Fritz vs Nakashima — the last seed standing
Preview · Mubadala DC Open, Washington (ATP 500) · Semi-finals · 1 August 2026
Washington has been brutal on reputations this week. Frances Tiafoe, Arthur Fils and Learner Tien were all gone by the end of the first round. Jakub Menšík went out in the last sixteen, Lorenzo Musetti lost to Rafael Jodar, Ben Shelton was beaten by Alejandro Tabilo and top seed Alex de Minaur was dismissed in the quarter-finals. That leaves Taylor Fritz, seeded third, as the only seed still in the draw — and standing in his way is the man who took de Minaur out, Brandon Nakashima.
The matchup
Fritz leads the head-to-head and has won the most recent meeting, 6-3, 6-4 in Dallas in February this year. Nakashima’s wins came a long time ago, the most recent in the Cincinnati first round in 2024, so the sample is thin and stretched across very different versions of both players.
Their weeks have looked rather different. Fritz has had three matches and needed a third-set tie-break in the last of them, beating Zizou Bergs 6-3, 6-4, Kamil Majchrzak 6-3, 6-4 and then Alex Michelsen 6-1, 3-6, 7-6 in a quarter-final he came close to losing. Nakashima came through Tomás Martín Etcheverry 6-3, 6-4, survived a scrappy 7-6, 3-6, 6-4 against Menšík and then produced the result of the tournament, beating de Minaur 7-6, 6-4 without dropping a set. That is a significant scalp: de Minaur is one of the hardest men on tour to hit through, and Nakashima did it by holding firm in the tie-break and then breaking clean.
Form & conditions
Fritz arrives as the more decorated player by a distance — ten tour titles, a fixture inside the world’s top ten, and a 2026 that has included the Australian Open fourth round, a Dallas final, finals in Stuttgart and Halle on grass and a Wimbledon quarter-final. What he has never done is win here. His best week in Washington remains the 2023 semi-final, lost to Tallon Griekspoor, with a quarter-final last year.
Nakashima, who sits just outside the top thirty and turns 25 on Monday, has had a quietly strong season of his own: a run to the Brisbane final in January, where he lost to Daniil Medvedev, and a semi-final at Queen’s in June. He has two career titles and a career-high ranking of No. 29, and hard courts remain comfortably his best surface.
The deciding factor
Serve, and what happens when neither man can break. Fritz’s delivery is the bigger weapon and he has the better tie-break pedigree over a career, but Nakashima has already won two tie-breaks this week, one of them against the tour’s most reliable returner. Fritz’s route has been the more physically expensive; Nakashima’s the more emotionally validating. If the American number three seed serves as he did against Majchrzak, the match is his; if he wobbles as he did in the middle set against Michelsen, Nakashima has the return depth to punish it.
The call
Fritz is the better player over five matches out of seven and holds the recent head-to-head, so the lean is Fritz, with medium confidence — though Nakashima is playing well enough that a third set feels close to inevitable.
