List Mgmt. Evolution of the list

[hsquid]

Like a lot of people I'm torn on our list. On the one hand, our core of quality is clear. On the other, we still seem to have a lare number of 'filler' players. Some would call them list-cloggers. The quality of this finals series makes it clear: We need to have serious quality across the board to compete.

From next year we can expect meaningful improvements in gameplan and fitness, but we don't want to be end up in another cycle of finishing 7-9th because the list remains below par. Renewing a list is not a quick process. It doesn't matter if you cut 5 or 10 a year, the constraint is on how much quality you can bring in. It's bloody hard to bring in more than 2 or so regular players in a year no matter how many you turn over.

So how close are we?
I share here some analysis I've done in my angst to get a better handle on where we are at.

--
I started by classifying our end-of-22 list into six categories:

Quality (6)​	Unproven Quality (7)​	Troopers (8)​
Cunnington Davies-Uniacke Goldstein Larkey McKay Simpkin	Comben Curtis Goater Horne-Francis Phillips Powell Thomas	Anderson Archer Greenwood Hall McDonald Scott Taylor Young
Unknown (8)​	Marginal (8)​	Disappointing (6)​
Bergman Coleman-Jones Dawson Edwards Ford Perez Stephenson Zurharr	Bonar Bosunavulagi Corr Mahony Turner J. Walker Xerri Ziebell	Hayden Lazzaro McGuiness Polec Spicer P. Walker

You could argue some of those (McDonald, Zurharr, Xerri, Lazzaro...) but I've tried to err on the pessimistic side.

That gives us a list mix like this:



We have 21 players at 'Trooper' and above. Enough to form a core, but not enough for any depth at all.
On top of that, there only only 6 'Quality'. Of those, two are reaching the end (Goldstein and Cunnington) and one just scrapes into the category (Larkey). Compare with 5th-finishing Melbourne, for example, who would have 10-11 in that category.

[Note that this takes no account of team balance and positional needs. The assumption is that over time large imbalances will get patched up by targeted recruitment and trading.]

The advantage we have is that beyond Goldstein and Cunnington, we won't be losing any quality for a while.

Making some reasonable estimates about retirement ages and graphing it out shows that the situation is extreme. Apart from the above two, we will barely be losing anyone of note for the next 6-7 years.



Note that this chart, and all that follow, hide the two lowest 'disposable' categories of players ('Marginal' and 'Disappointing') as the expectation is they will be the kind that can always be found to round up a list to full size.

In the meantime we will be doing recruiting. How has that gone in the past?
The chart below shows the end-of-2022 list categorised by quality and year-joined (not draft year). Note that the years before 2015 with no survivers are not shown.



There are a few takeaways from this chart:

• As we all know, the five years between 2010 and 2014 have produced almost nothing for us and were a big reason for our recent struggles.
• During 2015-2017 we didn't pick up many but we stockpiled some quality (McKay, Simpkin, LDU and Larkey)
• The bulk of our potential list going forward has come from the last 4 recruitment seasons and the evolution of the 'Unproven quality' and 'Unknowns' in this will be crucial.

Spoiler: Caveat: Retrospective analysis

This analysis uses the categories of how we see players now but that doesn't mean thy were categorised that way when they arrived.
I don't think this distinction matters though because development can result in both upgrades and downgrades of potential and my model of development (see below) is quite balanced in that respect.

This chart also gives us an idea of what to expect from our recruitment and trading going forward. If we can continue the pattern of the last few years, we should expect each year to get:

• 1.75 x Unproven quality
• 1.5 x Trooper
• 1.5 x Unknown

There's now even a chance we could attract a genuine quality free agent, but I treat this as a bonus.

Spoiler: Caveat: Trading future picks

The past few years probably gives a slightly optimistic view because we essentially got CCJ and Curtis last year for our 2023 2nd and 3rd round picks. But averaging this out over 4 years reduces its impact and this skew will likely be more than balanced by the 'Clarko effect' of being much better able to attract talent than in the past. The likelihood of priority picks in this draft is another compensation not otherwise factored in.

That's recruitment. But there's also development. Hopefully 'Unproven quality' can become 'Quality'. 'Unknowns' should become something else. If we make some assumptions about the kinds of transitions then we can anticipate a 'status quo' picture of where we might end up. If we nail the development and every kid turns into a star we'll do better. If they all turn into Kieran Harper

Kieran Harper

Age

32

Ht

187cm

Wt

84kg

Pos.

Fwd

Career

Season

Last 5

D

8.9

2star

K

5.6

2star

HB

3.3

3star

M

2.0

2star

T

3.4

5star

G

0.9

4star

No current season stats available

D

8.2

2star

K

5.2

2star

HB

3.0

3star

M

2.2

3star

T

3.2

5star

G

0.8

4star

, Aaron Black and Aaron Mullett

Aaron Mullett

Age

32

Ht

184cm

Wt

82kg

Pos.

Def

Career

Season

Last 5

D

16.6

4star

K

11.2

4star

HB

5.4

4star

M

3.7

4star

T

1.6

4star

MG

323.1

4star

No current season stats available

D

12.8

4star

K

5.6

3star

HB

7.2

5star

M

2.4

3star

T

1.6

4star

we'll do worse.

Caveat: Yes I know this is getting speculative, but come for the ride.

For the record, these are the development probabilities I used for change between categories each year:



In addition I assume that we can delist the worst performers on the list to maintain a list of 44. This won't always be true due to list balance and contract situations. This exaggerates the disappearance of the 'Disappointings' in the charts below but only makes minor differences at the fringes and be corrected in following years

Putting that all together: retirements, recruitment, development, delistings, what does that project for the future?



The key takeaway here is that we should get meaningful improvements in our list over the next 5-7 years. This is the flip side to our talent drought before 2015: We just won't be losing much through decline and retirement, so every year we'll be bringing in talent and using that to raise the standards at the bottom end.

That said we can't really hit that 10+ level of quality that we would need to be a top list until 2026.

Note that this doesn't take into account anything to do with specific recruiting or development, simply extrapolating forward our current age/quality list profile and seeing where it takes us.

Is it possible to condense that into a single number, like a "List Quality Score?". Probably not, but I'll do it anyway. I give a score to each category, heavily weighting quality and downplaying the bottom end. Then I can add up those scores to give a value for firstly the entire list, and then for the 'top-30' assuming that's the most relevant group for year-to-year performance.

Spoiler: Quality Scores by Category

Again, the same pattern: A significant climb over an extended period.

All of this generally confirms what most of us probably already suspect:

• Our list currently has a lot of unproven quality and 'fillers'
• In the short term we still have to deal with the loss of Goldstein and Cunnington which will slow the list improvement.
• We should see meaningful improvements in the list each year over an extended period (because we will have virtually no senior talent to lose).
• The list trajectory looks sufficient to plausibly compete but not in the short term.
• The big lift next year will be all about systems, fitness, strength, engagement and individual development.

 

[Ashley B]

You have put a bit of work in there hsquid

 

[Shermanator]

Like a lot of people I'm torn on our list. On the one hand, our core of quality is clear. On the other, we still seem to have a lare number of 'filler' players. Some would call them list-cloggers. The quality of this finals series makes it clear: We need to have serious quality across the board to compete.

From next year we can expect meaningful improvements in gameplan and fitness, but we don't want to be stuck finishing 9th because the list remains below par. Renewing a list is not a quick process. It doesn't matter if you cut 5 or 10 a year, the constraint is on how much quality you can bring in. It's bloody hard to bring in more than 2 or so quality players in a year no matter how many you turn over.

So how close are we?
I share here some analysis I've done in my angst to get a better handle on where we are at.

--
I started by classifying our end-of-22 list into six categories:

Quality (6)​	Unproven Quality (7)​	Troopers (8)​
CunningtonDavies-Uniacke Goldstein Larkey McKay Simpkin	Comben Curtis Goater Horne-Francis Phillips Powell Thomas	Anderson Archer Greenwood Hall McDonald Scott Taylor Young
Unknown (8)​	Marginal (8)​	Disappointing (6)​
Bergman Coleman-Jones Dawson Edwards Ford Perez Stephenson Zurharr	Bonar Bosunavulagi Corr Mahony Turner J. Walker Xerri Ziebell	Hayden Lazzaro McGuiness Polec Spicer P. Walker

You could argue some of those (McDonald, Zurharr, Xerri, Lazzaro...) but I've tried to err on the pessimistic side.

That gives us a list mix like this:

View attachment 1505581

This gives us 21 players at 'Trooper' and above. Enough to form a core, but not enough for any depth at all.
On top of that, there only only 6 'Quality'. Of those, two are reaching the end (Goldstein and Cunnington) and one just scrapes into the category (Larkey). Compare with 5th-finishing Melbourne, for example, who would have 10-11 in that category.

[Note that this takes no account of team balance and positional needs. The assumption is that over time large imbalances will get patched up by targeted recruitment and trading.]

The advantage we have is that beyond Goldstein and Cunnington, we won't be losing any quality for a while.

Making some reasonable estimates about retirement ages and graphing it out shows that the situation is extreme. Apart from the above two, we will barely be losing anyone of note for the next 6-7 years.

View attachment 1505608

Note that this chart, and all that follow, hide the two lowest 'disposable' categories of players ('Marginal' and 'Disappointing') as the expectation is they will be the kind that can always be found to round up a list to full size.

In the meantime we will be doing recruiting. How has that gone in the past?
The chart below shows the end-of-2022 list categorised by quality and year-joined (not draft year). Note that the years before 2015 with no survivers are not shown.

View attachment 1505617

There are a few takeaways from this chart:

• As we all know, the five years between 2010 and 2014 have produced almost nothing for us and were a big reason for our recent struggles.
• During 2015-2017 we didn't pick up many but we stockpiled some quality (McKay, Simpkin, LDU and Larkey)
• The bulk of our potential list going forward has come from the last 4 recruitment seasons and the evolution of the 'Unproven quality' and 'Unknowns' in this will be crucial.

Spoiler: Caveat: Retrospective analysis

This analysis uses the categories of how we see players now but that doesn't mean thy were categorised that way when they arrived.
I don't think this distinction matters though because development can result in both upgrades and downgrades of potential and my model of development (see below) is quite balanced in that respect.

