A lot can change in two weeks in the AFL. And there are so many questions with no really satisfying answers across a whole range of teams, players and trends.

Rather than do a 6,000 word column – oh yes, I thought about it – let’s wrap six teams in an express ‘Since you asked’.

Since You Asked: What the hell is happening?
Foreign forces top the VFL ladder. The Blues lost by almost eleventy goals on a Friday night for the third time. Hawthorn is a 0.500 team with a percentage of a 0.875 team. It’s been an incredibly unpredictable start to the 2015 AFL season.

What the hell is happening? Hot takes are flying left, right and centre.
It feels a bit different, this season. Look I hate to rush you but I’ve got a deep dive to write. Can we get this over with?

Well if you want to be that way. I thought we were friends. So, are Hawthorn out of the running?
No. They’re 4-4, but with a percentage of 145.8 – that’s the highest in at least 15 seasons. Four teams have had a percentage of 120 or more with a 4-4 record since the turn of the century: 2008 Sydney (finished sixth), 2009 Carlton (seventh), 2013 Adelaide (11th) and last year’s West Coast (ninth). Its not exactly a decisive stat, notwithstanding that the Hawks have a better percentage than all of those sides.

But, Hawthorn are very good at football. They’ll be fine.

You upgraded the Dogs to eighth spot in your last finger-in-the-air exercise. Regretting that now?
A premature annunciation, you say? The Dogs have been a little off recently, but they play a brand of football that means they won’t be blown out of the water too often.

But Greater Western Sydney is stomping all over the competition. That makes things difficult around this part of the ladder.

How about Richmond? You had them slipping out of the eight before the season, and yet they just knocked off a preliminary finalist from 2014 at home. More regrets?
You’ll see my view on Port Adelaide at the end of the column. I had them slipping, and maintain that view.

Are West Coast the second best side in the competition?
One stat says yes: 6-2 sides tend to make the finals pretty consistently.

One stat says pump the breaks: Strength of schedule indicates they’ve played a powder puff draw to date. Hold fire, everyone. But I’ll admit I’ve underestimated them.

Should Gold Coast be panicking?
This one isn’t a hot take. Something is amiss on the Coast. I’ll get back to you.

Is it possible that there will be a Sydney derby in the finals this year?
I’ve upped Sydney to grand finalists this week, after a defensive masterpiece of a match against Hawthorn. Sure, the Hawks missed a bunch of shots, but you don’t hold the champs to 18 scoring shots on 54 inside 50s unless you know what you’re doing.

And GWS? They may not be top four come the end of the year, but they are now well and truly in the hunt for the eight.

…wait, you don’t want to ask about Carlton?
We’ll save that one for when you’re not trying to move me on quicker than a Jobe Watson handpass. Thanks for your time.

***

Phew that really was quick fire. I saved you four pages of scrolling just now, so you know.

Without further ado, here’s the latest run of Improper Projections after Round 8.

This column, let’s have a deep dive look at a side that has lived towards the bottom end of the ladder for the past few years, but that is showing some positive signs of renewal, both in personnel and game style.

Later, I’ll briefly throw the microscope on Port Adelaide, and anoint a new top four contender. Any ideas?

***

St Kilda’s Green Shoots
Since making the elimination final in 2011, and missing out on the final eight by losing to North Melbourne by five goals in 2012, the St Kilda Football Club has won just 11 of its 52 games of AFL football. That’s fewer than all but perennial rebuilders Melbourne (11), and fewer than both Greater Western Sydney (12) and the Gold Coast Suns (19).

To say it’s been a difficult period in the club’s history is a slight understatement.

But for long-suffering Saints fans, the lack of Ws on the board is reminiscent of their performances just over a decade ago. Between the 2000 and 2002 seasons, the Saints managed just 11 wins in the course of three tough years. Or there’s the 1980s, where the Saints were the perennial last-place finishers in the VFL.

For a team with a solitary premiership flag in more than 100 years of top level play, it must be an all-too-familiar feeling of hope and opportunity down at Seaford.

