First Serve: Canadians on the pro tennis tours this week

He's still in the race to make the final eight doubles teams at the ATP World Tour Finals in London in two weeks. But while that's a longshot at best, 43-year-old Canadian doubles legend Daniel Nestor has a more likely goal in the next couple of days: winning the 1,000th doubles match of his illustrious career.

Nestor and current partner Édouard Roger-Vasselin of France dispatched the Spanish team of Guillermo Garcia-Lopez and David Marrero 6-4, 6-2 Monday at the BNP Paribas Masters, a Masters 1000 event and the final tournament of the regular season on the ATP Tour. They will face No. 3 seeds Jean-Julier Rojer of the Netherlands and Horia Tecau of Romania in the second round, as Nestor sits on 999 career victories.

To make the final eight, Nestor and Roger-Vasselin (who have just seven tournaments on their mutual resumé this season - several of the top teams have more than 20) would have to win in Paris, and hope none of the teams in front of them gunning for that eighth and final spot go ver far. Not likely, but you never know.

Here are the scenarios under which Nestor, as well as Davis Cup partner Vasek Pospisil (who is teamed up with American Jack Sock), could make it to London. Pospisil and Sock would also have to win the title, but they have a little more leeway in terms of what the rival teams do.

Pospisil got a bad break in singles for the Paris event, after reaching the semi-finals in Valencia last weekend (he lost to Joao Sousa of Portugal, who ended up winning the title).

His effort in Spain meant he couldn't get to Paris in time for the qualifying at the high-level event, where you bad to be in the top 40 to even think about making the 48-player main draw. There is a contingency for this sort of thing on the ATP Tour called a "special exemption", but that wasn't available to Pospisil in this case because the Valencia event was downgraded this year to a 250-level tournament, from its previous 500.

He ended up being next in line to get into Paris, needing a withdrawal that didn't happen before the draw was made. Unfortunately, Germany's Philipp Kohlshcreiber withdrew the next day; had he done it before the draw, Pospisil would have been in. Because of the late timing, the spot went to Teymuraz Gabashvili of Russia, who lost in the final round of the qualifying and ended up a lucky loser.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, Gloucester, Ont.'s Gabriela Dabrowski and Polish partner Alicja Rosolska are playing in an event called the "WTA Elite Trophy", a second-tier "tour championship" where players who didn't make the final eight at the WTA Finals in Singapore last week will play.

There are huge bucks involved - a prize-money pool of $2 million, with 12 players in the singles. As it happens, there are some noteworthy names this year who just missed out on Singapore: Venus Williams, Madison Keys, Caroline Wozniacki, Carla Suárez Navarro.

The doubles (which only takes $150,000 of the total purse) is a six-team event, with two of the teams wild-card entries from China. It's not mandatory, and unlike the singles event, there are no ranking points for the doubles. The four teams who ended up there stand No. 15, 16, 19 and 21 in the team rankings (Dabrowski and Rosolska are No. 16).

Dabrowski's singles ranking plummeted from No. 219 down to No. 300 Monday, essentially the result of her skipping the $50,000 Challenger in Toronto last week to head to China for some guaranteed money. Dabrowski won Toronto a year ago; those points rolled off the computer. She likely will drop another 20 spots as a result of points earned in singles a year ago this week at a tournament in the U.S.

Dabrowski is only 23; she was as promising as anyone in her junior days, one of only a couple of girls to win both Les Petits As (a big junior event in France considered the world championship for the 14-and-unders) and the Orange Bowl, the most prestigious junior event outside the junior Slams, a few years later. It hasn't panned out in the pros, for various reasons.

But with her singles ranking in its current state, she likely will be forced to make a decision between trying to salvage her singles ranking at much smaller events, or give up and become strictly a doubles specialist. Since she's not one of the players who gets much financial support from Tennis Canada, the necessity to earn a living will probably make that decision moot; Dabrowski's doubles ranking allows her to play in most WTA Tour-level tournaments; she will be at close to $200,000 in prize money from doubles in 2015 once Zhuhai is done.

Even at No. 300, though, Dabrowski is the second-highest ranked female singles player in Canada, with Eugenie Bouchard currently ranked No. 48.

(Bookmark this link to follow the Canadian results through the week).