This chart also gives us an idea of what to expect from our recruitment and trading going forward. If we can continue the pattern of the last few years, we should expect each year to get:

• 1.75 x Unproven quality
• 1.5 x Trooper
• 1.5 x Unknown

There's now even a chance we could attract a genuine quality free agent, but I treat this as a bonus.

Spoiler: Caveat: Trading future picks

The past few years probably gives a slightly optimistic view because we essentially got CCJ and Curtis last year for our 2023 2nd and 3rd round picks. But averaging this out over 4 years reduces its impact and this skew will likely be more than balanced by the 'Clarko effect' of being much better able to attract talent than in the past.

That's recruitment. But there's also development. Hopefully 'Unproven quality' can become 'Quality'. 'Unknowns' should become something else. If we make some assumptions about the kinds of transitions then we can anticipate a 'status quo' picture of where we might end up. If we nail the development and every kid turns into a star we'll do better. If they all turn into Kieran Harper, Aaron Black and Aaron Mullett we'll do worse.

Caveat: Yes I know this is getting speculative, but come for the ride.

For the record, these are the development probabilities I used for change between categories each year:

View attachment 1505662

In addition I assume that we can delist the worst performers on the list to maintain a list of 44. This won't always be true due to list balance and contract situations, but those aspects should only make minor differences and be quickly corrected in following years.

So putting that all together: retirements, recruitment, development, delistings, what does that project for the future?
Note that this doesn't take into account anything to do with specific recruiting or development, simply extrapolating forward our current age/quality list profile and seeing where it takes us.

View attachment 1505669

The key takeaway here is that we should get meaningful improvements in our list over the next 5-8 years. This is the flip side to our talent drought before 2015: We just won't be losing much out the top end, so every year we'll be bringing in talent and using that to raise the standards on the bottom end.

That said we can't really hit that 10+ level of quality that we would need to be a top list until 2026.

Is it possible to condense that into a single number, like a "List Quality Score?". Probably not, but I'll do it anyway. I give a score to each category, heavily weighting quality and downplaying the bottom end. Then I can add up those scores to give a value for firstly the entire list, and then for the 'top-30' assuming that's the most relevant group for year-to-year performance.

Spoiler: Quality Scores by Category

View attachment 1505674

View attachment 1505670


View attachment 1505680

Again, the same pattern: A significant climb over an extended period.

So what does all this mean? Well, it mostly confirms what most of us probably already know:

• Our list currently has a lot of unproven quality and 'fillers'
• We should see improvements in the list each year
• In the short term we still have to deal with the loss of Goldstein and Cunnington which will slow the list improvement
• Given vanilla assumptions, we should expect continue to meaningfully improve the list over a number of years because we will stop losing talent.
• The big lift next year will be all about systems, fitness, strength, engagement and individual development.
• The list seems to plausibly have enough talent to compete, but not in the short term.

 

[Twangler]

Like a lot of people I'm torn on our list. On the one hand, our core of quality is clear. On the other, we still seem to have a lare number of 'filler' players. Some would call them list-cloggers. The quality of this finals series makes it clear: We need to have serious quality across the board to compete.

From next year we can expect meaningful improvements in gameplan and fitness, but we don't want to be stuck finishing 9th because the list remains below par. Renewing a list is not a quick process. It doesn't matter if you cut 5 or 10 a year, the constraint is on how much quality you can bring in. It's bloody hard to bring in more than 2 or so quality players in a year no matter how many you turn over.

So how close are we?
I share here some analysis I've done in my angst to get a better handle on where we are at.

--
I started by classifying our end-of-22 list into six categories:

Quality (6)​	Unproven Quality (7)​	Troopers (8)​
CunningtonDavies-Uniacke Goldstein Larkey McKay Simpkin	Comben Curtis Goater Horne-Francis Phillips Powell Thomas	Anderson Archer Greenwood Hall McDonald Scott Taylor Young
Unknown (8)​	Marginal (8)​	Disappointing (6)​
Bergman Coleman-Jones Dawson Edwards Ford Perez Stephenson Zurharr	Bonar Bosunavulagi Corr Mahony Turner J. Walker Xerri Ziebell	Hayden Lazzaro McGuiness Polec Spicer P. Walker

You could argue some of those (McDonald, Zurharr, Xerri, Lazzaro...) but I've tried to err on the pessimistic side.

That gives us a list mix like this:

View attachment 1505581

This gives us 21 players at 'Trooper' and above. Enough to form a core, but not enough for any depth at all.
On top of that, there only only 6 'Quality'. Of those, two are reaching the end (Goldstein and Cunnington) and one just scrapes into the category (Larkey). Compare with 5th-finishing Melbourne, for example, who would have 10-11 in that category.

[Note that this takes no account of team balance and positional needs. The assumption is that over time large imbalances will get patched up by targeted recruitment and trading.]

The advantage we have is that beyond Goldstein and Cunnington, we won't be losing any quality for a while.

Making some reasonable estimates about retirement ages and graphing it out shows that the situation is extreme. Apart from the above two, we will barely be losing anyone of note for the next 6-7 years.

View attachment 1505608

Note that this chart, and all that follow, hide the two lowest 'disposable' categories of players ('Marginal' and 'Disappointing') as the expectation is they will be the kind that can always be found to round up a list to full size.

In the meantime we will be doing recruiting. How has that gone in the past?
The chart below shows the end-of-2022 list categorised by quality and year-joined (not draft year). Note that the years before 2015 with no survivers are not shown.

View attachment 1505617

There are a few takeaways from this chart:

• As we all know, the five years between 2010 and 2014 have produced almost nothing for us and were a big reason for our recent struggles.
• During 2015-2017 we didn't pick up many but we stockpiled some quality (McKay, Simpkin, LDU and Larkey)
• The bulk of our potential list going forward has come from the last 4 recruitment seasons and the evolution of the 'Unproven quality' and 'Unknowns' in this will be crucial.

Spoiler: Caveat: Retrospective analysis

This analysis uses the categories of how we see players now but that doesn't mean thy were categorised that way when they arrived.
I don't think this distinction matters though because development can result in both upgrades and downgrades of potential and my model of development (see below) is quite balanced in that respect.

This chart also gives us an idea of what to expect from our recruitment and trading going forward. If we can continue the pattern of the last few years, we should expect each year to get:

• 1.75 x Unproven quality
• 1.5 x Trooper
• 1.5 x Unknown

There's now even a chance we could attract a genuine quality free agent, but I treat this as a bonus.

Spoiler: Caveat: Trading future picks

The past few years probably gives a slightly optimistic view because we essentially got CCJ and Curtis last year for our 2023 2nd and 3rd round picks. But averaging this out over 4 years reduces its impact and this skew will likely be more than balanced by the 'Clarko effect' of being much better able to attract talent than in the past.

That's recruitment. But there's also development. Hopefully 'Unproven quality' can become 'Quality'. 'Unknowns' should become something else. If we make some assumptions about the kinds of transitions then we can anticipate a 'status quo' picture of where we might end up. If we nail the development and every kid turns into a star we'll do better. If they all turn into Kieran Harper, Aaron Black and Aaron Mullett we'll do worse.

Caveat: Yes I know this is getting speculative, but come for the ride.

For the record, these are the development probabilities I used for change between categories each year:

View attachment 1505662

In addition I assume that we can delist the worst performers on the list to maintain a list of 44. This won't always be true due to list balance and contract situations, but those aspects should only make minor differences and be quickly corrected in following years.

So putting that all together: retirements, recruitment, development, delistings, what does that project for the future?
Note that this doesn't take into account anything to do with specific recruiting or development, simply extrapolating forward our current age/quality list profile and seeing where it takes us.

View attachment 1505669

The key takeaway here is that we should get meaningful improvements in our list over the next 5-8 years. This is the flip side to our talent drought before 2015: We just won't be losing much out the top end, so every year we'll be bringing in talent and using that to raise the standards on the bottom end.

That said we can't really hit that 10+ level of quality that we would need to be a top list until 2026.

Is it possible to condense that into a single number, like a "List Quality Score?". Probably not, but I'll do it anyway. I give a score to each category, heavily weighting quality and downplaying the bottom end. Then I can add up those scores to give a value for firstly the entire list, and then for the 'top-30' assuming that's the most relevant group for year-to-year performance.

Spoiler: Quality Scores by Category

View attachment 1505674

View attachment 1505670


View attachment 1505680

Again, the same pattern: A significant climb over an extended period.

So what does all this mean? Well, it mostly confirms what most of us probably already know:

• Our list currently has a lot of unproven quality and 'fillers'
• We should see improvements in the list each year
• In the short term we still have to deal with the loss of Goldstein and Cunnington which will slow the list improvement
• Given vanilla assumptions, we should expect continue to meaningfully improve the list over a number of years because we will stop losing talent.
• The big lift next year will be all about systems, fitness, strength, engagement and individual development.
• The list seems to plausibly have enough talent to compete, but not in the short term.

That analysis is nearly the equivalent of a week’s worth of work for me. I wonder what that says about the state of corporatey office type jobs (or maybe it just says more about me)

Anyway, what do you mean by trooper? I’m guessing it means proven role player? If so I think Archer is the odd one out.

Zurhaar has to be either in the quality or trooper category - he’s hardly an unknown. And Corr surely doesn’t belong in the same category as Mahoney and Turney.

But putting all that aside, I’m impressed by the level of effort of the posters on this site

 

[Only Forwards]

Like a lot of people I'm torn on our list.

This is quality work.

 

[Ashley B]

You have put a bit of work in there hsquid

Looks like you relented there Sherm , could have gone either way lol.

 

[Only Forwards]

Looks like you almost relented there Sherm , could have gone either way lol.

The historical accuracy is that a thumbs up meant the person died.

 

[Ashley B]

Thought that would have been good like Fonzie

 

[Flawed Genius]

Like a lot of people I'm torn on our list. On the one hand, our core of quality is clear. On the other, we still seem to have a lare number of 'filler' players. Some would call them list-cloggers. The quality of this finals series makes it clear: We need to have serious quality across the board to compete.

From next year we can expect meaningful improvements in gameplan and fitness, but we don't want to be stuck finishing 9th because the list remains below par. Renewing a list is not a quick process. It doesn't matter if you cut 5 or 10 a year, the constraint is on how much quality you can bring in. It's bloody hard to bring in more than 2 or so quality players in a year no matter how many you turn over.

So how close are we?
I share here some analysis I've done in my angst to get a better handle on where we are at.

