There’s not much movement on the HPN Team Ratings this week, with GWS and Geelong continuing their week-to-week tango for 3rd and 4th, and the Dons jumping up into 6th. The rest is steady, and the weekly movements should get more subtle as time moves forward. To fill out a
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Is Patrick Dangerfield having a better 2017 than 2016?
Before we get to the title of the post, and the meat of the content, let’s have a look at how the HPN Team Ratings are looking after sixteen thrilling rounds of football. This year is chaos; and chaos is beautiful. It was a big week for the “S” teams,
Continue reading »This is the most even season since 1998
The weekend after Brisbane rolled a potential finalist and two weeks after lowly Hawthorn shocked Adelaide, focus has naturally sharpened on the evenness of this year’s competition. We’re here to add to the chorus saying yes (this great piece by The Arc has more international context), this is a really even year.
Continue reading »Injury lists, surging teams and staving off failure – nine tales from midseason AFL
Let’s be honest: it’s a tiny bit after the true middle of the season, but we are firmly in the part of the footy year where (in most seasons) most teams have started to sort into their layers amongst the league. This is evidenced in this week’s HPN Team Ratings,
Continue reading »Can Sydney and Essendon’s form upheaval drag them into the finals?
The last bye round saw a fair bit of movement but no change to the overall picture – also presented by the real world ladder – of an even season. This week we’re going to focus on shorter term trend-lines to see which teams are on the move or are
Continue reading »Anatomy of an upset – how do AFL teams overcome the odds to spring a big win?
This season has seen some pretty surprising upsets as well as a general pattern of unpredictable results. As we’ve said before, there’s a wide spread of non-terrible teams – 17th is currently two games outside the top 8, where last year that gap was 6 games. Most teams this year
Continue reading »Can Gold Coast somehow make the finals in 2017?
If you can’t beat the clickbait hoards, join them. Let’s start this out with the most obvious statement of all: Gold Coast is a below-average football team. They are the type of young-ish team who have solid performances on their resume (beating the Cats and Eagles), as well as some
Continue reading »Trade period: AFLW clubs take divergent paths in building for the future
The first AFLW trade and free agency period has come and gone, and seen all eight clubs set on slightly different paths on the way to the upcoming season. Whilst the raw number of trades and free agency moves was smaller than the typical AFLM trade and free agency period,
Continue reading »What do we really know about Port Adelaide?
As the bye rounds get underway, our ratings system based on forward, defensive and midfield strength continues to settle into seeing a top three teams and then a large middle class. Alongside the ladder’s top two of Adelaide and GWS we also see Port Adelaide defying their eighth ladder position
Continue reading »The Race for the Eight is tightening up, and the Dogs are on a surge
Over the last 7 weeks HPN has been tracking the fortunes of teams using our Team Ratings, and some early trends appear to be emerging. But before we get to them, lets look at how the ratings sit after 9 weeks of footy: For the second week in a row,
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