The Ross Lyon era, spanning five seasons from 2007 to 2011, was by far the most successful in the club’s on-field history. Lyon guided his charges to a 64 per cent winning record, including four straight finals appearances, two grand final appearances (three if you include the replay), but lacking that piece of silverware that we’re all in this caper to grasp.

As a man of logic I don’t like to make sweeping, counterfactual statements, but were it not for a truly freakish bounce of the ball in the closing stages of grand final I, 2010, St Kilda’s premiership tally would have been double what is it today.

We know how the Lyon era ended: Ross activated a get-out clause in his contract, flew over to the other side of the country, and has taken another side on the verge of greatness to the pointy end of the ladder on a sustained basis.

For the Saints, it was a turn to one of their grand final conquerors in Collingwood defensive coach, and WAFL premiership winning coach, Scott Watters. The pairing barely lasted two years, with Watters shown the door after just two seasons. We never got to the bottom of what caused the split, but from the outside looking in it looked like a classic case of “lost the confidence of the playing group”.

While that may be the case, decisions like this smack of disagreements over club direction. Again, from the outside looking in, is it possible that there was a disagreement between the coaching staff and the rest of the front office as to where the St Kilda playing group was at?

A fabled 40-page document – one of those dastardly things – floating around the club in 2013 set out a medium-term list-building strategy that involved a big turnover of the St Kilda list with an aim to get it into shape to make a push in the latter part of the decade.

Refurbishing the list
Some huge moves followed. On the weekend, the Saints had 12 players in their side with less than 50 games of experience, compared to just four in the first round of 2012 as Watters took over. Their average games played has halved, from 122.2 to 69.2, while their median age has effectively halved from 27 to 22.5.

The list changes were quite swift, particularly at the top end and particularly in the midfield. Of the core four of Brendon Goddard, Lenny Hays, Nick Dal Santo and Leigh Montagna, just Montagna remains. Other 200-game veterans have retired. Just five of St Kilda’s Round 1, 2012 team suited up for the Saints on the weekend.

In their place have come a number of recycled additions, like Billy Longer (Brisbane), Luke Delaney (North Melbourne), Shane Savage (Hawthorn), Dylan Roberton (Fremantle), Maverick Weller (Gold Coast), Tom Hickey (also Gold Coast), and Josh Bruce (Greater Western Sydney). In fact, almost the entire middle part of their Round 8 side started their AFL careers on other lists. What happened to their draft picks?

St Kilda’s 2012 draft was a fizzer, with no player taken really managing to establish themselves in the line-up.

But how about the 2013 class? Jack Billings is moonlighting as superman. Luke Dunstan has already played 23 games (of a possible 29) and looks cut from the same cloth as Saint Lenny. Blake Acres has the size-skill combination a modern midfield is built around.

All three were selected in the top 20 of the draft, and to this point it looks like the Saints have nailed it.

Not a bad start for then-new coach Alan Richardson, who was just one week in the chief’s chair before said nailing. It continued in 2014, with the Saints abstaining from the player trading market and instead going for a cluster of picks at the top end of the draft.

Having finished last on the season, the Saints had the very first selection in the draft, and were faced with something of a dilemma: pick or trade?

The front office at Seaford were very open in their desire to field offers for the number one pick, in what would have been a relatively unprecedented move in the 20-odd year history of the AFL.

By my reckoning it’s happened once before, in the, uh, somewhat one-sided trade between Fremantle and Hawthorn in 2001. If you’d like a laugh, have a Google.

It’s a somewhat annual tradition in the AFL: should the side with the number one pick, and with it the worst record in the AFL in the preceding season, trade it away for established players, extra draft picks, or some Frankenstein type offer including both.

This year, no one took the bait, with not a single qualifying offer being made to the Saints – at least nothing that we regular types were made aware of.

The second choice was between two players: Christian Petrecca or Paddy McCartin. Both were rated very highly, considered guaranteed 10 year players by draft experts and fantasy fans alike.