--
I started by classifying our end-of-22 list into six categories:

Quality (6)​	Unproven Quality (7)​	Troopers (8)​
CunningtonDavies-Uniacke Goldstein Larkey McKay Simpkin	Comben Curtis Goater Horne-Francis Phillips Powell Thomas	Anderson Archer Greenwood Hall McDonald Scott Taylor Young
Unknown (8)​	Marginal (8)​	Disappointing (6)​
Bergman Coleman-Jones Dawson Edwards Ford Perez Stephenson Zurharr	Bonar Bosunavulagi Corr Mahony Turner J. Walker Xerri Ziebell	Hayden Lazzaro McGuiness Polec Spicer P. Walker

You could argue some of those (McDonald, Zurharr, Xerri, Lazzaro...) but I've tried to err on the pessimistic side.

That gives us a list mix like this:

View attachment 1505581

This gives us 21 players at 'Trooper' and above. Enough to form a core, but not enough for any depth at all.
On top of that, there only only 6 'Quality'. Of those, two are reaching the end (Goldstein and Cunnington) and one just scrapes into the category (Larkey). Compare with 5th-finishing Melbourne, for example, who would have 10-11 in that category.

[Note that this takes no account of team balance and positional needs. The assumption is that over time large imbalances will get patched up by targeted recruitment and trading.]

The advantage we have is that beyond Goldstein and Cunnington, we won't be losing any quality for a while.

Making some reasonable estimates about retirement ages and graphing it out shows that the situation is extreme. Apart from the above two, we will barely be losing anyone of note for the next 6-7 years.

View attachment 1505608

Note that this chart, and all that follow, hide the two lowest 'disposable' categories of players ('Marginal' and 'Disappointing') as the expectation is they will be the kind that can always be found to round up a list to full size.

In the meantime we will be doing recruiting. How has that gone in the past?
The chart below shows the end-of-2022 list categorised by quality and year-joined (not draft year). Note that the years before 2015 with no survivers are not shown.

View attachment 1505617

There are a few takeaways from this chart:

• As we all know, the five years between 2010 and 2014 have produced almost nothing for us and were a big reason for our recent struggles.
• During 2015-2017 we didn't pick up many but we stockpiled some quality (McKay, Simpkin, LDU and Larkey)
• The bulk of our potential list going forward has come from the last 4 recruitment seasons and the evolution of the 'Unproven quality' and 'Unknowns' in this will be crucial.

Spoiler: Caveat: Retrospective analysis

This analysis uses the categories of how we see players now but that doesn't mean thy were categorised that way when they arrived.
I don't think this distinction matters though because development can result in both upgrades and downgrades of potential and my model of development (see below) is quite balanced in that respect.

This chart also gives us an idea of what to expect from our recruitment and trading going forward. If we can continue the pattern of the last few years, we should expect each year to get:

• 1.75 x Unproven quality
• 1.5 x Trooper
• 1.5 x Unknown

There's now even a chance we could attract a genuine quality free agent, but I treat this as a bonus.

Spoiler: Caveat: Trading future picks

The past few years probably gives a slightly optimistic view because we essentially got CCJ and Curtis last year for our 2023 2nd and 3rd round picks. But averaging this out over 4 years reduces its impact and this skew will likely be more than balanced by the 'Clarko effect' of being much better able to attract talent than in the past.

That's recruitment. But there's also development. Hopefully 'Unproven quality' can become 'Quality'. 'Unknowns' should become something else. If we make some assumptions about the kinds of transitions then we can anticipate a 'status quo' picture of where we might end up. If we nail the development and every kid turns into a star we'll do better. If they all turn into Kieran Harper, Aaron Black and Aaron Mullett we'll do worse.

Caveat: Yes I know this is getting speculative, but come for the ride.

For the record, these are the development probabilities I used for change between categories each year:

View attachment 1505662

In addition I assume that we can delist the worst performers on the list to maintain a list of 44. This won't always be true due to list balance and contract situations, but those aspects should only make minor differences and be quickly corrected in following years.

So putting that all together: retirements, recruitment, development, delistings, what does that project for the future?
Note that this doesn't take into account anything to do with specific recruiting or development, simply extrapolating forward our current age/quality list profile and seeing where it takes us.

View attachment 1505669

The key takeaway here is that we should get meaningful improvements in our list over the next 5-8 years. This is the flip side to our talent drought before 2015: We just won't be losing much out the top end, so every year we'll be bringing in talent and using that to raise the standards on the bottom end.

That said we can't really hit that 10+ level of quality that we would need to be a top list until 2026.

Is it possible to condense that into a single number, like a "List Quality Score?". Probably not, but I'll do it anyway. I give a score to each category, heavily weighting quality and downplaying the bottom end. Then I can add up those scores to give a value for firstly the entire list, and then for the 'top-30' assuming that's the most relevant group for year-to-year performance.

Spoiler: Quality Scores by Category

View attachment 1505674

View attachment 1505670


View attachment 1505680

Again, the same pattern: A significant climb over an extended period.

So what does all this mean? Well, it mostly confirms what most of us probably already know:

• Our list currently has a lot of unproven quality and 'fillers'
• We should see improvements in the list each year
• In the short term we still have to deal with the loss of Goldstein and Cunnington which will slow the list improvement
• Given vanilla assumptions, we should expect continue to meaningfully improve the list over a number of years because we will stop losing talent.
• The big lift next year will be all about systems, fitness, strength, engagement and individual development.
• The list seems to plausibly have enough talent to compete, but not in the short term.

babe wake up new POTY just dropped

 

[archerboy]

Like a lot of people I'm torn on our list. On the one hand, our core of quality is clear. On the other, we still seem to have a lare number of 'filler' players. Some would call them list-cloggers. The quality of this finals series makes it clear: We need to have serious quality across the board to compete.

From next year we can expect meaningful improvements in gameplan and fitness, but we don't want to be stuck finishing 9th because the list remains below par. Renewing a list is not a quick process. It doesn't matter if you cut 5 or 10 a year, the constraint is on how much quality you can bring in. It's bloody hard to bring in more than 2 or so quality players in a year no matter how many you turn over.

So how close are we?
I share here some analysis I've done in my angst to get a better handle on where we are at.

--
I started by classifying our end-of-22 list into six categories:

Quality (6)​	Unproven Quality (7)​	Troopers (8)​
CunningtonDavies-Uniacke Goldstein Larkey McKay Simpkin	Comben Curtis Goater Horne-Francis Phillips Powell Thomas	Anderson Archer Greenwood Hall McDonald Scott Taylor Young
Unknown (8)​	Marginal (8)​	Disappointing (6)​
Bergman Coleman-Jones Dawson Edwards Ford Perez Stephenson Zurharr	Bonar Bosunavulagi Corr Mahony Turner J. Walker Xerri Ziebell	Hayden Lazzaro McGuiness Polec Spicer P. Walker

You could argue some of those (McDonald, Zurharr, Xerri, Lazzaro...) but I've tried to err on the pessimistic side.

That gives us a list mix like this:

View attachment 1505581

This gives us 21 players at 'Trooper' and above. Enough to form a core, but not enough for any depth at all.
On top of that, there only only 6 'Quality'. Of those, two are reaching the end (Goldstein and Cunnington) and one just scrapes into the category (Larkey). Compare with 5th-finishing Melbourne, for example, who would have 10-11 in that category.

[Note that this takes no account of team balance and positional needs. The assumption is that over time large imbalances will get patched up by targeted recruitment and trading.]

The advantage we have is that beyond Goldstein and Cunnington, we won't be losing any quality for a while.

Making some reasonable estimates about retirement ages and graphing it out shows that the situation is extreme. Apart from the above two, we will barely be losing anyone of note for the next 6-7 years.

View attachment 1505608

Note that this chart, and all that follow, hide the two lowest 'disposable' categories of players ('Marginal' and 'Disappointing') as the expectation is they will be the kind that can always be found to round up a list to full size.

In the meantime we will be doing recruiting. How has that gone in the past?
The chart below shows the end-of-2022 list categorised by quality and year-joined (not draft year). Note that the years before 2015 with no survivers are not shown.

View attachment 1505617

There are a few takeaways from this chart:

• As we all know, the five years between 2010 and 2014 have produced almost nothing for us and were a big reason for our recent struggles.
• During 2015-2017 we didn't pick up many but we stockpiled some quality (McKay, Simpkin, LDU and Larkey)
• The bulk of our potential list going forward has come from the last 4 recruitment seasons and the evolution of the 'Unproven quality' and 'Unknowns' in this will be crucial.

Spoiler: Caveat: Retrospective analysis

This analysis uses the categories of how we see players now but that doesn't mean thy were categorised that way when they arrived.
I don't think this distinction matters though because development can result in both upgrades and downgrades of potential and my model of development (see below) is quite balanced in that respect.

This chart also gives us an idea of what to expect from our recruitment and trading going forward. If we can continue the pattern of the last few years, we should expect each year to get:

• 1.75 x Unproven quality
• 1.5 x Trooper
• 1.5 x Unknown

There's now even a chance we could attract a genuine quality free agent, but I treat this as a bonus.

Spoiler: Caveat: Trading future picks

The past few years probably gives a slightly optimistic view because we essentially got CCJ and Curtis last year for our 2023 2nd and 3rd round picks. But averaging this out over 4 years reduces its impact and this skew will likely be more than balanced by the 'Clarko effect' of being much better able to attract talent than in the past.

That's recruitment. But there's also development. Hopefully 'Unproven quality' can become 'Quality'. 'Unknowns' should become something else. If we make some assumptions about the kinds of transitions then we can anticipate a 'status quo' picture of where we might end up. If we nail the development and every kid turns into a star we'll do better. If they all turn into Kieran Harper, Aaron Black and Aaron Mullett we'll do worse.

Caveat: Yes I know this is getting speculative, but come for the ride.

For the record, these are the development probabilities I used for change between categories each year:

View attachment 1505662

In addition I assume that we can delist the worst performers on the list to maintain a list of 44. This won't always be true due to list balance and contract situations, but those aspects should only make minor differences and be quickly corrected in following years.

So putting that all together: retirements, recruitment, development, delistings, what does that project for the future?
Note that this doesn't take into account anything to do with specific recruiting or development, simply extrapolating forward our current age/quality list profile and seeing where it takes us.

View attachment 1505669

The key takeaway here is that we should get meaningful improvements in our list over the next 5-8 years. This is the flip side to our talent drought before 2015: We just won't be losing much out the top end, so every year we'll be bringing in talent and using that to raise the standards on the bottom end.

