Mega Thread #14 David Mackay - 14 possessions again

[CrowBloke]

I would have thought our grievances are pretty well outlined in those threads.

Yes, I considered your objection. Fair point.
I read every post in that thread and it would've taken me too long to reply to the many anti-MacKay comments that aired grievances but without giving reasons. So, I thought I'd start this thread, seeking reasons.
eg "Rotayjay" above said: "Because he's not a very good player" and I'd like to know why he thinks that. By comparison JJ has fewer possessions and registers fewer tackles per game than Mackay --- is he also "not a very good player"?
Likewise, "Samcro24" above said: "He can't even football" which is just a mystery to me.

People are free to reply or not, but restating a dislike for MacKay without reasons is pointless.

 

[marty36]

He isnt the coach , its not his fault he gets picked???????

 

[Elite Crow]

He isnt the coach , its not his fault he gets picked???????

It's his fault that he decides to have 4 good games a year though.

 

[Wood_Duck]

His disposal, his strength, his tackling, his ball winning, his competitiveness, his composure and aggression are not at the required level to be a successful AFL footballer and yet he continually gets picked.

 

[Doc_]

He's a spud of the highest order. Even the ball can knock him off his feet FFS!
The epitome of a soft player if ever there was one.

Sent from my SM-G900I using Tapatalk

 

[CrowBloke]

Really? Where did he finish in last years B&F?

Another fair point, which offers a reason.
MacKay ranked 20th out of the 29 players used which puts him in the Top 22, doesn't it?
With 118 votes he polled something like 4+/game which suggests that he did underperform slightly, relative to CC voter expectations.
I'm not a MacKay FAN, in fact I am neutral because I don't know all the behind-the-scenes reasons for his selection. I was just surprised by the level of vitriol directed at him.

 

[Scorpus]

His tackling and physicality is not AFL standard and it never has been

 

[threefa9]

Who was that poster who claimed to have a reliable source that claimed D-Mac was getting traded on the last day of trade week in 2015, talk about the ultimate troll

 

[TexFactor]

i cant speak for everyone but for me its 100% personal.

 

[Scorpus]

Also, I want to be clear that I don't hate David Mackay personally. I'm sure he's a great bloke off the field. I also don't hate him for being a player of limited skill; he's certainly made it further than most of us.

But I wish we'd identify his numerous limitations, realize he is not a best 22 player, let go, and move on.

 

[Smoooothy]

he floats around and gets easy touches

he is nearly the only player on our list that seems incapable of being the difference in the game

his disposal is rubbish

he doesn't tackle - and if he does, it either doesn't stick or is brushed aside with ease

he is not damaging

he is a dime-a-dozen type player

he will play 5 soft shithouse rubbish games until the pressure is on, then play a mediocre game which seems much better than it really is because we all expect him to be putrid, and thats enough for his selection to be justified for weeks to come

we have better options, and we will lose them if we don't start to use them

 

[SydCrow]

The last player you would pick in a final. So why do we keep playing and paying him?

 

[hippyhippy]

dont think anyone here hates him personally ... no one here probably knows the man.

however everyone needs a scapegoat for shit performances and failure ... every team has a player they lay the blame on. in our case its mackey.

too many games has he been shit.
only been dropped maybe 2 times in his recent career.

to me, he is the epitome of why the crows are a failure on field. we do not have a winners mentality, a mentality that says if you do not perform at the required standard, then you are not good enough. a mentality that rewards players that perform on the field. a mentality that rewards good performance even if you have to drop a senior player. we all know that at the crows, you are not easily dropped if you're senior. thats not a winning culture.

 

[baldandbroke]

You know why I don't like players like Mackay ...

(1) they train the house down
(2) they play a few games to show you what they are capable of
(3) the rest of their career is spent at less than 100%, making you question if the few good games ever even happened

I'll take a player that just gives his all, every day on an off the field. A good example is VB. VB was not the best footballer, not the most skilled, not the fastest, not the biggest ... but he gave his all at every contest. He is a guy you accept the gaps with. Sure, eventually they become ineffective as the holes in their game become impossible to cover over - but they give you everything until they can give no more.

DMac gives you 50% of what he is capable of 98% of the time.

 

[Bob Neil]

I posted the stats below in another thread so apologies for reproducing it here...but the numbers don't lie - he's been way below average over a long career.

The reasons most Crows fans don't like him is therefore twofold:

1. His shit performance - especially noticeable when the heat is on in critical matches.
2. How his continued selection in the face of all evidence stands as a manifestation of our mediocrity as a club and our prolonged premiership drought.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Because I'm a procrastinator at heart I took some time out from my desk job to do some analysis. I used Footywire to help me find all (maybe one or two slipped through the cracks) 92 currently listed AFL footballers who are designated as midfielders and who have played a minimum of 100 games.

David Mackay is in this cohort.

I then extracted their career averages for a bunch of KPIs and calculated the Percentile Rank for each player for each statistic (if you have a Percentile Rank of, say, 20% that means you are in the bottom 20% of the group for that metric).

The table below are the career per game averages and Percentile Rank for our blond-haired hero and doesn't it make for pretty reading! Well below average across the board and bottom 10% for kicks, disposals, goals, and Brownlow votes...

 

[relapse]

Another fair point, which offers a reason.
MacKay ranked 20th out of the 29 players used which puts him in the Top 22, doesn't it?
With 118 votes he polled something like 4+/game which suggests that he did underperform slightly, relative to CC voter expectations.
I'm not a MacKay FAN, in fact I am neutral because I don't know all the behind-the-scenes reasons for his selection. I was just surprised by the level of vitriol directed at him.

Our B'nF is a strange one because it rewards mediocrity.