It’s the kind of decision that comes around every few years – most recently in 2008 when Melbourne had a choice between a freakishly talented Jack Watts and once-in-a-generation athlete in Nic Naitanui.

McCartin was the choice, and by all reports is carving up for Sandringham in the VFL. But the Saints are wary, rightly, of the hysteria that surrounds number one picks, and are yet to roll the hulking 19-year-old out beyond the obligatory couple of games.

That, plus the Saints are improving organically. After two years of toil, there are some signs that the foundation which has been built since 2011 is about to afford the Saints a chance to build sustained success in the coming years.

Trying to fly
When you think of St Kilda football, you think defence, right? It’s a well-worn reputation acquired under the tutelage of Ross Lyon. At the absolute peak of their powers, St Kilda had not only one of the best defensive units of the era, but a stopping power that ranked among the very elite in the game’s history.

But things change. Or more particularly, schemes change. Here’s how the Saint’s defensive efficiency has changed over the past 10 years.

The build started under Grant Thomas, peaked under Lyon, and effectively ended under the guidance of Watters.

Just on that peak for a moment: a Defensive Efficiency Rating of +30.5 is the largest single season defensive mark achieved under my system (which goes back to 2000). Anything above, say, +5 is considered a reasonably strong defence.

So far this season, Fremantle have managed a DER of +28.0 – the 2009 St Kilda defence was 10 per cent stronger than the 2015 Dockers. Peak might be an understatement.

Thus far in 2015, Richardson has managed to eek out an incremental gain to St Kilda’s defensive prowess.

But the real improvement to this point – and yes, it’s still only early – has been through offence. Unlike fellow long-sufferers Melbourne, St Kilda are choosing to improve on the offensive side of the ball as a strategy to climb off the bottom rungs of the ladder.

Here’s that same chart, but with St Kilda’s Offensive Efficiency Rating included.

Look like I said it’s only early, but the grey line is moving in the right direction. If St Kilda manage to maintain the rage (or given the number is still negative… maintain the mild state of grumpiness?) the Saints will record the an OER that they haven’t approached since Peak Defence in 2009.

And they’re doing it by taking the game on, throwing caution to the wind, and using their legs.

Mistakes are still quite common – most of their players have less than 50 games experience remember – with the Saints leading the league in clangers (290, or just over 36 per game).

St Kilda have had a below average kick-to-handball ratio to this point in the season (1.25, ranked 12th), and are third on the running bounce table with 87. That last one is the best I’ve got when it comes to quantifying their run (#freethestats).

There are clear shades of Richardson’s alma mater, Port Adelaide, in the way St Kilda are trying to move the ball, and I can also see a little bit of Hawthorn-style zone offence. It’s still mostly in patches, but the signs are all there.

You can see it in the way the Saints almost managed to sneak a win over Essendon. That game was played with a margin hovering within three goals for much of the day, and if it wasn’t for a couple of missed chances late in the piece victory would have been theirs.

Early in the second quarter, the Saints threw down the gauntlet and kicked four goals to none. The first was courtesy of a free kick just outside the 50 metre arc, and the third from a holding the ball call, but the second and fourth were driven by run and daring from the half-back line.

The second-half demolition of the Bulldogs was all through courage and determination. Just as the Dogs were looking like world-beaters, demolishing Adelaide, outlasting Sydney, and putting an eight-goal lead on St Kilda at the one-hour mark, St Kilda flipped the bird and started to run.

And run. And run. Check out this passage.

After a smothered attempt at goal, Jack Steven gathers to Daniel McKenzie, who handballs over the top to Maverick Weller.

Weller uses the overlap runner in Jack Sinclair, who handballs (the fourth in the chain) to David Armitage. At the bottom of the picture, you can see three Saints players streaming forward through the centre of the ground. Armitage tucks the ball under his arm, with lone forward Josh Bruce in his sights.