That said we can't really hit that 10+ level of quality that we would need to be a top list until 2026.

Is it possible to condense that into a single number, like a "List Quality Score?". Probably not, but I'll do it anyway. I give a score to each category, heavily weighting quality and downplaying the bottom end. Then I can add up those scores to give a value for firstly the entire list, and then for the 'top-30' assuming that's the most relevant group for year-to-year performance.

Spoiler: Quality Scores by Category

View attachment 1505674

View attachment 1505670


View attachment 1505680

Again, the same pattern: A significant climb over an extended period.

So what does all this mean? Well, it mostly confirms what most of us probably already know:

• Our list currently has a lot of unproven quality and 'fillers'
• We should see improvements in the list each year
• In the short term we still have to deal with the loss of Goldstein and Cunnington which will slow the list improvement
• Given vanilla assumptions, we should expect continue to meaningfully improve the list over a number of years because we will stop losing talent.
• The big lift next year will be all about systems, fitness, strength, engagement and individual development.
• The list seems to plausibly have enough talent to compete, but not in the short term.

I applaud your effort Sir

 

[Orange Peanut]

Like a lot of people I'm torn on our list. On the one hand, our core of quality is clear. On the other, we still seem to have a lare number of 'filler' players. Some would call them list-cloggers. The quality of this finals series makes it clear: We need to have serious quality across the board to compete.

From next year we can expect meaningful improvements in gameplan and fitness, but we don't want to be stuck finishing 9th because the list remains below par. Renewing a list is not a quick process. It doesn't matter if you cut 5 or 10 a year, the constraint is on how much quality you can bring in. It's bloody hard to bring in more than 2 or so quality players in a year no matter how many you turn over.

So how close are we?
I share here some analysis I've done in my angst to get a better handle on where we are at.

--
I started by classifying our end-of-22 list into six categories:

Quality (6)​	Unproven Quality (7)​	Troopers (8)​
Cunnington Davies-Uniacke Goldstein Larkey McKay Simpkin	Comben Curtis Goater Horne-Francis Phillips Powell Thomas	Anderson Archer Greenwood Hall McDonald Scott Taylor Young
Unknown (8)​	Marginal (8)​	Disappointing (6)​
Bergman Coleman-Jones Dawson Edwards Ford Perez Stephenson Zurharr	Bonar Bosunavulagi Corr Mahony Turner J. Walker Xerri Ziebell	Hayden Lazzaro McGuiness Polec Spicer P. Walker

You could argue some of those (McDonald, Zurharr, Xerri, Lazzaro...) but I've tried to err on the pessimistic side.

That gives us a list mix like this:

View attachment 1505581

This gives us 21 players at 'Trooper' and above. Enough to form a core, but not enough for any depth at all.
On top of that, there only only 6 'Quality'. Of those, two are reaching the end (Goldstein and Cunnington) and one just scrapes into the category (Larkey). Compare with 5th-finishing Melbourne, for example, who would have 10-11 in that category.

[Note that this takes no account of team balance and positional needs. The assumption is that over time large imbalances will get patched up by targeted recruitment and trading.]

The advantage we have is that beyond Goldstein and Cunnington, we won't be losing any quality for a while.

Making some reasonable estimates about retirement ages and graphing it out shows that the situation is extreme. Apart from the above two, we will barely be losing anyone of note for the next 6-7 years.

View attachment 1505608

Note that this chart, and all that follow, hide the two lowest 'disposable' categories of players ('Marginal' and 'Disappointing') as the expectation is they will be the kind that can always be found to round up a list to full size.

In the meantime we will be doing recruiting. How has that gone in the past?
The chart below shows the end-of-2022 list categorised by quality and year-joined (not draft year). Note that the years before 2015 with no survivers are not shown.

View attachment 1505617

There are a few takeaways from this chart:

• As we all know, the five years between 2010 and 2014 have produced almost nothing for us and were a big reason for our recent struggles.
• During 2015-2017 we didn't pick up many but we stockpiled some quality (McKay, Simpkin, LDU and Larkey)
• The bulk of our potential list going forward has come from the last 4 recruitment seasons and the evolution of the 'Unproven quality' and 'Unknowns' in this will be crucial.

Spoiler: Caveat: Retrospective analysis

This analysis uses the categories of how we see players now but that doesn't mean thy were categorised that way when they arrived.
I don't think this distinction matters though because development can result in both upgrades and downgrades of potential and my model of development (see below) is quite balanced in that respect.

This chart also gives us an idea of what to expect from our recruitment and trading going forward. If we can continue the pattern of the last few years, we should expect each year to get:

• 1.75 x Unproven quality
• 1.5 x Trooper
• 1.5 x Unknown

There's now even a chance we could attract a genuine quality free agent, but I treat this as a bonus.

Spoiler: Caveat: Trading future picks

The past few years probably gives a slightly optimistic view because we essentially got CCJ and Curtis last year for our 2023 2nd and 3rd round picks. But averaging this out over 4 years reduces its impact and this skew will likely be more than balanced by the 'Clarko effect' of being much better able to attract talent than in the past.

That's recruitment. But there's also development. Hopefully 'Unproven quality' can become 'Quality'. 'Unknowns' should become something else. If we make some assumptions about the kinds of transitions then we can anticipate a 'status quo' picture of where we might end up. If we nail the development and every kid turns into a star we'll do better. If they all turn into Kieran Harper, Aaron Black and Aaron Mullett we'll do worse.

Caveat: Yes I know this is getting speculative, but come for the ride.

For the record, these are the development probabilities I used for change between categories each year:

View attachment 1505662

In addition I assume that we can delist the worst performers on the list to maintain a list of 44. This won't always be true due to list balance and contract situations, but those aspects should only make minor differences and be quickly corrected in following years.

So putting that all together: retirements, recruitment, development, delistings, what does that project for the future?
Note that this doesn't take into account anything to do with specific recruiting or development, simply extrapolating forward our current age/quality list profile and seeing where it takes us.

View attachment 1505669

The key takeaway here is that we should get meaningful improvements in our list over the next 5-8 years. This is the flip side to our talent drought before 2015: We just won't be losing much out the top end, so every year we'll be bringing in talent and using that to raise the standards on the bottom end.

That said we can't really hit that 10+ level of quality that we would need to be a top list until 2026.

Is it possible to condense that into a single number, like a "List Quality Score?". Probably not, but I'll do it anyway. I give a score to each category, heavily weighting quality and downplaying the bottom end. Then I can add up those scores to give a value for firstly the entire list, and then for the 'top-30' assuming that's the most relevant group for year-to-year performance.

Spoiler: Quality Scores by Category

View attachment 1505674

View attachment 1505670


View attachment 1505680

Again, the same pattern: A significant climb over an extended period.

So what does all this mean? Well, it mostly confirms what most of us probably already know:

• Our list currently has a lot of unproven quality and 'fillers'
• We should see improvements in the list each year
• In the short term we still have to deal with the loss of Goldstein and Cunnington which will slow the list improvement
• Given vanilla assumptions, we should expect continue to meaningfully improve the list over a number of years because we will stop losing talent.
• The big lift next year will be all about systems, fitness, strength, engagement and individual development.
• The list seems to plausibly have enough talent to compete, but not in the short term.

Well duh.

 

[Hojuman]

HS, can you summarise this for me ? Ta ❤

 

[hsquid]

You have put a bit of work in there hsquid

Just called my mum and she asked what I've been doing today. I lied.

 

[LB2Snake]

Like a lot of people I'm torn on our list. On the one hand, our core of quality is clear. On the other, we still seem to have a lare number of 'filler' players. Some would call them list-cloggers. The quality of this finals series makes it clear: We need to have serious quality across the board to compete.

From next year we can expect meaningful improvements in gameplan and fitness, but we don't want to be stuck finishing 9th because the list remains below par. Renewing a list is not a quick process. It doesn't matter if you cut 5 or 10 a year, the constraint is on how much quality you can bring in. It's bloody hard to bring in more than 2 or so quality players in a year no matter how many you turn over.

So how close are we?
I share here some analysis I've done in my angst to get a better handle on where we are at.

--
I started by classifying our end-of-22 list into six categories:

Quality (6)​	Unproven Quality (7)​	Troopers (8)​
Cunnington Davies-Uniacke Goldstein Larkey McKay Simpkin	Comben Curtis Goater Horne-Francis Phillips Powell Thomas	Anderson Archer Greenwood Hall McDonald Scott Taylor Young
Unknown (8)​	Marginal (8)​	Disappointing (6)​
Bergman Coleman-Jones Dawson Edwards Ford Perez Stephenson Zurharr	Bonar Bosunavulagi Corr Mahony Turner J. Walker Xerri Ziebell	Hayden Lazzaro McGuiness Polec Spicer P. Walker

You could argue some of those (McDonald, Zurharr, Xerri, Lazzaro...) but I've tried to err on the pessimistic side.

That gives us a list mix like this:

View attachment 1505581

This gives us 21 players at 'Trooper' and above. Enough to form a core, but not enough for any depth at all.
On top of that, there only only 6 'Quality'. Of those, two are reaching the end (Goldstein and Cunnington) and one just scrapes into the category (Larkey). Compare with 5th-finishing Melbourne, for example, who would have 10-11 in that category.

[Note that this takes no account of team balance and positional needs. The assumption is that over time large imbalances will get patched up by targeted recruitment and trading.]

The advantage we have is that beyond Goldstein and Cunnington, we won't be losing any quality for a while.

Making some reasonable estimates about retirement ages and graphing it out shows that the situation is extreme. Apart from the above two, we will barely be losing anyone of note for the next 6-7 years.

View attachment 1505608

Note that this chart, and all that follow, hide the two lowest 'disposable' categories of players ('Marginal' and 'Disappointing') as the expectation is they will be the kind that can always be found to round up a list to full size.

In the meantime we will be doing recruiting. How has that gone in the past?
The chart below shows the end-of-2022 list categorised by quality and year-joined (not draft year). Note that the years before 2015 with no survivers are not shown.

View attachment 1505617

There are a few takeaways from this chart:

• As we all know, the five years between 2010 and 2014 have produced almost nothing for us and were a big reason for our recent struggles.
• During 2015-2017 we didn't pick up many but we stockpiled some quality (McKay, Simpkin, LDU and Larkey)
• The bulk of our potential list going forward has come from the last 4 recruitment seasons and the evolution of the 'Unproven quality' and 'Unknowns' in this will be crucial.

