Three of the eight men still standing at the National Bank Open are American, and the one leading them into the quarterfinals is the one with the least to lose by being there. Ben Shelton, Learner Tien and Brandon Nakashima all reached the last eight in Montreal over the weekend, in a draw that stopped resembling a Masters 1000 field somewhere around the second round.
Alexander Zverev, the top seed, lost his opening match to Tallon Griekspoor. Taylor Fritz went out early, days after winning the title in Washington. Jannik Sinner, Carlos Alcaraz and Novak Djokovic never entered at all. What remains is a quarterfinal lineup in which Shelton, at 23 and seeded fifth, is the highest-ranked man left, and in which not one of the eight players was born before 2000, the first time that has happened at a Masters 1000.
Shelton is the defending champion, and he has been the steadiest of the three. He beat Joao Fonseca 6-3, 7-6(3) on Sunday night to stretch his winning run in Canada to nine matches and reach his first Masters 1000 quarterfinal of the season, the seventh of his career. He is a three-time titlist in 2026 already and the only man left in the draw besides Jakub Mensik who has won at this level. Mensik is his opponent, having come through Botic van de Zandschulp 6-4, 7-5.
Tien’s win was the neatest. He beat Thiago Agustin Tirante 6-4, 6-4 to become the youngest American man to reach the quarterfinals in Canada since Andy Roddick, then 19, did it in 2002. Tien is 20, seeded 12th, and has now backed up a fourth-round run here a year ago with a step past it. He plays Daniel Merida of Spain, who arrived in Montreal without a tour-level win on a hard court and has since beaten four men, the last of them Griekspoor, 6-3, 6-1 in 69 minutes.
Nakashima’s was the hardest earned. He had reached the fourth round at Masters 1000 level five times and lost every one of them. On Saturday he beat Arthur Rinderknech 7-6(4), 5-7, 7-5 in a match suspended by weather with the deciding set level at 4-4, came back out after the delay and closed it. It is the first quarterfinal of his career at this level, at 25, which makes him the oldest man left in a field that has spent the week being described as young. He meets Luciano Darderi, who is into his tour-leading tenth quarterfinal of the season.
The ranking arithmetic is what makes this more than a good week. Because the tournament sits a week later on the calendar than it did in 2025, the points from last year’s edition in Toronto came off the rankings before a ball was struck. Shelton won that tournament, and the expiry is the reason Fritz overtook him as the top-ranked American five days ago. Everything Shelton wins in Montreal is therefore added rather than defended, and the same is true of Tien and Nakashima, neither of whom went beyond the fourth round in Canada last year.
That matters because of what comes immediately after. The Cincinnati Open main draw begins Thursday, the day the Montreal final is played, and it is the last tournament capable of moving anyone before US Open seeding is set from the rankings of Aug. 24. Twenty-four American men and women are entered in Ohio. The seeding line in New York decides whether a player meets a top-10 opponent in the third round or the fourth, and for the group immediately behind Fritz and Shelton it is the difference between a draw that can be survived and one that cannot.
Whether any of the three converts is a separate question, and the draw that opened for them opened for everyone else too. Rafael Jodar, Arthur Fils, Darderi and Merida are all playing the best tennis of their careers in the same week. But the quarterfinals begin Monday night and finish Tuesday, and three of the eight men in them are American, which is not a sentence that has needed writing about a Masters 1000 for a while.
