Axis of Bob

It's about the focus on contested football vs uncontested football. Collingwood is a less contested team through the midfield than we are, so it obviously leads to better kicking efficiency. Of those midfielders that were included in ANG13's stats, Melbourne's players averages 16% more contested disposals per game (10.0 vs 8.6) and their contested/uncontested possession % was +5 (ie, 44% of disposals were contested vs Collingwood's 39%). The top 3 contested players (by total and ratio) were Melbourne players (Oliver, Petracca and Viney). The efficiency stat doesn't tell you how good a kick a player is because the bar for an 'effective' kick is incredibly low in certain circumstances and is therefore almost entirely reliant on the situation in which you are being asked to kick. Contested midfielders and forwards are under the most pressure with the ball so they have the lowest efficiency. That's the story. Using kicking efficiency as the measure of kicking ability is wrong. Either that or someone's going to have to convince me why Dougal Howard is the 4th best kick in the league.

This is the problem with statistics - they mean nothing if you don't know what you're measuring and why/if it's important. The kicking efficiency stat is practically worthless, IMHO, because of what is measures and how it assumes all situations where you kick the ball are the same. Kicking efficiency is just whether or not a kick finds a team mate or if the kick goes to a contest 40+ metres away. So James Harmes' diagonal kick from the stoppage to Fritsch inside 50 midway through the 3rd quarter of the 2021 GF is judged as being exactly the same as a 40m backwards to a contest between Spargo and Tom Lynch 10m from your own defensive goal. Both kicks = effective. Also a centering kick over your shoulder to the top of the square is only effective if you kicked the ball over 40m, even if you intended it and it is 100% the right kick to do - and a chip backwards to an open player 15m away in defence is effective. If you look at the top 10 players in disposal efficiency (minimum 10 games) all of them are defenders. Same with the top 20, and 30, and 40 and 50 ...... THE TOP 50 PLAYERS IN DISPOSAL EFFICIENCY IN 2023 ARE ALL DEFENDERS!!!! What are the chances of the top 50 kicks in the league playing in the backline? It goes further .... of the top 100 in disposal efficiency, 95 of them are defenders. The exceptions were Jackson Macrae, Jaspa Fletcher, Matt Johnson, Sam Petrevski-Seton and Eddie Ford. If you look at that, disposal efficiency is far more a function of where you play and the situation you play in than it is of your ability to kick the football. This is the only real information that you can take from the Collingwood vs Melbourne kicking efficiency statistic: that the two teams play differently and put their midfielders into different situations than each other. I'd recommend this excellent article about kicking statistics if you want more information on what good kicking is and how bad kicking/disposal efficiency is as a statistic: How defining what makes a good kick in the AFL is always up for debate - ABC News

Like Peter Ladhams, Lewis Taylor, Daniel Menzel, Jackson Thurlow and Michael Talia?

But it's a very noisy statistic. When you have a small sample size (ie, 26 shots in the SF) then you end up with weird results (ie, goal accuracy of 34.6%) which looks bad but that's because of the small sample size. There's a lot of luck and randomness that happens within a single game and especially with a single skill like goal kicking. On March 29, 1992, Tony Lockett kicked 3 goals 7 behinds against Footscray - even though he was a career 70% accuracy goalkicker because small sample sizes create weird results. When we look at the full year with all teams, we get a much better representation (ie, 8,888 shots across the full season from all teams). The average accuracy for all teams in 2023 was 58.8%. The difference between the best and worst was only 7 percentage points (63.1% first and 56.1% last). Interestingly, Melbourne was above the AFL average in terms of accuracy for the year (7th, with 59.1%) and Carlton were below average (12th, with 57.6%). These things play out over the long term but finals are played one time with a small sample size, so you can get some weird results. In this case, a generally less accurate Carlton who had 18 shots at goal managed to beat a generally more accurate Melbourne who had 26. But it's the randomness of these things which makes games interesting.

Oliver ranked first at Melbourne with 2.67 centre clearance per game. Viney second with 2.54 per game, and Petracca third with 2.00. No other midfielder came close to them. This puts Oliver 13th in the league (min 10 games). In terms of non-CB stoppage clearances, Oliver had 4.2 per game, Petracca 3.96, Brayshaw 2.50 and Viney 2.42. Oliver is 7th in the AFL for total clearances per game, just ahead of Patrick Cripps. Petracca is 16th and Viney is 29th. I don't think our weakness is in quality stoppage players.