Spoiler: Caveat: Retrospective analysis

This analysis uses the categories of how we see players now but that doesn't mean thy were categorised that way when they arrived.
I don't think this distinction matters though because development can result in both upgrades and downgrades of potential and my model of development (see below) is quite balanced in that respect.

This chart also gives us an idea of what to expect from our recruitment and trading going forward. If we can continue the pattern of the last few years, we should expect each year to get:

• 1.75 x Unproven quality
• 1.5 x Trooper
• 1.5 x Unknown

There's now even a chance we could attract a genuine quality free agent, but I treat this as a bonus.

Spoiler: Caveat: Trading future picks

The past few years probably gives a slightly optimistic view because we essentially got CCJ and Curtis last year for our 2023 2nd and 3rd round picks. But averaging this out over 4 years reduces its impact and this skew will likely be more than balanced by the 'Clarko effect' of being much better able to attract talent than in the past.

That's recruitment. But there's also development. Hopefully 'Unproven quality' can become 'Quality'. 'Unknowns' should become something else. If we make some assumptions about the kinds of transitions then we can anticipate a 'status quo' picture of where we might end up. If we nail the development and every kid turns into a star we'll do better. If they all turn into Kieran Harper, Aaron Black and Aaron Mullett we'll do worse.

Caveat: Yes I know this is getting speculative, but come for the ride.

For the record, these are the development probabilities I used for change between categories each year:

View attachment 1505662

In addition I assume that we can delist the worst performers on the list to maintain a list of 44. This won't always be true due to list balance and contract situations, but those aspects should only make minor differences and be quickly corrected in following years.

So putting that all together: retirements, recruitment, development, delistings, what does that project for the future?
Note that this doesn't take into account anything to do with specific recruiting or development, simply extrapolating forward our current age/quality list profile and seeing where it takes us.

View attachment 1505669

The key takeaway here is that we should get meaningful improvements in our list over the next 5-8 years. This is the flip side to our talent drought before 2015: We just won't be losing much out the top end, so every year we'll be bringing in talent and using that to raise the standards on the bottom end.

That said we can't really hit that 10+ level of quality that we would need to be a top list until 2026.

Is it possible to condense that into a single number, like a "List Quality Score?". Probably not, but I'll do it anyway. I give a score to each category, heavily weighting quality and downplaying the bottom end. Then I can add up those scores to give a value for firstly the entire list, and then for the 'top-30' assuming that's the most relevant group for year-to-year performance.

Spoiler: Quality Scores by Category

View attachment 1505674

View attachment 1505670


View attachment 1505680

Again, the same pattern: A significant climb over an extended period.

So what does all this mean? Well, it mostly confirms what most of us probably already know:

• Our list currently has a lot of unproven quality and 'fillers'
• We should see improvements in the list each year
• In the short term we still have to deal with the loss of Goldstein and Cunnington which will slow the list improvement
• Given vanilla assumptions, we should expect continue to meaningfully improve the list over a number of years because we will stop losing talent.
• The big lift next year will be all about systems, fitness, strength, engagement and individual development.
• The list seems to plausibly have enough talent to compete, but not in the short term.

Unbelievable there hsquid …….pretty impressive.

 

[shimaburnsgrieg]

Like a lot of people I'm torn on our list. On the one hand, our core of quality is clear. On the other, we still seem to have a lare number of 'filler' players. Some would call them list-cloggers. The quality of this finals series makes it clear: We need to have serious quality across the board to compete.

From next year we can expect meaningful improvements in gameplan and fitness, but we don't want to be stuck finishing 9th because the list remains below par. Renewing a list is not a quick process. It doesn't matter if you cut 5 or 10 a year, the constraint is on how much quality you can bring in. It's bloody hard to bring in more than 2 or so regular players in a year no matter how many you turn over.

So how close are we?
I share here some analysis I've done in my angst to get a better handle on where we are at.

--
I started by classifying our end-of-22 list into six categories:

Quality (6)​	Unproven Quality (7)​	Troopers (8)​
Cunnington Davies-Uniacke Goldstein Larkey McKay Simpkin	Comben Curtis Goater Horne-Francis Phillips Powell Thomas	Anderson Archer Greenwood Hall McDonald Scott Taylor Young
Unknown (8)​	Marginal (8)​	Disappointing (6)​
Bergman Coleman-Jones Dawson Edwards Ford Perez Stephenson Zurharr	Bonar Bosunavulagi Corr Mahony Turner J. Walker Xerri Ziebell	Hayden Lazzaro McGuiness Polec Spicer P. Walker

You could argue some of those (McDonald, Zurharr, Xerri, Lazzaro...) but I've tried to err on the pessimistic side.

That gives us a list mix like this:

View attachment 1505581

This gives us 21 players at 'Trooper' and above. Enough to form a core, but not enough for any depth at all.
On top of that, there only only 6 'Quality'. Of those, two are reaching the end (Goldstein and Cunnington) and one just scrapes into the category (Larkey). Compare with 5th-finishing Melbourne, for example, who would have 10-11 in that category.

[Note that this takes no account of team balance and positional needs. The assumption is that over time large imbalances will get patched up by targeted recruitment and trading.]

The advantage we have is that beyond Goldstein and Cunnington, we won't be losing any quality for a while.

Making some reasonable estimates about retirement ages and graphing it out shows that the situation is extreme. Apart from the above two, we will barely be losing anyone of note for the next 6-7 years.

View attachment 1505608

Note that this chart, and all that follow, hide the two lowest 'disposable' categories of players ('Marginal' and 'Disappointing') as the expectation is they will be the kind that can always be found to round up a list to full size.

In the meantime we will be doing recruiting. How has that gone in the past?
The chart below shows the end-of-2022 list categorised by quality and year-joined (not draft year). Note that the years before 2015 with no survivers are not shown.

View attachment 1505617

There are a few takeaways from this chart:

• As we all know, the five years between 2010 and 2014 have produced almost nothing for us and were a big reason for our recent struggles.
• During 2015-2017 we didn't pick up many but we stockpiled some quality (McKay, Simpkin, LDU and Larkey)
• The bulk of our potential list going forward has come from the last 4 recruitment seasons and the evolution of the 'Unproven quality' and 'Unknowns' in this will be crucial.

Spoiler: Caveat: Retrospective analysis

This analysis uses the categories of how we see players now but that doesn't mean thy were categorised that way when they arrived.
I don't think this distinction matters though because development can result in both upgrades and downgrades of potential and my model of development (see below) is quite balanced in that respect.

This chart also gives us an idea of what to expect from our recruitment and trading going forward. If we can continue the pattern of the last few years, we should expect each year to get:

• 1.75 x Unproven quality
• 1.5 x Trooper
• 1.5 x Unknown

There's now even a chance we could attract a genuine quality free agent, but I treat this as a bonus.

Spoiler: Caveat: Trading future picks

The past few years probably gives a slightly optimistic view because we essentially got CCJ and Curtis last year for our 2023 2nd and 3rd round picks. But averaging this out over 4 years reduces its impact and this skew will likely be more than balanced by the 'Clarko effect' of being much better able to attract talent than in the past.

That's recruitment. But there's also development. Hopefully 'Unproven quality' can become 'Quality'. 'Unknowns' should become something else. If we make some assumptions about the kinds of transitions then we can anticipate a 'status quo' picture of where we might end up. If we nail the development and every kid turns into a star we'll do better. If they all turn into Kieran Harper, Aaron Black and Aaron Mullett we'll do worse.

Caveat: Yes I know this is getting speculative, but come for the ride.

For the record, these are the development probabilities I used for change between categories each year:

View attachment 1505662

In addition I assume that we can delist the worst performers on the list to maintain a list of 44. This won't always be true due to list balance and contract situations, but those aspects should only make minor differences and be quickly corrected in following years.

Putting that all together: retirements, recruitment, development, delistings, what does that project for the future?

View attachment 1505669

The key takeaway here is that we should get meaningful improvements in our list over the next 5-7 years. This is the flip side to our talent drought before 2015: We just won't be losing much out the top end, so every year we'll be bringing in talent and using that to raise the standards on the bottom end.

That said we can't really hit that 10+ level of quality that we would need to be a top list until 2026.

Note that this doesn't take into account anything to do with specific recruiting or development, simply extrapolating forward our current age/quality list profile and seeing where it takes us.

Is it possible to condense that into a single number, like a "List Quality Score?". Probably not, but I'll do it anyway. I give a score to each category, heavily weighting quality and downplaying the bottom end. Then I can add up those scores to give a value for firstly the entire list, and then for the 'top-30' assuming that's the most relevant group for year-to-year performance.

Spoiler: Quality Scores by Category

View attachment 1505674

View attachment 1505670


View attachment 1505680

Again, the same pattern: A significant climb over an extended period.

All of this mostly confirms what most of us probably already know:

• Our list currently has a lot of unproven quality and 'fillers'
• We should see improvements in the list each year
• In the short term we still have to deal with the loss of Goldstein and Cunnington which will slow the list improvement
• Given vanilla assumptions, we should expect continue to meaningfully improve the list over a number of years because we will stop losing talent.
• The big lift next year will be all about systems, fitness, strength, engagement and individual development.
• The list seems to plausibly have enough talent to compete, but not in the short term.

The key takeaway here is that we should get meaningful improvements in our list over the next 5-7 years.

Ouch - that part hurt.

But great analysis.

 

[Ashley B]

One graph you seemed to have overlooked hsquid is the fact that goal assists will increase incrementally over the coming years. We may even get an All Australian if all goes well lol

 

[RossHenshaw]

Like a lot of people I'm torn on our list. On the one hand, our core of quality is clear. On the other, we still seem to have a lare number of 'filler' players. Some would call them list-cloggers. The quality of this finals series makes it clear: We need to have serious quality across the board to compete.

From next year we can expect meaningful improvements in gameplan and fitness, but we don't want to be stuck finishing 9th because the list remains below par. Renewing a list is not a quick process. It doesn't matter if you cut 5 or 10 a year, the constraint is on how much quality you can bring in. It's bloody hard to bring in more than 2 or so regular players in a year no matter how many you turn over.

So how close are we?
I share here some analysis I've done in my angst to get a better handle on where we are at.

