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Given the AFL’s insistence on scheduling Thursday night games, Round 17 has already begun with Hawthorn pipping Sydney in yet another close win (and a fourth last-moments defeat for the Swans). A bit of a narrative has emerged from that game regarding Hawthorn as a “clutch” team and we want

Sorry for the clickbait headline, but through 16 rounds this statement is more fact than mere hot take. According to the HPN ratings system, applied historically back to 1998, this top four is the tightest since at least 2003. Our ratings are expressed as in-season relativities, telling us how far

This week we’re going to take a look at the question of how reliant teams have been on particular goal kickers. The specific spur for this is the talk of Sydney being overly Franklin-centric but the question is worth looking at more broadly – how much heavy lifting do each

As the season keeps on keeping on, and the bye rounds hit the rear view mirror, stability is slowly taking its course (as we mentioned last week). Only one change in the positions this week, with Collingwood leapfrogging Richmond after recording the most uninspiring of wins over Carlton. Richmond likely

This round the only movement in the overall rankings was Collingwood jumping Fremantle. The nature of rating entire seasons is that movement tends to settle down towards the end of the year with weight of information already collected. By round 23, the expected movements should be small as the week will contribute just 4.5% of

Continuity is always key A common football truism is that a stable team does better than a chaotic one. But does this hold true when looking at actual results? HPN has looked at the number of players that missed less than two players across the last three years (2014 to

Geelong are once again on top of our team ratings thanks to a strong performance over the Bulldogs. Also contributing was a pretty poor effort by GWS against a very spirited Essendon. That game may have denied us the sort of hilarious record-breaking scores we were predicting last week, but instead it

This column wouldn’t have been written if not for the hard work of the Outer Sanctum podcast, Josh Pinn, Footy Maths Institute, Andy Maher and Erin Riley. Their work has been invaluable and they get all the credit for bringing this whole episode onto the footy world’s agenda. If you’re