Hypothetical Question: Would you rather have Sampras's serve and Djokovic's return, or Federer's forehand and Djokovic's backhand (everything else average)
Strange question I know, its just a fun hypothetical I'm thinking about: Would you rather have the best serve and return but average groundstrokes OR the best groundstrokes and an average serve/return.
It's a hard one, I don't know too many players who are top tier on both serve and return, but I think about Rafa, who's a pretty good returner, average server (he improved later in his career but still had a lot of early career success with a weak serve), but insanely strong off both wings. So for that reason I'll go groundstrokes.
There's a lot of variables I'm passing over I know, obviously a good return makes for a good ground game, but I'm just trying to see, what's more important, serve and return, or ground game?