Armitage pulls the trigger, going to the one-on-one with a doubling-back Bruce marked by Fletcher Roberts. Bruce spills the mark, but keeps his feet, chases the ball into the pocket and gathers on the run. But again, check out the bottom of the screen. Two of the three visible St Kilda players have kept running into the forward 50, flanked by just one Dog.

Bruce goes the dribble kick for goal, with Roberts pushing him in the back to try and throw him off balance – a professional foul, if you will – and it works. But the umpire pings Fletcher.

It doesn’t matter though, with the two-on-one situation that the Saints created through their run leading to the simplest of goals to Luke Dunstan, who started his run on the half back line as St Kilda took possession.

That passage of play was repeated two more times before the end of the quarter, and infinity times in the final term, as the Saints got home by seven points. The Dogs haven’t been the same since.

In the weekend just past, St Kilda made the Eagles flap about as if they were playing a top eight side for much of the second quarter. Collectively, the Eagles looked like 18 deer in headlights, as the Saints played a bit of Hawthorn zone offence.

At the 17-minute mark, the Saints transitioned from half-back to half-forward in two easy kicks that caught the dozing West Coast midfield off guard; and followed up with a similar movement a minute later.

The Eagles touched the ball about three times by my count.

Now, Billings missed the second opportunity, and West Coast did West Coast things on the subsequent kick in, but still, the Saints proved they had what it took to stare down the Eagles and fight back through attack. A second two=goal burst at the nine minute mark was built on that same counter-attacking, running and gunning style. It was a solid fightback, even if it only lasted another 15 minutes or so.

The engine room
Tactics aren’t everything in a game as random as Australian Rules football. Having good players is often 80 per cent of the secret to victory. Knowing how to use them is what puts you over the top – just ask Richmond fans.

While the Saints have drafted well, and bought in some strong, if still-raw, young talent, two of their home grown players have been very important to this new-found offensive pluckiness.

A huge player in St Kilda’s season to date has been David Armitage, who I will openly admit I thought was both a) a sixth man at best and b) in his 30s.

Armitage has been absolutely massive for the Saints so far this year, averaging a league high (yes, more than Nat Fyfe) 33 disposals per game, and is right up the top of the tree when it comes to clearances (6.9 per game, ranked ninth) and contested possessions (13.8, sixth). He’s also tied for the lead in clangers with 4.5 per game, despite having more handballs than kicks.

Armitage would be the clubhouse leader of a Most Improved award if one were to exist, having lifted his disposal rate from 22 per game, generating an extra 1.5 clearances, an extra inside 50, and more than three more contested possessions.

Jack ‘Jackrabbit’ Steven, who I’ve nicknamed after a 90s video game character because of his tendency to take very small, rapid strides when moving forward, and also because his real name fits it quite neatly, missed much of last season with injury.

His presence on the outside has been welcome so far in 2015, leading the Saints in kicks (17.3) and inside 50s (5.8) per game.

Together with young gun Luke Dunstan (who has had almost 10 contested possessions, four clearances and three inside 50s per game this season), they form an engine room that boasts a lot of young talent. Throw grizzled veteran Leigh Motagna in, and it’s starting to resemble a core group of followers to build a team around.

Forward of the ball, captain Nick Reiwoldt’s publicised move to the wing is likely to be less temporary migration and more permanent residency, with the aforementioned Bruce looking very at home inside the paint.

He’s got the modern, utility-type key forward look about him; he’s not the tallest (at 196cm he’s tall for sure, but look to the red sash for a glimpse of the future), and not the biggest, but is a great athlete for his size and has a real nose for the two big posts.

With 25 goals and just eight behinds he’s seventh in the Luke Breust Trophy, which is currently held by West Coast’s Josh Hill (18.3 from six games. Talk about a role player).

McCartin is waiting in the wings, and Tim Membrey is acquitting himself well. For Reiwoldt, a move to the wing may allow him to focus on what he does best – take marks and make excellent decisions with the ball in hand.