--
I started by classifying our end-of-22 list into six categories:

Quality (6)​	Unproven Quality (7)​	Troopers (8)​
Cunnington Davies-Uniacke Goldstein Larkey McKay Simpkin	Comben Curtis Goater Horne-Francis Phillips Powell Thomas	Anderson Archer Greenwood Hall McDonald Scott Taylor Young
Unknown (8)​	Marginal (8)​	Disappointing (6)​
Bergman Coleman-Jones Dawson Edwards Ford Perez Stephenson Zurharr	Bonar Bosunavulagi Corr Mahony Turner J. Walker Xerri Ziebell	Hayden Lazzaro McGuiness Polec Spicer P. Walker

You could argue some of those (McDonald, Zurharr, Xerri, Lazzaro...) but I've tried to err on the pessimistic side.

That gives us a list mix like this:

View attachment 1505581

This gives us 21 players at 'Trooper' and above. Enough to form a core, but not enough for any depth at all.
On top of that, there only only 6 'Quality'. Of those, two are reaching the end (Goldstein and Cunnington) and one just scrapes into the category (Larkey). Compare with 5th-finishing Melbourne, for example, who would have 10-11 in that category.

[Note that this takes no account of team balance and positional needs. The assumption is that over time large imbalances will get patched up by targeted recruitment and trading.]

The advantage we have is that beyond Goldstein and Cunnington, we won't be losing any quality for a while.

Making some reasonable estimates about retirement ages and graphing it out shows that the situation is extreme. Apart from the above two, we will barely be losing anyone of note for the next 6-7 years.

View attachment 1505608

Note that this chart, and all that follow, hide the two lowest 'disposable' categories of players ('Marginal' and 'Disappointing') as the expectation is they will be the kind that can always be found to round up a list to full size.

In the meantime we will be doing recruiting. How has that gone in the past?
The chart below shows the end-of-2022 list categorised by quality and year-joined (not draft year). Note that the years before 2015 with no survivers are not shown.

View attachment 1505617

There are a few takeaways from this chart:

• As we all know, the five years between 2010 and 2014 have produced almost nothing for us and were a big reason for our recent struggles.
• During 2015-2017 we didn't pick up many but we stockpiled some quality (McKay, Simpkin, LDU and Larkey)
• The bulk of our potential list going forward has come from the last 4 recruitment seasons and the evolution of the 'Unproven quality' and 'Unknowns' in this will be crucial.

Spoiler: Caveat: Retrospective analysis

This analysis uses the categories of how we see players now but that doesn't mean thy were categorised that way when they arrived.
I don't think this distinction matters though because development can result in both upgrades and downgrades of potential and my model of development (see below) is quite balanced in that respect.

This chart also gives us an idea of what to expect from our recruitment and trading going forward. If we can continue the pattern of the last few years, we should expect each year to get:

• 1.75 x Unproven quality
• 1.5 x Trooper
• 1.5 x Unknown

There's now even a chance we could attract a genuine quality free agent, but I treat this as a bonus.

Spoiler: Caveat: Trading future picks

The past few years probably gives a slightly optimistic view because we essentially got CCJ and Curtis last year for our 2023 2nd and 3rd round picks. But averaging this out over 4 years reduces its impact and this skew will likely be more than balanced by the 'Clarko effect' of being much better able to attract talent than in the past.

That's recruitment. But there's also development. Hopefully 'Unproven quality' can become 'Quality'. 'Unknowns' should become something else. If we make some assumptions about the kinds of transitions then we can anticipate a 'status quo' picture of where we might end up. If we nail the development and every kid turns into a star we'll do better. If they all turn into Kieran Harper, Aaron Black and Aaron Mullett we'll do worse.

Caveat: Yes I know this is getting speculative, but come for the ride.

For the record, these are the development probabilities I used for change between categories each year:

View attachment 1505662

In addition I assume that we can delist the worst performers on the list to maintain a list of 44. This won't always be true due to list balance and contract situations, but those aspects should only make minor differences and be quickly corrected in following years.

Putting that all together: retirements, recruitment, development, delistings, what does that project for the future?

View attachment 1505669

The key takeaway here is that we should get meaningful improvements in our list over the next 5-7 years. This is the flip side to our talent drought before 2015: We just won't be losing much out the top end, so every year we'll be bringing in talent and using that to raise the standards on the bottom end.

That said we can't really hit that 10+ level of quality that we would need to be a top list until 2026.

Note that this doesn't take into account anything to do with specific recruiting or development, simply extrapolating forward our current age/quality list profile and seeing where it takes us.

Is it possible to condense that into a single number, like a "List Quality Score?". Probably not, but I'll do it anyway. I give a score to each category, heavily weighting quality and downplaying the bottom end. Then I can add up those scores to give a value for firstly the entire list, and then for the 'top-30' assuming that's the most relevant group for year-to-year performance.

Spoiler: Quality Scores by Category

View attachment 1505674

View attachment 1505670


View attachment 1505680

Again, the same pattern: A significant climb over an extended period.

All of this mostly confirms what most of us probably already know:

• Our list currently has a lot of unproven quality and 'fillers'
• We should see improvements in the list each year
• In the short term we still have to deal with the loss of Goldstein and Cunnington which will slow the list improvement
• Given vanilla assumptions, we should expect continue to meaningfully improve the list over a number of years because we will stop losing talent.
• The big lift next year will be all about systems, fitness, strength, engagement and individual development.
• The list seems to plausibly have enough talent to compete, but not in the short term.

 

[Mr Lloyd Christmas]

Ideally hope Ziebull never plays again and retires. Warrior but finished.

It's incredibly frustrating to watch.

Sure he will continue for $$, but we are going nowhere when a totally cooked Captain continues to play.

 

[Kangaroos techno]

Like a lot of people I'm torn on our list. On the one hand, our core of quality is clear. On the other, we still seem to have a lare number of 'filler' players. Some would call them list-cloggers. The quality of this finals series makes it clear: We need to have serious quality across the board to compete.

From next year we can expect meaningful improvements in gameplan and fitness, but we don't want to be stuck finishing 9th because the list remains below par. Renewing a list is not a quick process. It doesn't matter if you cut 5 or 10 a year, the constraint is on how much quality you can bring in. It's bloody hard to bring in more than 2 or so regular players in a year no matter how many you turn over.

So how close are we?
I share here some analysis I've done in my angst to get a better handle on where we are at.

--
I started by classifying our end-of-22 list into six categories:

Quality (6)​	Unproven Quality (7)​	Troopers (8)​
Cunnington Davies-Uniacke Goldstein Larkey McKay Simpkin	Comben Curtis Goater Horne-Francis Phillips Powell Thomas	Anderson Archer Greenwood Hall McDonald Scott Taylor Young
Unknown (8)​	Marginal (8)​	Disappointing (6)​
Bergman Coleman-Jones Dawson Edwards Ford Perez Stephenson Zurharr	Bonar Bosunavulagi Corr Mahony Turner J. Walker Xerri Ziebell	Hayden Lazzaro McGuiness Polec Spicer P. Walker

You could argue some of those (McDonald, Zurharr, Xerri, Lazzaro...) but I've tried to err on the pessimistic side.

That gives us a list mix like this:

View attachment 1505581

This gives us 21 players at 'Trooper' and above. Enough to form a core, but not enough for any depth at all.
On top of that, there only only 6 'Quality'. Of those, two are reaching the end (Goldstein and Cunnington) and one just scrapes into the category (Larkey). Compare with 5th-finishing Melbourne, for example, who would have 10-11 in that category.

[Note that this takes no account of team balance and positional needs. The assumption is that over time large imbalances will get patched up by targeted recruitment and trading.]

The advantage we have is that beyond Goldstein and Cunnington, we won't be losing any quality for a while.

Making some reasonable estimates about retirement ages and graphing it out shows that the situation is extreme. Apart from the above two, we will barely be losing anyone of note for the next 6-7 years.

View attachment 1505608

Note that this chart, and all that follow, hide the two lowest 'disposable' categories of players ('Marginal' and 'Disappointing') as the expectation is they will be the kind that can always be found to round up a list to full size.

In the meantime we will be doing recruiting. How has that gone in the past?
The chart below shows the end-of-2022 list categorised by quality and year-joined (not draft year). Note that the years before 2015 with no survivers are not shown.

View attachment 1505617

There are a few takeaways from this chart:

• As we all know, the five years between 2010 and 2014 have produced almost nothing for us and were a big reason for our recent struggles.
• During 2015-2017 we didn't pick up many but we stockpiled some quality (McKay, Simpkin, LDU and Larkey)
• The bulk of our potential list going forward has come from the last 4 recruitment seasons and the evolution of the 'Unproven quality' and 'Unknowns' in this will be crucial.

Spoiler: Caveat: Retrospective analysis

This analysis uses the categories of how we see players now but that doesn't mean thy were categorised that way when they arrived.
I don't think this distinction matters though because development can result in both upgrades and downgrades of potential and my model of development (see below) is quite balanced in that respect.

This chart also gives us an idea of what to expect from our recruitment and trading going forward. If we can continue the pattern of the last few years, we should expect each year to get:

• 1.75 x Unproven quality
• 1.5 x Trooper
• 1.5 x Unknown

There's now even a chance we could attract a genuine quality free agent, but I treat this as a bonus.

Spoiler: Caveat: Trading future picks

The past few years probably gives a slightly optimistic view because we essentially got CCJ and Curtis last year for our 2023 2nd and 3rd round picks. But averaging this out over 4 years reduces its impact and this skew will likely be more than balanced by the 'Clarko effect' of being much better able to attract talent than in the past.

That's recruitment. But there's also development. Hopefully 'Unproven quality' can become 'Quality'. 'Unknowns' should become something else. If we make some assumptions about the kinds of transitions then we can anticipate a 'status quo' picture of where we might end up. If we nail the development and every kid turns into a star we'll do better. If they all turn into Kieran Harper, Aaron Black and Aaron Mullett we'll do worse.

Caveat: Yes I know this is getting speculative, but come for the ride.

For the record, these are the development probabilities I used for change between categories each year:

View attachment 1505662

In addition I assume that we can delist the worst performers on the list to maintain a list of 44. This won't always be true due to list balance and contract situations, but those aspects should only make minor differences and be quickly corrected in following years.

Putting that all together: retirements, recruitment, development, delistings, what does that project for the future?

