This was supposed to be Gold Coast’s year, but for a variety of reasons it wasn’t.

Even worse, there’s a real risk that an injury-riddled 2015 campaign sets the Suns back immeasurably as the AFL’s middle class grows in 2016.

It makes their past couple of weeks at the trade table somewhat puzzling, and has left one big question: are the Suns rebuilding?

Everything was falling into place towards the middle of the 2014 season. The Suns were sitting in third position after Round 10, with a record of 7-2 and looked odds-on to make it to the final eight for the first time. Their raw offensive and defensive output was more akin to a 5-4 record, and over the next six or so rounds that caught up with them as the Suns fell to 9-6.

Their five-point win against Collingwood in Round 16 was exciting, but also saw captain – and raging Brownlow Medal favourite – Gary Ablett Jr go down with a season-ending shoulder injury. The Suns would win just one more game for the year, finishing on 10-12 and missing the eight.

In those first nine games, the Suns were the league’s third best offence according to my OER, putting up a +12.1 that would have them near level with this season’s Adelaide side. Things were a little less sound on the defensive front, with an 11th place +0.2 on the defensive end something of an Achilles heel, which would come back to bite them later on in the year.

Looking back now, there wasn’t anything that the Suns did particularly well in attack. Their skills were no greater than average, nor their ability to win the ball in tight. They were consistently smacked in uncontested possessions, mostly a product of their youthful exuberance.

There was also a fair dose of schedule-induced performance, with the Suns beating up on Greater Western Sydney (42 points), St Kilda (38 points), Brisbane (48 points) and the Western Bulldogs (45 points), as well as just eeking over the line against the Dees (6 points). Victories against the Tigers and Roos were full of merit, particularly the victory against North which was on their home deck.

They were still some way off of the top sides, though, with the Dockers and Hawks holding the Suns to sub-50 scores.

And that’s how things unfolded in the remainder of the season, once the Suns schedule evened out and the grind of a 22-game AFL season took its toll. In their final 13 games the Suns dropped to 13th on OER and a pitiful 16th on DER, on their way to a 3-9 record and eventual 12th placed finish.

The battered Gold Coast started to leak like a sieve at the contest, losing the contested possession count by almost nine per game in the second two thirds of the year. Their penchant for giving up big uncontested possession deficits became a real problem; return match-ups against the Dogs and Lions resulted in uncontested possession losses of -91 and -111 respectively.

Coincidentally (or not), these two losses came in the two rounds immediately following the loss of their captain.

That second part of the year was an unmitigated disaster from a travelling perspective, too. The Suns won three of their first four away games for the year, but would go on to lose their remaining seven by an average of five goals. Their home record held up much better from a wins and losses point of view, but the average winning margin in games played at Metricon Stadium was just five points.

But the Suns showed enough in the first half of the year to earn many admirers, and were expected to slot into the bottom half of the eight. I was a little more circumspect, expecting a finish just outside of the finals in 10th position. I also thought Brisbane would finish above them, so take that as you will.

It’s easy to see why that was the consensus though. I mean, check out their starting midfield lines over the summer:

Harley Bennell | David Swallow | Jack Martin
Dion Prestia | Gary Ablett Jr | Jaeger O’Meara

That’s just the starting six. It was a young group, but as far as raw talent goes that’s probably in the top four in the competition. It does fall away a little from here, but those half dozen players are strong enough to drag a team of veterans and scrubs along with them. We’ll get to those veteran players in a moment.

The balance of that core midfield set is probably tipped a little more outside than would be ideal, which forced Ablett to spend a little more time in close than he would like. But in the main, it’s a very strong group on paper.

Forward of the ball things were coming together nicely, too. Tom Lynch and Charlie Dixon combined to form another of the league’s two-metre tall forward line duos, only both were very effective marking and goal-kicking threats.

Brandon Matera was yet to play a full season, but in 2014 showed that he could become an elite small forward. The midfield group above are dangerous up forward, and bring enough to the table that the Suns present as a genuine attacking force.

Down back things were a little more iffy. Steven May wasn’t quite the force that he became this season yet, and outside of him there wasn’t exactly a lot to like. Former Swan Nick Malceski was bought in more as a rebounder than a defender, while Rory Thompson was (and still isn’t) much more than a promise of something special. Kade Kolodjashnij was still raw, and not exactly a lock down defender himself.

At the time, no one saw dual-Rising Star nominees Touk Miller and Ahmed Saad coming. They played 22 and 16 games respectively, adding a layer of ground ball defence that looked non-existent heading into the year – needless to say they were perhaps the two bright spots of a year coloured with various shades of black.

