you can look at it that way. Or you can say that when we had the Big 4 that's the most ATG dense era we've ever had. Those mofos cleared out opportunities for everyone else. As I've said before, there are ATG careers that were still born because of those selfish bastards
Perhaps in terms of total dominance. I was more talking about
quantity of ATGs playing at or near their peak. Or let's illustrate it this way.
Terms such as "peak" and "prime" have no official definitions, but let's use the latter for "within the span of when a player was capable of playing near their best level." Or to put it another way, if every player has a "best result" comparable to their talent level (e.g. greats = Slams, elites = Masters, very good players = ATP 500s, etc), it is the same of time in which a player was able to reach that level. For ATGs, we could say that is the span of years between their first and last big title or Slam final. Meaning, winning a big title or reaching a Slam final is a "great" result - and the span of first and last could give us a rough estimation of when an ATG was, well, "great."
So for the Big Four we have:
Roger: 2002-19
Rafa: 2005-22
Novak: 2007-26
Andy: 2008-16
If we consider the pre-Big Four greats to be Sampras and Agassi, their spans are:
Sampras: 1990-2002
Agassi: 1990-2005
And the post-Big Four greats to be Alcaraz and SInner:
Alcaraz: 2022-present
Sinner: 2023- present
Now obviously these are rough estimates and don't account for oscillations in level. For instance, I don't think Roger became a truly great player until late 2003; in 2002 he won his first Masters, but he was erratic and didn't really come into form as a consistently great player until the end of 2003. Similarly with Sinner: We see a transition in late 2023 as he won his first Masters, reached the Tour Finals final, but then he "locked in" at the 2024 AO. Or someone like Agassi was pretty damn good in 1988, but didn't have his first "big result" until 1990 and really, he was up and down in terms of being an elite player.
My point being, these spans aren't exact equivalencies for prime level, but they do approximate.
Anyhow, the Big Four era didn't really have much by the way of overlapping greats, either from generations before or after. Agassi was there at the beginning and still a great player in 2005, the first true year of Fedal, but gone by the time Novak and Andy became elite players in 2007-08. Similarly on the other end, by the time Alcaraz emerged in 2022, Roger had retired, Andy was far from his prime, and Rafa was about to exit stage left.
If we want to get a bit granular about it, we could say that Stan Wawrinka was the equivalent to a great player from 2014-16, so in those years there was the equivalent of five ATGs playing at the same time at a level at or near prime levels. But even there, Rafa was injured in the latter half of 2014 and struggling in 2015-16; Roger struggled in 2016. The Big Four's peak, as a group, was probably 2011-12. I have often dubbed 2012 as "The Year of the Big Four," because they all won a Slam and all were playing as close to their collective best as we've ever seen.
Anyhow, just kind of rambling. In summary, I do think you can make the argument that the "density of talent" was the highest its ever been during the height of the Big Four era, perhaps especially in the 2011-14 range. But really, there are several periods of high "talent density": the mid-to-late 80s period, I'd say the 78-81 period, too, is up there.
