Squiggle: The 2016 Premier Will Be…

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Animated!

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That was a bad game to lose, Adelaide. Very bad.

The shafting Adelaide received this week was really noteworthy in its breadth, depth, and thoroughness, as I’ll get to in more detail later. But first: Sydney! They look all right. Winning by 113 points in a game where you hold the opposition to two goals at three-quarter time is impressive, even if it is with the aid of interstate home advantage, and against a team THAT COULDN’T DISAPPOINT ME MORE IF IT WERE MY OWN SON. Go to your room, Richmond. You disgust me.

The Swans have spent the past month climbing the vertical axis by beefing up their scoring. They are still a lot more defensive than the typical premier. But not more than the typical Sydney premier.

Geelong and GWS did what they needed to do to lock down a top 4 spot. So did Hawthorn, although far more shakily.

Now let’s talk about the Hawks. Last year, they lost 4 games in the first 8 rounds by an average of 6 points. As such, they could only finish 3rd in the home & away season despite being by far the most impressive team. That was because at the same time, Ross Lyon had made a secret bargain with Ocxthn’GGia the Demon Goat-God of Close Games, in which he agreed to hand over Zac Dawson’s virgin soul in exchange for at least half a dozen fall-over-the-line wins.

So the Hawks got screwed there. They probably should have won their close ones, of course, but the fact is that whether a team wins a close game is very random. Plus, even if they had, they couldn’t do anything about Fremantle winning all their close ones.

BUT LOOK HOW IT TURNS AROUND. This year, in any kind of fair universe, Hawthorn deserves to finish outside the top 4. They’ve won games by 3, 3, 3, 9, 5, and 1 point, while their losses are by 30, 75, 14, 29, and 25 points. That’s a whole lot of wins that were one stroke of luck away from becoming a loss, and a bunch of losses that couldn’t have been anything else. Across 2015-2016, Hawthorn’s win-loss record on close games now actually looks normal. But last year has all the losses and this year has all the wins. It’s like flipping a coin 10 times and getting five heads in a row followed by five tails. On balance, it’s what you’d expect, but the distribution is crazy.

Anyway, given what happened in 2015, it’s probably fair play for the Hawks to square up now. But Adelaide can feel aggrieved, because if you shake 2016 and randomize all the results a little, it’s hard to get an outcome where they miss the Top 4. Yet here we are.

This is what the ladder looks like if you run the Squiggle Doors simulation with 5% luck 5,000 times. This modifies all scores by a small random amount, so that close wins can easily turn into close losses, and vice versa, while more emphatic results stay like they are. It has nothing to do with squiggle ratings, the fixture, or any kind of prediction; it’s purely about adding a little random chance to each result, in order to simulate how easily things could be different:

So everything is the same except Hawthorn move 3 spots.

Here is the same thing in Tower of Power style. It shows the chances of each team finishing in a particular position, given 5% luck:

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North can feel fortunate, too, with those close wins earlier in the year to thank for getting them into the finals. They had practically no chance of finishing higher than 8th and a big chance of finishing lower. It could easily have been St. Kilda in there.

Anyway, we now have pretty strong teams in 5th and 6th, in Adelaide and West Coast. Finals are very commonly won by home teams, so it’s a big ask for either of them to go all the way. But I do think this year offers by far the best chances of a team outside the Top 4 reaching the GF than we’ve seen for a while.

The official prediction, though, is this:

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North and the Bulldogs look quite a lot weaker than the top 6, so they’re expected to go out. I feel extra-confident about this because I know Elimination Finals involving North always go exactly to plan.

Flagpole! Another tightening, with Sydney zooming to the top.