Almost every player receives votes in every game as the system rewards those that play more games. Under our system David Mackay can play a mediocre game every week and will poll more Club Champion votes by default than someone who's performed at a far higher standard, but has played less games.

 

[Minor Threat]

OK, statistics are not a totally reliable performance indicator and the stats I looked at lacked detail regarding the 1% acts which often go unrecorded anyway eg field positioning, shepherding, blocking, tapping on a loose ball to a teammate's advantage, smothering off the boot, kick efficiency etc.
They did not record contested possessions, either, but as far as I can see MacKay is used as an outside runner, a receiver (in gridiron terms) for which he does find space to receive transitional rebound plays from half-back, so his stats are not going to reflect in-the-pack hardball gets. Even so, MacKay's stats are favourable putting him around 12-14th in the team for possessions and tackles.

If they did record all these details the answer for these stats would still be: ZERO POINT ZERO

 

[Bob Neil]

To add a slight degree of balance I'd add that I think he does have two characteristics that are generally important in making a good AFL footballer

1. Durable - he's played 16 games or more in 8 of 9 seasons since making his debut. Now of course in his case this is a curse on the club but that's not his fault.
2. Consistent - I know this will surprise people but I think he's actually *very* consistent both within and across seasons. The problem is his average level of performance around which he is consistent is just too low but he delivers that mediocre level pretty reliably. Most of the other players I analysed went up (and occasionally down) over their career (in terms of season averages) but he is very consistent within 1 or 2 disposals each year of his career average. We can't say we don't know what we'll get with him!

 

[Freewayflyer]

For me it is having an outside mid in the side who has no hurt whatsoever with the ball. Just continually bombs to the opposition spare defender or ruckman.

If he used the footy like McLeod maybe, just maybe you could put up with the amount of times he gets brushed aside when trying to tackle.

Round 1 v GWS this season he lowered the eyes a couple of times and hit targets for what is the first time I can ever remember him doing this. I thought finally a coach has got him to change habits, but he has gone back to normal since then.

 

[Rotayjay]

Yes, I considered your objection. Fair point.
I read every post in that thread and it would've taken me too long to reply to the many anti-MacKay comments that aired grievances but without giving reasons. So, I thought I'd start this thread, seeking reasons.
eg "Rotayjay" above said: "Because he's not a very good player" and I'd like to know why he thinks that. By comparison JJ has fewer possessions and registers fewer tackles per game than Mackay --- is he also "not a very good player"?
Likewise, "Samcro24" above said: "He can't even football" which is just a mystery to me.

People are free to reply or not, but restating a dislike for MacKay without reasons is pointless.

He's a *midfielder* who doesn't get that much of the ball and hardly contributes any midfield goals. He's amassed 1 Brownlow vote in his 9-year career (and we all know the Brownlow is the midfielder's medal). Matt Crouch is sitting on 7, from 43 games with revealed Brownlow votes. Mackay hardly gets coaches or club B&F votes either.

Also, criticism of Mackay and the selectors is part of the culture of the Crows Bigfooty board.

 

[Samcro24]

Yes, I considered your objection. Fair point.
I read every post in that thread and it would've taken me too long to reply to the many anti-MacKay comments that aired grievances but without giving reasons. So, I thought I'd start this thread, seeking reasons.
eg "Rotayjay" above said: "Because he's not a very good player" and I'd like to know why he thinks that. By comparison JJ has fewer possessions and registers fewer tackles per game than Mackay --- is he also "not a very good player"?
Likewise, "Samcro24" above said: "He can't even football" which is just a mystery to me.

People are free to reply or not, but restating a dislike for MacKay without reasons is pointless.

I was being a smartarse, hopefully my next post was better.

And yes, Josh Jenkins is also not a very good footballer.

 

[relapse]

He's a *midfielder* who doesn't get that much of the ball and hardly contributes any midfield goals. He's amassed 1 Brownlow vote in his 9-year career (and we all know the Brownlow is the midfielder's medal). Matt Crouch is sitting on 7, from 43 games with revealed Brownlow votes. Mackay hardly gets coaches or club B&F votes either.

Also, criticism of Mackay and the selectors is part of the culture of the Crows Bigfooty board.

1 Brownlow vote in 9 seasons as a midfielder ?

 

[huludicidal]

Same reason I wasn't a fan of David Gallagher or Myke Cook.

Because he continually fails to deliver anything resembling consistent AFL standard football.

It is mind-boggling to me that he is selected most weeks. He plays roughly 8 poor games out of every 10 he is selected for. This has been going on for a LONG TIME.

There is no groupthink influencing my opinion. I don't dislike him personally. I just don't enjoy watching proven failures run around for my club, at the expense of someone who MAY (or may not) be a quality player for us in the future.

As for his result in last year's B&F, how many players who played more than 75% of the games for the season averaged less votes per game than Mackay? I'd be stunned if the answer isn't 0. This to me outlines that not even the coaches rate him highly. Despite this, they appear to be too scared to ditch him for a young player or a rotation of young players who may not exceed his output initially, but given game time at senior level there would surely be scope to improve in the future.

Mackay performs at a lower standard than any other player selected regularly. His continued selection stunts the growth of younger players such as Wigg and Gallucci.

I am unhappy with Mackay's performances. I am more unhappy with him being selected.

 

[Samcro24]

171 games
51 goals (2.12 last year)
2x 30 disposal games (both in 09)
11 games over 25 disposals (3 since 2012)

He peaked in 09 where he averaged 20 touches.

 

[MRB37]

There's a bit of stat padding in the last quarter in some of his games when there's no heat this year as well.

Vs Hawks - 13 possessions - 6 in the last quarter.
Vs Essendon - 21 possessions - 10 in the last quarter.
Vs Gold Coast - 23 possessions - 9 in the last quarter.
Vs Richmond - 21 possessions - 9 in the last quarter.