One hole I can see becoming an issue for them in the years ahead is at the defensive end. Unfortunately for the brass, key defender is the most illiquid position in the league, something the Hawks have identified and subsequently cornered the market for. After a couple of years drafting high, I could see the Saints packaging up one of their choices in an effort to lure a Mitch Brown type to Seaford – they were close a couple of years back.

St Kilda won’t be a top eight team this year. They may not be a top eight team next year. But the young core that they are assembling, combined with the middle-to-top end of their list, and sound game plan, suggests the Saints’ five year plan may just end up coming to fruition.

***

Port Adelaide’s shaky start
Hands up if you had Port Adelaide in the top eight this year?

**puts two hands up**

How about the top four?

**puts one hand up**

Top two?

**looks around and notices a lot of hands in the air**

And flag favourites?

**still many hands in the air**

I never got to doing a full preview of Port Adelaide before the pre-season. But on a number of occasions, both on this site and in other parts of the Internet, I raised an almighty red flag: being fitter than everyone else is not a sustainable competitive advantage. To simplify, any team has the ability to make their players Power Fit, if they really want to.

With the available figures (#freethestats), quantitative evidence of the fitness catch up is difficult to come by. But the eye test doesn’t lie. Port haven’t been able to recapture their run and gun glory from 2013 and 2014 thus far in 2015.

They are 3-5 after eight rounds, only one game and a reasonable percentage away from eighth spot. More crucially for pre-season expectations, Port Adelaide are three games and 30-odd percentage points outside of the top four, and are even further back on percentage from second.

One saving grace is that the Power have played the league’s second toughest schedule, rated about two goals a week more difficult than the hypothetical even draw, and 27 points more challenging Collingwood’s slate of games.

That’s one of the downsides of finishing at the pointy end of the ladder, but it’s also a product of the improvement seen in Adelaide and West Coast, while Sunday’s loss to a reverse-Cam-Rose-jinxed Richmond was something of an upset.

You’ve read a whole bunch of takes, so I won’t spend forever here. For all of the flaws in Port’s game style in 2015, one sticks out above the rest: an abject failure to retain the ball inside forward 50.

Remember Essendon? When I anointed them top four fancies a few weeks back (another text book jinx for The Roar‘s 2015 AFL coverage), I found their biggest issue was a historically terrible inside 50 conversion rate.

Port Adelaide is only slightly better so far in 2015, converting just 42.8 per cent of their entries to scores. Last season, they were running at 48.2 per cent. Their drop-off is quite stark: 11.2 per cent compared to last year, which is the worst mark in the league.

The only thing saving the Power from being even further behind the eight-ball headed into the pre-bye stretch of games is a big improvement in their ability to repel attacks. Their defensive conversion rate allowed is just 44 per cent, which is still just seventh in the league, but is a nine per cent improvement on their 15th placed rank the year before.

They say building through defence is the way to go in the AFL. Port Adelaide broke the mould over the past couple of years in surging up the ladder through all-out attack. St Kilda is trying to follow. Perhaps the Power has sought fit to slow their games down in an effort to get better at stopping their opponents from putting up big scores? It’s hard to say.

What’s not hard to say is that Port Adelaide faces an uphill battle for the top four from this point in the season. While they’ve already played the toughest part of their draw, do you have any faith in their ability to beat the Bulldogs or Geelong ahead of the bye?

For now, I’m comfortable bumping them out of the top four, and putting a suddenly free-flowing Essendon side in their place. The Dons have a wide open draw for the remainder of the season, with a return date against Hawthorn and a pre-bye date with West Coast, the only two games that the Dons will start as underdogs based on their form on the weekend.

Four and four now, I think they can pull together nine more wins to scrape into the double chance.

Call me a blind optimist, but Essendon are good. They have the cattle to mix it with the big boys. After their showing on the weekend – against a terrible team, but you’ve still got to play a certain style – I feel like coach Hird may have heeded the calls to play fast footy.

Story lines abound in the AFL right now. What’s the one most on your mind?