You'd really hate the players that this drafting rule would make us pick! 🤣

I think so. It's easy to throw it the baby with the bathwater in a season like this but I don't think we need a revolution. It's just going to be about finding better ways to maximise our scoring when we on top and then finding longer term succession to Gwen and May. Our list is in a good spot without our important players signed up long term and we've got draft assets to help us with future planning. We've got a reasonably long flag window and our best chance to win flags to to be consistently good across that window, rather than going for magic beans in the next year or two.

Mil Hanna! Even as a non-Carlton supporter, I loved watching him play when I was young. Thanks for bringing up those memories, Red.

Humans have a great need to look at the result and then make up a story that explains that. Look at the difference between the Qualifying and Grand Finals. In one, we were inaccurate despite being territorially dominant, with Collingwood taking their chances despite enormous territorial deficiency. Because Collingwood won a close game people try to make the story about Collingwood's superior forward efficiency against our useless fixation on territory. Yesterday the roles are reversed, as Collingwood were dominant in territory but wasteful and Brisbane were efficient with get chances, but because Collingwood win we still search for reasons why Collingwood were still efficient (like looking at rushed behind our shots outside 50 etc - not picking on any posters in particular) because humans need to tell the story. The fact is that luck and randomness have so much influence on the outcome but everyone is very uncomfortable with that because a coherent story is very important to us. If we're making decisions about the future we can get clouded by the results and end up focusing on the wrong things.

Very good win by a very professional team. Our ability forward of the ball is what sets us apart and our trust in team mates to not just hack the ball forward but hold onto it and carry it with handballs. Lots of teams have good midfielders but so much of it is quick dump kicks that are easy to defend. We have dynamic forwards and power runners that allow us to create space forward of the play and use it to score. That’s why we do so well late in games because we expose any drop off in running by carrying the ball forward and forcing them to defend in space. It’s especially effective in AFLW because a long kick isn’t as effective an alternative. It’s the old saying that your reward for running hard early in the game doesn’t come until late in the game.

Who do you have in mind to bring in as our back up ruckman? Dean Cox?

So that they can trade them.

I think you've misunderstood bias. Bias doesn't have to be from a person .... I'm not talking about falsifying data. Bias is that data skews one way or another based upon what you're measuring, who you're measuring and how you're measuring it. All data is biased in some way. I used the example of disposal efficiency above as an example of bias, but it could be for kicks (including/excluding kickouts, or the inside/outside balance of your game etc) or even wins (how easy was you draw, did other teams have more injuries etc.). When people talk about lies, damned lies and statistics, this is what they're talking about. For instance, I could argue that Taj Woewodin is a better player than Steven May because Taj kicked 2 goals this year whilst May kicked zero. But it's obviously a bad argument because the context and methodology of the statistics matters. I don't know how the AFL Kick Rating is biased because there's no decent information on it nor results. But I do know that it's biased because all statistics are. Having 3 of the top 7 (out of 200+) players coming from the same position on the same team is a massive red flag. I'd like to see the total rankings because I think it would tell us some very interesting stories.

How could I know if the stat is bad ... it never gets used! You referenced the only time I've seen it where it was still shown out of context. I am someone who cares about the data and I try to use it whenever I can to tell a story about whatever it is I'm posting about. I try to use good sources and I don't know if this is a good source because there's no context around it with which to judge it. You said that we have 3 of the 10 worst kicks int he AFL. It's up to you to prove that this is the case and I don't know if the stat that you provided does that. There are several stats that could indicate poor disposal or poor decision making. For instance, you could talk about average turnovers as being a stat for this, which has Jack Viney as the 2nd worst in the league and Clayton Oliver as the 4th worst. That make sense to you ..... but the context is that Tim Kelly was the worst and Errol Gulden was 3rd worst, so it doesn't really pass the sniff test as a measure. Or you could use Disposal Efficiency %, which would make sense. However looking at the context for this data shows that all those with the lowest DE% are forwards and all of the highest are defenders (Melksham 3rd worst 50.5% vs Dougal Howard 4th best 88.8%), so that's clearly not a good measure as it's biased against forwards and towards defenders. The stats that you use to measure something are important and each of them tells a different story. The AFL Kick Ratings stat is seldom used or reported upon, and when it is it done so without context, which makes it very difficult to trust as a proper measure. If we had more information about it and more data from it then perhaps it could mean something but it's difficult to trust as it is.

