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It may be a bold opening statement, but we will use it anyway: this early AFL season is the most compelling one that HPN can remember in our footy watching days. No side is invincible, no side utterly hopeless (Brisbane aren’t utterly hopeless). The early season favourites in Adelaide were

When Port Adelaide announced last year that it had struck a three year “partnership” with Chinese business, the dominant reaction was probably confusion or derision. With a game now having been played for premiership points in Shanghai, now is a good time to try to get to grips with what exactly is

This week’s post features a contribution from the excellent Figuring Footy, aka Rob Younger. If you don’t already follow him/read his work, get around it ASAP! After a weekend of big upsets, HPN thought we’d take a step back and reassess the league as it sits after seven weeks. With Adelaide

There’s an evenness becoming evident this year, with a lot of ordinary sides, some of whom will make finals. Even the bottom teams don’t look as bad as the worst teams from many previous years. At this stage, there’s nobody who stands out as being abjectly terrible.

Currently the 2017 season of the AFL looks like a small number of really good teams and then an unusually long tail of ordinary but not terrible teams. Only six clubs currently sit above the competition average on our combined rating covering midfield, offensive and defensive strength. By contrast, the bottom

Almost every credible (and non-credible) football journalist in the country has waxed lyrical about the decline of the Mighty Hawks, and the Considerably Less Mighty Roos. Both sides were finalists in 2016, but have gotten off to tough starts in 2017, a combined 0-8 through a month of footy. Each rating

It’s hard to argue that rich young men deserve more money. The sympathies of the average person often go to the minimum wage battlers before it goes to footballers on a comparative motza. And that’s fair – no-one at HPN will argue for a second that you shouldn’t read up

Three weeks of the AFL season are past us and…honestly, we don’t know who is good or bad yet. Are the Suns set for another long year, or is there light in the tunnel? Is Ross Lyon about to be sacked, or is he a genius for the Dockers upset

This is a collaboration post between HPN and Matt Cowgill of The Arc/ESPN. Matt is an expert in finding beautiful ways to display footy data, in order to tell compelling stories. And we are HPN. Matt has kindly provided the graphs, and some of the general comments for this piece

The introduction of future draft pick trades in 2015 has given us, the footballing public/nerds, the wonderful spectacle of clubs quite literally taking bets on each other and then “death-riding” them the following year in the hopes of securing a better pick. In 2016, for example, Collingwood’s struggles resulted in the pick they traded for Adam