s a shame, because of that defeat we weren’t able to put the U.S under pressure.”

In the parlance of reality shows, Wawrinka got thrown under the bus.

What Federer fails to mention is that after Wawrinka lost to Fish, he immediately went out and lost to John Isner, which was a much bigger defeat for the Swiss team.

Wawrinka is ranked No. 26. Fish is No. 8. Playing on clay and in front of a partisan crowd, the gap between the two wasn’t as a big, but still; the loss wasn’t exactly a stunner.

Federer’s loss to Isner, on the other hand, was. That’s a point Switzerland has to have. Wawrinka’s would have been nice, Federer’s was crucial. He rarely loses to players outside the top 10, let alone in his home soil in a Davis Cup match.

The two share the blame for Saturday’s doubles loss. Federer and Wawrinka looked out of sync, especially for a team that won a gold medal at the last Summer Olympics. That they were playing a team that was partnering for only the second time in their careers only added to the insult.

It’s an old saying that a team is only as strong as its weakest player. Switzerland’s squad was as weak as its strongest one. Roger Federer wasn’t himself this weekend and it resulted in an early exit from the Davis Cup.

Roger Federer looked like he wanted to be anywhere else in the world. Once he saw how good John Isner looked, he played like it too.

The 16-time Grand Slam champion was playing in a first-round Davis Cup tie for the first time in eight years and was doing so in front of his hometown fans in Firbourg, Switzerland. But a fast, sloppy clay surface left him frustrated before the match and Isner’s powerful serve kept him that way during it, leading to a stunning four-set, 4-6, 6-3, 7-6 (4), 6-2 victory for the American.

It was the first time Federer had lost to an American on clay since 1999 and his first Davis Cup loss in 15 matches.

Isner’s win gave the United States a 2-0 lead in the opening-round tie. Earlier in the day, Mardy Fish outlasted Stanislas Wawrinka in five sets, winning 9-7 in the last. The Americans are playing without an injured Andy Roddick and Bob Bryan, who is back in the states caring for his newborn daughter.

Federer got a break early in the first set and cruised to a 6-4 win. Despite 12 more break chances in the match, the world No. 3 wouldn’t get another. Isner’s serve was predictably solid, but he won the match on his passing shots and at the net. The uneven surface allowed the American to get behind shots and change angles, crossing up Federer countless times during their match.

The final two points of the match captured the overall tenor of play. On two Federer second serves, Isner took a step inside the baseline and unleashed a crosscourt return backhand that Federer barely reached for.

“It’s the biggest win of my life, that’s for sure,” Isner said after the match. “But what it means to me is that our team is up 2-0.”

Saturday’s doubles match is scheduled to pit Federer and Wawrinka against Fish and Ryan Harrison.

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