Sunday, July 8, 2018

AFL Power Rankings: Round 16 2018

Richmond may well be further ahead of the second best side than any team this decade. However, that is not because they are the best side of the 2010s – it is because so far they lack any strong rival. 


Last week, Jake Niall of The Age wrote that Richmond is currently further ahead of any other side in the AFL than any team has been this decade. That includes the Hawthorn side that won three premierships in a row from 2013 to 2015, and the powerful Geelong and Collingwood sides of 2010 and 2011. Is he right?
Note that Niall is not saying that Richmond is the best side of this decade. Niall’s claim is just that the gap between Richmond and the second best side is the largest of this decade. And while it’s not completely clear that he is right about that, his claim at least looks to be reasonably defensible.
Richmond is currently 12 ranking points, or two goals, ahead of the second best side (Geelong) on the Power Rankings. Based on the end-of-season Power Rankings, since I started them for 2010, only Geelong in 2011 had a higher point gap over its nearest rival. (See chart below – note that I have re-based historical rankings to match my current method.) It’s also debatable whether Geelong was generally that far ahead of second-placed Collingwood that year; the Cats trailed the Magpies by a fair distance right up until the end of the home-and-away season.

Some other ranking systems, such as the scoring shots system used by Matter of Stats, also have Richmond ‘dancing on their own’. As Niall himself notes, there is certainly time for another team to catch up, but at the moment the gap between the Tigers and everyone else looks pretty high.  
That is not to say though that Richmond is the strongest side of the decade – indeed far from it. As I wrote about earlier this season no team in 2018, including the Tigers, looks to be as dominant as the greatest sides of the 2010s – Collingwood and Geelong in 2010 and 2011, Sydney in 2012, 2014, and 2016, and Hawthorn from 2012 to 2015. They’re not far off some of those sides, but they are probably not catching up to that historically great Cats side from 2011.
However, each of those ‘great’ sides had another side that was really good as well. Collingwood and Geelong had each other in 2010 and 2011. Hawthorn had Sydney in 2012 and 2014, West Coast in 2015, and to a lesser extent Fremantle in 2013 as worthy rivals. In 2016 and 2017 both Sydney and Adelaide were really good, along with the 2016 GWS side and Richmond’s premiership team last season. (The other premiership side of that era – the 2016 Western Bulldogs – were really good when it mattered most.)
In 2018 though, so far the second best side is by far the weakest of this decade. Second-ranked Geelong are a good side, but 2010 is the only other year since the Rankings began that they would even finish in the top three. It’s not even clear the Cats are the second-best side. They are currently seventh on the ladder, and reasonable arguments could be made for every other side in the top eight.
To be rated as ‘very good’ a team obviously needs to often put together very good performances. So far in 2018 only Richmond has done that (see table below). Other teams have had really strong streaks that have seen them considered ‘premiership contenders’, such as West Coast in Rounds 7 to 9, and Melbourne in Rounds 8 to 10. But only Richmond has made wins like their eight goal win against Adelaide on the weekend seem routine, albeit so far only in Victoria.

Of course that does not guarantee that Richmond will win the premiership. As Niall notes perhaps the last side to be this far ahead was Geelong in 2008 – one of the strongest teams ever – and they famously lost the Grand Final to Hawthorn. 
It is rare for a side to have more than a 50 per cent chance of winning the flag up until Grand Final day. Richmond is generally considered to currently have about a 30 to 40 per cent of winning the premiership. In other words, there is still a far greater chance that some team other than Richmond are premiers. There may not be another really good team in 2018, but there are still a bunch of good ones.

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