View attachment 1505669

The key takeaway here is that we should get meaningful improvements in our list over the next 5-7 years. This is the flip side to our talent drought before 2015: We just won't be losing much out the top end, so every year we'll be bringing in talent and using that to raise the standards on the bottom end.

That said we can't really hit that 10+ level of quality that we would need to be a top list until 2026.

Note that this doesn't take into account anything to do with specific recruiting or development, simply extrapolating forward our current age/quality list profile and seeing where it takes us.

Is it possible to condense that into a single number, like a "List Quality Score?". Probably not, but I'll do it anyway. I give a score to each category, heavily weighting quality and downplaying the bottom end. Then I can add up those scores to give a value for firstly the entire list, and then for the 'top-30' assuming that's the most relevant group for year-to-year performance.

Spoiler: Quality Scores by Category

View attachment 1505674

View attachment 1505670


View attachment 1505680

Again, the same pattern: A significant climb over an extended period.

All of this mostly confirms what most of us probably already know:

• Our list currently has a lot of unproven quality and 'fillers'
• We should see improvements in the list each year
• In the short term we still have to deal with the loss of Goldstein and Cunnington which will slow the list improvement
• Given vanilla assumptions, we should expect continue to meaningfully improve the list over a number of years because we will stop losing talent.
• The big lift next year will be all about systems, fitness, strength, engagement and individual development.
• The list seems to plausibly have enough talent to compete, but not in the short term.

Gonna have to wait until the morning so i can put on the kettle and mull over this great post properly. Thank you for the effort!

 

[hilly]

Like a lot of people I'm torn on our list. On the one hand, our core of quality is clear. On the other, we still seem to have a lare number of 'filler' players. Some would call them list-cloggers. The quality of this finals series makes it clear: We need to have serious quality across the board to compete.

From next year we can expect meaningful improvements in gameplan and fitness, but we don't want to be stuck finishing 9th because the list remains below par. Renewing a list is not a quick process. It doesn't matter if you cut 5 or 10 a year, the constraint is on how much quality you can bring in. It's bloody hard to bring in more than 2 or so regular players in a year no matter how many you turn over.

So how close are we?
I share here some analysis I've done in my angst to get a better handle on where we are at.

--
I started by classifying our end-of-22 list into six categories:

Quality (6)​	Unproven Quality (7)​	Troopers (8)​
Cunnington Davies-Uniacke Goldstein Larkey McKay Simpkin	Comben Curtis Goater Horne-Francis Phillips Powell Thomas	Anderson Archer Greenwood Hall McDonald Scott Taylor Young
Unknown (8)​	Marginal (8)​	Disappointing (6)​
Bergman Coleman-Jones Dawson Edwards Ford Perez Stephenson Zurharr	Bonar Bosunavulagi Corr Mahony Turner J. Walker Xerri Ziebell	Hayden Lazzaro McGuiness Polec Spicer P. Walker

You could argue some of those (McDonald, Zurharr, Xerri, Lazzaro...) but I've tried to err on the pessimistic side.

That gives us a list mix like this:

View attachment 1505581

We have 21 players at 'Trooper' and above. Enough to form a core, but not enough for any depth at all.
On top of that, there only only 6 'Quality'. Of those, two are reaching the end (Goldstein and Cunnington) and one just scrapes into the category (Larkey). Compare with 5th-finishing Melbourne, for example, who would have 10-11 in that category.

[Note that this takes no account of team balance and positional needs. The assumption is that over time large imbalances will get patched up by targeted recruitment and trading.]

The advantage we have is that beyond Goldstein and Cunnington, we won't be losing any quality for a while.

Making some reasonable estimates about retirement ages and graphing it out shows that the situation is extreme. Apart from the above two, we will barely be losing anyone of note for the next 6-7 years.

View attachment 1505608

Note that this chart, and all that follow, hide the two lowest 'disposable' categories of players ('Marginal' and 'Disappointing') as the expectation is they will be the kind that can always be found to round up a list to full size.

In the meantime we will be doing recruiting. How has that gone in the past?
The chart below shows the end-of-2022 list categorised by quality and year-joined (not draft year). Note that the years before 2015 with no survivers are not shown.

View attachment 1505617

There are a few takeaways from this chart:

• As we all know, the five years between 2010 and 2014 have produced almost nothing for us and were a big reason for our recent struggles.
• During 2015-2017 we didn't pick up many but we stockpiled some quality (McKay, Simpkin, LDU and Larkey)
• The bulk of our potential list going forward has come from the last 4 recruitment seasons and the evolution of the 'Unproven quality' and 'Unknowns' in this will be crucial.

Spoiler: Caveat: Retrospective analysis

This analysis uses the categories of how we see players now but that doesn't mean thy were categorised that way when they arrived.
I don't think this distinction matters though because development can result in both upgrades and downgrades of potential and my model of development (see below) is quite balanced in that respect.

This chart also gives us an idea of what to expect from our recruitment and trading going forward. If we can continue the pattern of the last few years, we should expect each year to get:

• 1.75 x Unproven quality
• 1.5 x Trooper
• 1.5 x Unknown

There's now even a chance we could attract a genuine quality free agent, but I treat this as a bonus.

Spoiler: Caveat: Trading future picks

The past few years probably gives a slightly optimistic view because we essentially got CCJ and Curtis last year for our 2023 2nd and 3rd round picks. But averaging this out over 4 years reduces its impact and this skew will likely be more than balanced by the 'Clarko effect' of being much better able to attract talent than in the past. The likelihood of priority picks in this draft is another compensation not otherwise factored in.

That's recruitment. But there's also development. Hopefully 'Unproven quality' can become 'Quality'. 'Unknowns' should become something else. If we make some assumptions about the kinds of transitions then we can anticipate a 'status quo' picture of where we might end up. If we nail the development and every kid turns into a star we'll do better. If they all turn into Kieran Harper, Aaron Black and Aaron Mullett we'll do worse.

Caveat: Yes I know this is getting speculative, but come for the ride.

For the record, these are the development probabilities I used for change between categories each year:

View attachment 1505662

In addition I assume that we can delist the worst performers on the list to maintain a list of 44. This won't always be true due to list balance and contract situations. This exaggerates the disappearance of the 'Disappointings' in the charts below but only makes minor differences at the fringes and be corrected in following years

Putting that all together: retirements, recruitment, development, delistings, what does that project for the future?

View attachment 1505669

The key takeaway here is that we should get meaningful improvements in our list over the next 5-7 years. This is the flip side to our talent drought before 2015: We just won't be losing much through decline and retirement, so every year we'll be bringing in talent and using that to raise the standards at the bottom end.

That said we can't really hit that 10+ level of quality that we would need to be a top list until 2026.

Note that this doesn't take into account anything to do with specific recruiting or development, simply extrapolating forward our current age/quality list profile and seeing where it takes us.

Is it possible to condense that into a single number, like a "List Quality Score?". Probably not, but I'll do it anyway. I give a score to each category, heavily weighting quality and downplaying the bottom end. Then I can add up those scores to give a value for firstly the entire list, and then for the 'top-30' assuming that's the most relevant group for year-to-year performance.

Spoiler: Quality Scores by Category

View attachment 1505674

View attachment 1505670


View attachment 1505680

Again, the same pattern: A significant climb over an extended period.

All of this mostly confirms what most of us probably already know:

• Our list currently has a lot of unproven quality and 'fillers'
• We should see improvements in the list each year
• In the short term we still have to deal with the loss of Goldstein and Cunnington which will slow the list improvement
• Given vanilla assumptions, we should expect to continue to meaningfully improve the list over a number of years because we will stop losing talent.
• The big lift next year will be all about systems, fitness, strength, engagement and individual development.
• The list seems to plausibly have enough talent to compete, but not in the short term.

TLDR.

 

[Shinboner1]

Ideally hope Ziebull never plays again and retires. Warrior but finished.

It's incredibly frustrating to watch.

Sure he will continue for $$, but we are going nowhere when a totally cooked Captain continues to play.

Finishes out his contract and then gone I reckon

 

[Errol Street Bandit]

Like a lot of people I'm torn on our list. On the one hand, our core of quality is clear. On the other, we still seem to have a lare number of 'filler' players. Some would call them list-cloggers. The quality of this finals series makes it clear: We need to have serious quality across the board to compete.

From next year we can expect meaningful improvements in gameplan and fitness, but we don't want to be stuck finishing 9th because the list remains below par. Renewing a list is not a quick process. It doesn't matter if you cut 5 or 10 a year, the constraint is on how much quality you can bring in. It's bloody hard to bring in more than 2 or so regular players in a year no matter how many you turn over.

So how close are we?
I share here some analysis I've done in my angst to get a better handle on where we are at.

--
I started by classifying our end-of-22 list into six categories:

Quality (6)​	Unproven Quality (7)​	Troopers (8)​
Cunnington Davies-Uniacke Goldstein Larkey McKay Simpkin	Comben Curtis Goater Horne-Francis Phillips Powell Thomas	Anderson Archer Greenwood Hall McDonald Scott Taylor Young
Unknown (8)​	Marginal (8)​	Disappointing (6)​
Bergman Coleman-Jones Dawson Edwards Ford Perez Stephenson Zurharr	Bonar Bosunavulagi Corr Mahony Turner J. Walker Xerri Ziebell	Hayden Lazzaro McGuiness Polec Spicer P. Walker

You could argue some of those (McDonald, Zurharr, Xerri, Lazzaro...) but I've tried to err on the pessimistic side.

That gives us a list mix like this:

View attachment 1505581

We have 21 players at 'Trooper' and above. Enough to form a core, but not enough for any depth at all.
On top of that, there only only 6 'Quality'. Of those, two are reaching the end (Goldstein and Cunnington) and one just scrapes into the category (Larkey). Compare with 5th-finishing Melbourne, for example, who would have 10-11 in that category.

[Note that this takes no account of team balance and positional needs. The assumption is that over time large imbalances will get patched up by targeted recruitment and trading.]

The advantage we have is that beyond Goldstein and Cunnington, we won't be losing any quality for a while.

Making some reasonable estimates about retirement ages and graphing it out shows that the situation is extreme. Apart from the above two, we will barely be losing anyone of note for the next 6-7 years.

View attachment 1505608

Note that this chart, and all that follow, hide the two lowest 'disposable' categories of players ('Marginal' and 'Disappointing') as the expectation is they will be the kind that can always be found to round up a list to full size.