It isn't that, it's kick rating which is a Champion Data stat which I've barely seen anyone use at all. It's theoretically the retention of the ball weighted on the difficulty of the kick. The fact that there are 3 star players from the same part of the field from the same team is pretty suspicious, and probably indicates a bias that makes the stat pretty inaccurate. The fact that I haven't seen a list of the top 5, 10 or whatever on this stat really does make it appear that the stat isn't very good. The only real time I've seen it used this year was an article after round 4, where the worst kick in the league (according to AFL Kick Rating) was Hugh McCluggage.

Underweight key forward who does not have senior level running ability plays every game of the year (the most of any player in the VFL) and struggles in a final where his team is pummeled. Is that the issue? Am I getting that right? I think people significantly undervalue the difference between a professional AFL environment and schoolboy football, and the toll that takes on your body over a long season. This is particularly true for a player that was nowhere near senior running ability when he came to the club and the amount of stress that his body will be going through to adapt to the changes in workload. You could see in previous games that he was running on fumes at the end of a long season, as you can for a few other young players.

Having 5 players who are genuine aerial threats inside 50 whilst not losing speed is such an advantage. Being able to put a score on the board when you’re on top is so important in this competition.

Whilst everyone talks about his body, which is undeveloped at this early stage, he actually has very few problems influencing aerial contests in the VFL despite being underweight. I think the biggest issue for him at this point is just his ability to do AFL/VFL style running at the moment. The possessions he wins are the difficult types, where he outmarks 3 opponents or wins a hard ball on the ground when he's part of a contests. What he doesn't do enough of right now is get to those contests so that he can be a factor. He does the difficult stuff (the stuff he's supposed to do) really well right now despite his lack of weight, so his likelihood of being a good AFL player is actually really good, IMHO. He needs more AFL preseasons to get into AFL shape, which will take time.

I love that Freo has imploded and now we'll some unexpectedly good picks from Jackson leaving, but the talk about Jackson being anything other than a gun is just silly. He's obviously good, he's young, and Freo won't be crying about having 10 years of his services. From Freo's perspective, they just wish that they could have paid way unders for him by performing well, rather than just slight unders like they have by playing badly.

Was a player who ran at reasonably high pace for the whole game, which allowed him to cover a lot of ground at a decent clip (rather than having outright pace). He's lost the pace that he did have, which pushed him over the edge from 'quick enough for AFL' to 'not quick enough for AFL'. Since he's never been a contest winner and has always relied on his running, losing the ability to outrun his opponent has left him without any tricks to win the ball. The biggest indicator is his huge drop in contested possession which has seen a big drop. Having the game go past you happens all the time across the league but I still find it amazing how quickly it can happen sometimes.

He also played in a lower scoring era than Dunstall and Lockett, and also in an era where the goal kicking load was shared more evenly between players (not primarily the full forward). In the years Buddy has been active, the average team score was 87 points, whilst it was 99 (2 goals) more in the time of Dunstall and Lockett. Also, since Buddy has been active, he is the only player to have kicked 100 goal in a season. The only player to have even kicked 90 in that time was Fevola (the same year). Between 1983 and 1999, when Lockett was playing, there were only 4 years where a player didn't kick 100 goals (Beasley 1985 - 93 goal, John Longmire 1990 - 98 goals, Tony Modra 1997 - 81 goals, and Scott Cumming 1999 - 88 goals). Nobody has kicked more than 80 goals since 2009! During Lockett's 17 year career, there were 21 occasions where a player kicked 100 goals. Buddy is underrated as a potential GOAT. The nearest goalkicking rivals of his era have played about he same number of games (J Riewoldt and Hawkins) and still haven't even kicked 800 goals (779 and 772 - Buddy has 1061).

Really good game from our perspective. Got that solidity behind the ball back. Really good signs. Contested possession +29. inside 50s +20. clearances +9. Smashed them all over the ground. I don’t know what most people want from the team. Without looking, I assume it’s just groupthink from the Gameday thread.

It's difficult to trust your analysis and judgement when this is the key point that you've taken from my posts.

👍

OK, barring the evidence that I presented ..... ... I think Jefferson is a far more talented player than Van Rooyen. He's a better mark than JVR, particularly as a pack mark and certainly given with his currently slight frame. He is able to use his body really well with the ball in the air to use his long arms to take marks he has no right to take. He's an agile forward who wins the ball in multiple ways and turns those into scores. Jefferson has a lot of class with the ball and makes really good decisions with it. JVR is a blunt instrument whilst Jefferson has the ability to be a cut above that. I do find the idea of writing off a 195cm, 78kg key forward in his first half season pretty amusing, especially when you then compare him with Jonathan Brown from 25 years ago. Why not compare him to Tony Lockett in 1983, or maybe John Coleman in 1949?