HPN

The AFL season to date has chucked up a number of surprises, but now a pattern is starting to form. Indeed, it looks like a stratification between the top half and bottom half of the league has occurred: The largest quality gap, aside from how far adrift Essendon are at the

This has been a hell of a week for arguments about the structure of the AFL, so we’re going to devote most of this week’s “preview” to casting our eye over some of them. The fixture is fine, shut up about the 17-5 plan We’re on record, having looked at

The ratings story this week is a drop for our two ladder leaders and a jump for most of the chasing pack (Adelaide, Sydney and West Coast). Adelaide and Sydney are tracking towards rare ratings territory at this stage of the season, with Adelaide having a better offensive rating and Sydney a better defensive rating than

This year is the first Sir Doug Nicholls Indigenous Round. It’s not the first Indigenous Round, but the first one named for the very influential (and important) former Carlton player, although that undersells his achievements quite significantly. Nicholls was the first Indigenous Australian to be knighted, he was the first

The pundits are, for the moment, right about North Melbourne. For a side sitting two games clear on top of the ladder, they don’t present as an overwhelmingly strong side, and their weak schedule must be factored in when looking at where they sit. This year we’ve been rating teams after

The Suns’ list of injured players might be better than the players they have available Gold Coast are once again in a severe injury crisis and we think the hot take machine (for example this effort by Mick Malthouse) needs to take a bit of a look at just how

One of the interesting features of the inside-50 and scoring efficiency based ratings system we’ve been running this season is the way ongoing changes in each team’s opponent strength adjusts their rating. This week we’ve had two sides who lost to more highly fancied opponents rise up in their overall

Some teams don’t love the contested ball (but that’s not always a bad thing) At HPN, we have a pretty “glass half full” view of statistics. We think they’re pretty cool, and can often tell you a lot of things you didn’t know, or help to explain things you already

This year we’ve been trialling a fairly simple method of rating team strength based on statistics derived from inside 50s, which correlate strongly with winning teams. The premier usually sits near the top of the pile in these measures, as we’ll see later in this post. The ratings are three simple statistical