The story of Suns’ horror 2015 has been told many times so let’s not cover old ground here. Gold Coast won just 4.5 games for the year, the team’s worst result since their sophomore year in 2012. It halted what was a very clear up trend that had been building since the club’s inception, albeit one which was stunted by the 2014 fade out.

Early season losses to Melbourne, St Kilda, Geelong and Greater Western Sydney had the footy world buzzing that a change from incumbent Guy McKenna to the steady hand of Rodney Eade was taking time to bed down among the playing group.

The fact of the matter is that core midfield group chock full of blue chip, A++ grade talent couldn’t get on the park. Of the 132 games available for Gold Coast’s core midfield group, the sextet played just 47, and none together by virtue of O’Meara’s full-year absence. They missed 85 games – it sounds like a lot, and it is. In fact, it’s almost the equivalent of missing four players for the full season.

It gets worse: after Round 5, at no point did more than two of the six play in the same team, and in Rounds 10 and 11 the Suns were missing all six of their ultra-talented midfield set.

This rash of absenteeism exposed a thin playing group, which was incapable of filling the void. Players of the vintage and ability of Henry Schade, Luke Russell, Matt Shaw, Sean Lemmens, and Jesse Lonergan were required to play more than 16 games each, which is too many, either for skill reasons or relative inexperience reasons.

Part of the problem is that the Suns’ mature age recruits have, for the most part, provided the expansion side with precious little on-field production. How’s this for a list:

Campbell Brown
Jarrad Brennan
Nathan Bock
Greg Broughton
Nathan Krakouer
Andrew Raines
Nathan Ablett

All veteran journeymen that would have been aged 32 or less in the 2015 season, but for one reason or another played little to no part in Gold Coast’s season. Outside of Gary Ablett Jr, the only two veterans that have been able to play the veteran role – even going above and beyond in the case of Michael Rischitelli, who captained the team in the absence of Ablett – are Rischitelli and Jarrod Harbrow.

Free agent signing Malceski played much of the year like he joined the Suns as a retirement plan, rather than as a rebounding defender. While he was injured for much of the first part of the year, his season was a candidate for a ‘most underwhelming award should one exist’.

Contrast this to fellow expansion side Greater Western Sydney, who have made very astute veteran additions like Shane Mumford, Heath Shaw and Ryan Griffen, in addition to foundation signings like Callan Ward, Rhys Palmer and Tom Scully. Sure, there’s been a few flamers, but on the whole, little brother looks to have had a better time of it when it comes to mature age signings.

Gold Coast have also lost their fair share of players before the current trade period. Josh Caddy joined Geelong, while Maverick Weller (on the shortlist of best AFL names) and Tom Hickey joined the Saints. The first two would have provided much needed B-grade depth during the season just passed, but instead are kicking goals in Victoria. And unfortunately for Suns fans, the list of top talent departures has grown in the 2015 off season.

Herein lies the problem. The Gold Coast Suns have assembled a remarkable array of top end talent, but are thin on the ground at the second, third and even fourth tier. That top six midfield group projects as planet destroying – Lynch and Dixon could be unstoppable up forward, and I’d give Sam Day the ball at the one yard line in a Superbowl such is his size, speed and strength.

We’re never going to get to see this group in action, at least as was promised at the start of 2014.

Harley Bennell has been shipped off to Fremantle, with the Suns receiving Fremantle’s first and second round picks (16 and 35) while also shipping off a second rounder (pick 22). Ruckman Zac Smith, who looks a monstrous proposition if he can stay on the park, was shipped to Geelong in a three-way deal that saw the Suns net the Roos Dan Currie and Geelong’s pick 49. Charlie Dixon will move to Port Adelaide for their 2015 first round pick (pick 10), but will also see their end of first round pick 19 move on to Richmond via Port Adelaide.

That will leave Gold Coast with picks three, 10, and 16 inside of the top 20 of this season’s draft, as well as pick 31 and pick 35 between slots 21 and 40.

That’s more potential draft value than publicly-outed rebuilders Carlton (picks one, 19 from Richmond, and 20, with pick 21 to reportedly move to GWS) and Essendon (picks four, five, 23 and 25). That array of picks are certainly not so as to bid for players from the Gold Coast academy – not even the soon-to-be eponymous Didmyus Blanket can command anything close to a top 20 selection, according to those in the know.

Huh? Are the Gold Coast Suns looking to rebuild their list, just five years into their AFL existence?

If that’s the case, it would be quite a stunning turn of events for a franchise that looked set to stomp all over the League over the second half of this decade. But in a lot of ways, it makes sense.

