The North American hard-court swing lost two of its biggest names on Friday, when world No. 1 Jannik Sinner and 24-time Grand Slam champion Novak Djokovic both withdrew from the National Bank Open. Tournament organizers confirmed the withdrawals barely a week before main-draw play begins at the ATP Masters 1000 event, which runs Aug. 2-13 in Montreal. Both men had appeared on the original entry list. Sinner was set to be the top seed, Djokovic the No. 7.
Sinner said in a statement that the call was made after he and his team weighed every factor, and that stepping away was “the right decision to prioritize my health.” He described the withdrawal as a difficult one and said he expects to play the tournament again in the future.
Djokovic offered no public explanation. His absence is consistent with the reduced calendar the 39-year-old Serbian has kept all season, skipping smaller events and building his year around the majors. Treat it as workload management rather than a stated injury: nothing beyond the tournament’s confirmation has been put on the record.
Neither man has competed since Wimbledon, where Sinner beat Djokovic in the semifinals and then defeated Alexander Zverev in the final to defend his title and claim a fifth major. Sinner has since gone quiet, and he is expected to stay off the match court until the Cincinnati Open, which opens Aug. 11 and closes with a Sunday final on Aug. 23. That would leave him roughly a month between competitive matches at the point in the season when reps on hard courts matter most.
For Montreal, the sting is that this is not new. Sinner, Djokovic and Carlos Alcaraz — the three biggest draws in men’s tennis — all missed last year’s edition in Toronto. Alcaraz is absent again in 2026, left off the entry list entirely as he continues to recover from the right wrist injury that cost him Roland Garros and Wimbledon. Three of the four marquee names in the sport are gone from a US Open tune-up for the second consecutive year.
Organizers made their frustration plain. Tournament director Valérie Tétreault said the event respects the players’ decisions and accepts that health has to come first on a punishing calendar, but argued that the pattern of late withdrawals from Masters 1000 events has become a problem for the sport as a whole, given that fans buy tickets expecting to see the best in the world.
She said the tournament has already opened discussions with the ATP about it. Organizers had also expected a lighter attrition rate this year: the event begins three weeks after the Wimbledon finals, a full week later in the calendar than in 2025.
The sharper question for an American audience is what the absences mean for the last stretch before New York. Sinner arrives at the US Open as the sport’s dominant force — he is 44-3 this season with six titles — but with almost no recent hard-court match play, and Cincinnati alone as a tune-up. Djokovic, 14-5 on the year, has leaned on the same low-volume approach for several seasons and has generally made it work at the majors, though the margin for a 39-year-old is thinner every summer.
What is left in Montreal is a wide-open draw and a genuine opportunity for the tier just below. Zverev, a former champion in Canada, moves up to the No. 1 seed. Home favorite Félix Auger-Aliassime slides to No. 2, making him the highest-seeded Canadian in the tournament’s history in front of his own crowd. Ben Shelton returns as defending champion after winning the biggest title of his career at last year’s edition in Toronto, and the field also includes Taylor Fritz, Alex de Minaur, Daniil Medvedev and Flavio Cobolli.
That matters beyond a trophy. A Masters 1000 title carries 1,000 ranking points, and with the top two absent, the ceiling on the draw has been lifted for a group of players who will also be jockeying for US Open seeding as the cutoff approaches. For Shelton and Fritz in particular, Montreal is a chance to build hard-court form and ranking cushion in the same fortnight.
Whether the players who capitalize can carry it to Flushing Meadows is the open question. The men who did not turn up are betting they will not need the reps.