In the meantime we will be doing recruiting. How has that gone in the past?
The chart below shows the end-of-2022 list categorised by quality and year-joined (not draft year). Note that the years before 2015 with no survivers are not shown.

View attachment 1505617

There are a few takeaways from this chart:

• As we all know, the five years between 2010 and 2014 have produced almost nothing for us and were a big reason for our recent struggles.
• During 2015-2017 we didn't pick up many but we stockpiled some quality (McKay, Simpkin, LDU and Larkey)
• The bulk of our potential list going forward has come from the last 4 recruitment seasons and the evolution of the 'Unproven quality' and 'Unknowns' in this will be crucial.

Spoiler: Caveat: Retrospective analysis

This analysis uses the categories of how we see players now but that doesn't mean thy were categorised that way when they arrived.
I don't think this distinction matters though because development can result in both upgrades and downgrades of potential and my model of development (see below) is quite balanced in that respect.

This chart also gives us an idea of what to expect from our recruitment and trading going forward. If we can continue the pattern of the last few years, we should expect each year to get:

• 1.75 x Unproven quality
• 1.5 x Trooper
• 1.5 x Unknown

There's now even a chance we could attract a genuine quality free agent, but I treat this as a bonus.

Spoiler: Caveat: Trading future picks

The past few years probably gives a slightly optimistic view because we essentially got CCJ and Curtis last year for our 2023 2nd and 3rd round picks. But averaging this out over 4 years reduces its impact and this skew will likely be more than balanced by the 'Clarko effect' of being much better able to attract talent than in the past. The likelihood of priority picks in this draft is another compensation not otherwise factored in.

That's recruitment. But there's also development. Hopefully 'Unproven quality' can become 'Quality'. 'Unknowns' should become something else. If we make some assumptions about the kinds of transitions then we can anticipate a 'status quo' picture of where we might end up. If we nail the development and every kid turns into a star we'll do better. If they all turn into Kieran Harper, Aaron Black and Aaron Mullett we'll do worse.

Caveat: Yes I know this is getting speculative, but come for the ride.

For the record, these are the development probabilities I used for change between categories each year:

View attachment 1505662

In addition I assume that we can delist the worst performers on the list to maintain a list of 44. This won't always be true due to list balance and contract situations. This exaggerates the disappearance of the 'Disappointings' in the charts below but only makes minor differences at the fringes and be corrected in following years

Putting that all together: retirements, recruitment, development, delistings, what does that project for the future?

View attachment 1505669

The key takeaway here is that we should get meaningful improvements in our list over the next 5-7 years. This is the flip side to our talent drought before 2015: We just won't be losing much through decline and retirement, so every year we'll be bringing in talent and using that to raise the standards at the bottom end.

That said we can't really hit that 10+ level of quality that we would need to be a top list until 2026.

Note that this doesn't take into account anything to do with specific recruiting or development, simply extrapolating forward our current age/quality list profile and seeing where it takes us.

Is it possible to condense that into a single number, like a "List Quality Score?". Probably not, but I'll do it anyway. I give a score to each category, heavily weighting quality and downplaying the bottom end. Then I can add up those scores to give a value for firstly the entire list, and then for the 'top-30' assuming that's the most relevant group for year-to-year performance.

Spoiler: Quality Scores by Category

View attachment 1505674

View attachment 1505670


View attachment 1505680

Again, the same pattern: A significant climb over an extended period.

All of this mostly confirms what most of us probably already know:

• Our list currently has a lot of unproven quality and 'fillers'
• We should see improvements in the list each year
• In the short term we still have to deal with the loss of Goldstein and Cunnington which will slow the list improvement
• Given vanilla assumptions, we should expect to continue to meaningfully improve the list over a number of years because we will stop losing talent.
• The big lift next year will be all about systems, fitness, strength, engagement and individual development.
• The list seems to plausibly have enough talent to compete, but not in the short term.

That is good work, you should apply for a list management position at NM!!!

 

[Shermanator]

That is good work, you should apply for a list management position at NM!!!

Glen Luff likes this

 

[koshari]

Like a lot of people I'm torn on our list. On the one hand, our core of quality is clear. On the other, we still seem to have a lare number of 'filler' players. Some would call them list-cloggers. The quality of this finals series makes it clear: We need to have serious quality across the board to compete.

From next year we can expect meaningful improvements in gameplan and fitness, but we don't want to be stuck finishing 9th because the list remains below par. Renewing a list is not a quick process. It doesn't matter if you cut 5 or 10 a year, the constraint is on how much quality you can bring in. It's bloody hard to bring in more than 2 or so regular players in a year no matter how many you turn over.

So how close are we?
I share here some analysis I've done in my angst to get a better handle on where we are at.

--
I started by classifying our end-of-22 list into six categories:

Quality (6)​	Unproven Quality (7)​	Troopers (8)​
Cunnington Davies-Uniacke Goldstein Larkey McKay Simpkin	Comben Curtis Goater Horne-Francis Phillips Powell Thomas	Anderson Archer Greenwood Hall McDonald Scott Taylor Young
Unknown (8)​	Marginal (8)​	Disappointing (6)​
Bergman Coleman-Jones Dawson Edwards Ford Perez Stephenson Zurharr	Bonar Bosunavulagi Corr Mahony Turner J. Walker Xerri Ziebell	Hayden Lazzaro McGuiness Polec Spicer P. Walker

You could argue some of those (McDonald, Zurharr, Xerri, Lazzaro...) but I've tried to err on the pessimistic side.

That gives us a list mix like this:

View attachment 1505581

We have 21 players at 'Trooper' and above. Enough to form a core, but not enough for any depth at all.
On top of that, there only only 6 'Quality'. Of those, two are reaching the end (Goldstein and Cunnington) and one just scrapes into the category (Larkey). Compare with 5th-finishing Melbourne, for example, who would have 10-11 in that category.

[Note that this takes no account of team balance and positional needs. The assumption is that over time large imbalances will get patched up by targeted recruitment and trading.]

The advantage we have is that beyond Goldstein and Cunnington, we won't be losing any quality for a while.

Making some reasonable estimates about retirement ages and graphing it out shows that the situation is extreme. Apart from the above two, we will barely be losing anyone of note for the next 6-7 years.

View attachment 1505608

Note that this chart, and all that follow, hide the two lowest 'disposable' categories of players ('Marginal' and 'Disappointing') as the expectation is they will be the kind that can always be found to round up a list to full size.

In the meantime we will be doing recruiting. How has that gone in the past?
The chart below shows the end-of-2022 list categorised by quality and year-joined (not draft year). Note that the years before 2015 with no survivers are not shown.

View attachment 1505617

There are a few takeaways from this chart:

• As we all know, the five years between 2010 and 2014 have produced almost nothing for us and were a big reason for our recent struggles.
• During 2015-2017 we didn't pick up many but we stockpiled some quality (McKay, Simpkin, LDU and Larkey)
• The bulk of our potential list going forward has come from the last 4 recruitment seasons and the evolution of the 'Unproven quality' and 'Unknowns' in this will be crucial.

Spoiler: Caveat: Retrospective analysis

This analysis uses the categories of how we see players now but that doesn't mean thy were categorised that way when they arrived.
I don't think this distinction matters though because development can result in both upgrades and downgrades of potential and my model of development (see below) is quite balanced in that respect.

This chart also gives us an idea of what to expect from our recruitment and trading going forward. If we can continue the pattern of the last few years, we should expect each year to get:

• 1.75 x Unproven quality
• 1.5 x Trooper
• 1.5 x Unknown

There's now even a chance we could attract a genuine quality free agent, but I treat this as a bonus.

Spoiler: Caveat: Trading future picks

The past few years probably gives a slightly optimistic view because we essentially got CCJ and Curtis last year for our 2023 2nd and 3rd round picks. But averaging this out over 4 years reduces its impact and this skew will likely be more than balanced by the 'Clarko effect' of being much better able to attract talent than in the past. The likelihood of priority picks in this draft is another compensation not otherwise factored in.

That's recruitment. But there's also development. Hopefully 'Unproven quality' can become 'Quality'. 'Unknowns' should become something else. If we make some assumptions about the kinds of transitions then we can anticipate a 'status quo' picture of where we might end up. If we nail the development and every kid turns into a star we'll do better. If they all turn into Kieran Harper, Aaron Black and Aaron Mullett we'll do worse.

Caveat: Yes I know this is getting speculative, but come for the ride.

For the record, these are the development probabilities I used for change between categories each year:

View attachment 1505662

In addition I assume that we can delist the worst performers on the list to maintain a list of 44. This won't always be true due to list balance and contract situations. This exaggerates the disappearance of the 'Disappointings' in the charts below but only makes minor differences at the fringes and be corrected in following years

Putting that all together: retirements, recruitment, development, delistings, what does that project for the future?

View attachment 1505669

The key takeaway here is that we should get meaningful improvements in our list over the next 5-7 years. This is the flip side to our talent drought before 2015: We just won't be losing much through decline and retirement, so every year we'll be bringing in talent and using that to raise the standards at the bottom end.

That said we can't really hit that 10+ level of quality that we would need to be a top list until 2026.

Note that this doesn't take into account anything to do with specific recruiting or development, simply extrapolating forward our current age/quality list profile and seeing where it takes us.

Is it possible to condense that into a single number, like a "List Quality Score?". Probably not, but I'll do it anyway. I give a score to each category, heavily weighting quality and downplaying the bottom end. Then I can add up those scores to give a value for firstly the entire list, and then for the 'top-30' assuming that's the most relevant group for year-to-year performance.

Spoiler: Quality Scores by Category

View attachment 1505674

View attachment 1505670


View attachment 1505680

Again, the same pattern: A significant climb over an extended period.

All of this mostly confirms what most of us probably already know:

• Our list currently has a lot of unproven quality and 'fillers'
• We should see improvements in the list each year
• In the short term we still have to deal with the loss of Goldstein and Cunnington which will slow the list improvement
• Given vanilla assumptions, we should expect to continue to meaningfully improve the list over a number of years because we will stop losing talent.
• The big lift next year will be all about systems, fitness, strength, engagement and individual development.
• The list seems to plausibly have enough talent to compete, but not in the short term.

Nothing wrong with the trooper,

 

[Mr Lloyd Christmas]

Finishes out his contract and then gone I reckon

That is what will happen but I maintain I think Jack should retire, maybe even Captain the VFL team.