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Animated!

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It was Hawthorn’s week, with a critical victory in Sydney, while the Crows, Cats, and Eagles did not very much. But also exciting times for Port, who kept alive the real possibility of a late run into the finals at North’s expense.

It was a terrible game for the Swans to drop, as it’ll be hard now to pry Adelaide and Hawthorn out of the top 2. The Swans have really had one of those years: If you run Squiggle Doors on 5% luck, it’s hard to find an Alternate Reality in which they’re not currently Top 2, because at least one of those close losses turns the other way. But in the reality in which we live, they’re 5th.

Brisbane’s defence is now so bad that only half of their flag is showing. Don’t think I’m going to adjust my axis for you, Brisbane. You can go ahead and disappear for all I care.

Last week I decided to see how historically bad Brisbane’s defence was, but I found quite a few modern teams with even worse ones, such as Carlton 2007, so I stopped there. But then during the week I read that Carlton’s 2007 defence was the second-worst of all time! (Even worse than the mythically bad FITZROY 1996.)

So I looked again. Squiggle doesn’t quite agree with that, if you’re allowed to take a team at any point during the year. It has Brisbane a touch ahead of Port at their worst of 2012, and comfortably ahead of teams like GWS 2013/14, Carlton 2007, Fitzroy 1996, and Richmond, Brisbane, and Sydney of the early ’90s. But they’re still pretty bad.

Ladder Predictor!

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I started looking more into that thing where you run a bunch of randomized simulations to predict the ladder, rather than adding up probabilistic tips. Because as much as we all love it when squiggle noobs post about it, it isn’t the most scientific method. Simulations put the Hawks on top quite a lot more often than the Crows (about 43% of the time vs 29% for Adelaide), although they’re also more likely to finish out of the top 2, while the Crows are practically a lock. So that’s interesting.

You get into funny areas with this, like finding Geelong are more likely to finish higher than Sydney, but also that they’ll both probably win the same number of games, and the Swans will have a better percentage. (Because there are more situations where the Cats finish with more wins than Swans, even though they average out the same.) Anyway, I might rethink how to present the ladder predictor in the future.

Flagpole! Not a huge amount of movement, but the Hawks regain second spot.

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