Rafael Nadal vs. Novak Djokovic: Has Tennis Discovered Its Next Great Rivalry?

At the start of the year, nobody argued that Rafael Nadal was the best tennis player in the world.

Nine months later, nobody argues that Novak Djokovic is the best tennis player in the world.

Obviously, things changed and before we know it, things could change again. All Nadal has to do is to beat Djokovic in the men's final of the 2011 U.S. Open. If he does, we can argue about which of them is the best all we want, at least until the 2012 Australian Open, anyway.

Actually beating Djokovic is going to be the hard part, but Nadal is currently making things interesting. After dropping the first two sets of the final, Nadal managed to fight back to take the third set 7-6 after winning a tiebreaker 7-3. He doesn't quite have Djokovic on the ropes, but Nadal certainly isn't going down without a fight.

After what Djokovic has put him through this year, this is not at all surprising. Nadal has yet to beat him, and he didn't look like much of a match for Djokovic when he lost to him in the Wimbledon final. When Nadal dropped the first two sets on Monday, it looked like he still wasn't much of a match for Djokovic.

Given what's going on, it would be easy at this point to stop and assert that Nadal is on Djokovic's level after all, but he needs to actually pull off the comeback before we can say that.

I'll tell you this, though: if we didn't have enough evidence before that Nadal vs. Djokovic is a great rivalry in the making, we certainly do now.

The best part us that the two of them are still relatively young. Djokovic, the current No. 1 player in the world, is just 24. Despite the fact it seems like he's been around forever, Nadal is just 25. Both of them still have several good years left, and I think we can take it for granted at this point that those years are going to be littered with head-to-head confrontations. Each one will be just as hard-fought at the last.

Agassi vs. Sampras. Federer vs. Nadal. Nadal vs. Djokovic. The first two gave us plenty of epic matchups. The third, on the other hand, is just getting started.

You know that argument about which of them is the best player in the world? Yeah, that argument's not going away any time soon.