Gold Coast’s lost 2015 season could not have happened at a worse time for the club. The AFL’s middle class looks set to extend all the way from, say, 16th to fifth in 2015, with only the Blues and Bombers projecting as bad football teams as we approach list lodgement deadline number one at the start of October.

Hawthorn will be thereabouts, as will West Coast and an injury-free Sydney, and I’m still a fan of Fremantle’s sneaky-young list.

You could throw a medium-sized blanket over most of the rest of the competition. The battle for finals positions is going to be remarkably intense – and that’s after it took 13 wins just to make it in this season.

If you take out Bennell from the Suns midfield, and exclude the near 200-game Ablett, the loss of what the NBA analysts call ‘sweat equity’ – a fancy word for playing time – for the young blue chip core will begin to compound. If you assume each of O’Meara (0), Martin (12), Prestia (8) and Swallow (6) would have played 20 games for the year, that’s a combined loss of 54 games of experience, under a new coaching system no less, for your most important players.

But as I say, it compounds. If every game each of them play with one other is assigned one point, the young Suns core midfield earned just 26 points of playing time equity in season 2015, compared to 264 if they had all played all 22 games together, or 240 if the 20 game assumption is held. That could be a meaningless statistic, but I have a suspicion that it isn’t.

The group are doubtlessly talented. But how do you overcome that quantum of lost experience at a time where all of your competitors are continuing to build it up? I’m not certain that you can.

Add to that a near-total lack of veteran heads outside of Ablett, Malceski, Harbrow and Rischitelli. As above, the Suns would have been planning on having at least five or six of their lost eight veterans around coming into the 2015 season, and off the back of a maiden finals campaign many would have likely stuck around for the forthcoming year, too. Couldn’t the Suns use someone like Nathan Bock at full back right now?

The 2015 season showed that depth is a real problem at the Suns. Yet as far as I can tell, Gold Coast have been linked to Collingwood’s Jeremy Howe… and that’s about it. The Suns haven’t looked like trading in a player or two, instead content to acquire the above cited range of high draft picks.

There’s been no talk of free agents, either unrestricted or delisted. To be fair, the delisted free agency period hasn’t yet opened. Gold Coast must surely be looking around for some journeyman talent, both to help with their inadequate playing stock depth but also a lack of older, battle-hardened charges. A player like Jed Adcock is an absolute slam dunk proposition for the Suns as far as adding depth, veteran nous and a fair dose of leadership. They could do worse than inquire with the management of Mark Jamar, Dennis Armfield, Ryan Crowley and Rohan Bail while they’re at it.

And just to make matters worse, three of Gold Coast’s top end, blue chip talent are about to hit the market. O’Meara and Prestia enter 2016 as expiring contracts, while Swallow and Martin will be off contract at the end of the 2017 season.

The hyperbole surrounding O’Meara’s contract status has already reached ridiculous levels, with the New Limited’s own Jon ‘Ralphy’ Ralph interpreting the youngster’s purchase of an investment property in Melbourne as a sign O’Meara was on the way out. Never mind that he already owned properties in Queensland and Western Australia.

If, and it’s a big if, the Suns hierarchy have decided to pull the pin, where does that leave them as an administration? Gold Coast, and their counterparts in Western Sydney, have been given the most support of any fledgling franchise in the AFL era; investments that were justified on the basis that as a Greenfield project success would have to flow in the short term.

To this point, it has been moderately successful. Crowds at Metricon Stadium have been trending up, but in line with the team on the field, attendance hit the skids in the final rounds of 2015, pushing down the overall average crowd for the year to a disappointing 12,400. The Suns require AFL grants to make a profit, but that’s true of half of the league – the $17.3 million in own-source revenue that the club generated in 2014 is by no means small change, and indeed is more than the circa $16 million that St Kilda raised off of their own bat in the same year.

In reality, its likely that Gold Coast are making the best of a bad situation, acquiring assets which they will hope to flip in the 2016 and 2017 off seasons as they make their charge up the ladder following a speed bump in 2015.

They are a solid candidate for a four or five win gain in this year, simply by virtue of regaining their injured stars for 2016. Gary Ablett has been discarded from the Best Player in the League conversation – I doubt that will sit well with him. But that alone won’t be enough to get them into finals contention; they will need to pick up close to twice that many to get a look in. That will be remarkably difficult to achieve.

The AFL’s second youngest franchise is emerging through a year from hell, and by my reckoning are in a very delicate position. What the administration chose to do next will define not only the future of their team in the short term, but the future of the League’s investment in this part of the world.