The Sydney Swans ended 2015 an injury-riddled mess. Does the NSW capital’s elder sibling have genuine premiership hopes this season? Perhaps, but there is one big question, and many other smaller questions, that need to be answered.

John Longmire’s tenure as head coach of the Swans has involved five straight finals series and four finishes inside the top four. He’s presided over the reimagining of Sydney as a star-spangled Hollywood franchise, emerging from its scrappy, sludgy slumber under Paul Roos.

Both regimes brought the red and white the ultimate success, with Sydney’s most recent premiership coming in 2012, before the signing of key forward pairing Kurt Tippett and Lance Franklin.

While the coach is locked in until 2017, that doesn’t mean the team is sitting still. In fact, the Swans have the opposite problem in 2016: a third iteration of the modern Swans is emerging, one that melds the inside mettle of Roos and the penchant for attack honed in the first half decade under Longmire.

Football is, increasingly, driven by the run and carry and disposal quality of a team’s players. We’re a year or two into the pace and space era, and Sydney are a window into how the AFL is being shaken up.

We had a deep look at the Swans in July last year, noting that the team’s scoring power had declined despite their forward line investments, and that their style of ball movement had shifted to a more uncontested style to no great effect.

Sydney’s greatest strength has, historically, been its inside midfielders and their collective ability to win the ball in set piece situations. It was their backbone in the early 2000s, and a central feature of their game in the early part of this decade.

Last season, the Swans were ranked eighth in contested possession differential, but recorded a raw figure of just +0.8 per game – essentially a break even over the course of the home-and-away season. It was the second-weakest mark of last year’s top eight, with Hawthorn recording a differential of +0.5 per game over the year.

The Swans were similar to Hawthorn in another way: their uncontested possession differential of +32 per game was second only to the Hawks (+44 per game). However, the Hawks took an average of 112 uncontested marks per game, while the Swans took just 89.

That was likely driven by Sydney’s penchant for using handballs to dispose of the ball. Their 200 handballs per game was the most in the league, while their kick-to-handball ratio of 1.14 was the lowest in the competition by some margin. Their use of the handball was up on the 2014 season (from 194 per game), but their kick-to-handball ratio was significantly lower – down from 1.24 kicks per handball.

Sydney remains a team with a strong ability to win their own ball, and they increasingly want to use their legs with the ball in hand to move it forward. What remains to be seen is whether they Swans have the playing stocks to play that style of football at a high level.

In 2015, the Swans won just three of their eight games played against top eight sides, a remarkable stat for the fact that Sydney’s lone eventual double-up against a finalist came against Hawthorn. It was the weakest mark of the top four (Fremantle, West Coast and Hawthorn had winning percentages of 60 per cent, 50 per cent and 75 per cent respectively), and second only to North Melbourne for the worst mark of last year’s finalists.

In those eight games against last year’s finalists, the Swans managed an uncontested possession differential of +37 per game, compared to +29 per game against the also-rans. They got what they wanted by way of attacking method, but it didn’t work: Sydney scored just 74 points per game in those games against top eight sides, compared to 101 against the rest of the competition, while they conceded 88 points per game versus 62 points per game against the bottom ten.

Whether this is simply teething problems or signs that the coach has erred in moving his team away from what it does best, will be solved this season. Roar columnist Cam Rose reckons the time may have already come for Sydney to move on from Longmire as a result of the Swans’ slow descent into good-not-great status.

Personnel challenges
What is even more puzzling is that Sydney, the side trying to play with run and carry in a more concerted way than most other teams, have an abject lack of players with the outside pace to do so.

Have the AFL’s crazy, draconian, ridiculous, unedifying and manifestly unfair trade sanctions, which expired at the end of last season’s trade period, played a role in how the Swans have been able to adjust their list to this new style of play?

Sydney were barred from bringing in any players in the 2014 trade period regardless of how many left due to retirement or trade, and were allowed to bring in players earning below $450,000 per annum over the course of their deal in 2015 – a concession they used to sign Callum Sinclair from West Coast in the Lewis Jetta trade, and to pick up Dog defender Michael Talia for less than a half-eaten sandwich.

Now that the sanctions have come to an end, the Swans might be in the market for a few outside players in this off-season or beyond. For now, they will have to make do with what they have.

Outside of Dane Rampe, Jake Lloyd and Gary Rohan, none of Sydney’s midfield group scream linebreaker. The Swans lost Lewis Jetta to West Coast in last season’s trade period, who was Sydney’s only genuine wing-type player. They have been left to cobble together an outside game made up of players more suited to the in-and-under style of the Swans of old.

Dan Hannebery has been the big beneficiary of Sydney’s mode shift, with his pack bursting abilities coming into play as he emerged as Sydney’s best player last season. He is one of 18 players on the field at any time, though, and the load he and inside bull Josh Kennedy carried last season – both were first or second in disposals, contested possessions, inside 50s and clearances, and in the top five for uncontested possessions and tackles – is not sustainable.

Kieran Jack has been the most disappointing of Sydney’s midfield group, after blitzing the competition with his ‘rugby league background’ skills in the early years of the Longmire era. Of all of the Swans midfield group, he is the one that should be leading the way in this transition to an outside-dominant mode of ball movement. Yet he seems to have plateaued at a ‘good’ level.

This concern comes at a time where the Swans will enter the season with their youngest and least experienced list in a decade, according to Champion Data. DraftGuru pegs Sydney as the league’s sixth-youngest and 11th-most experienced list in 2016, making the Swans the youngest side of last year’s finalists.

This is likely driven by the retirements of Adam Goodes, Rhys Shaw and Mike Pyke, all of whom were over 30. Collectively, these players held 719 games of experience, and when Jetta and Craig Bird’s departures are included, the Swans lost close to 1000 games in the 2015 off-season. The trade ban meant the Swans brought in the 29 games of experience garnered by Sinclair – yeah, that trade ban might have bitten the Swans hard.

Coming into 2016, the Swans now have just three players in their 30-year-old or over season – Ted Richards, Jarrad McVeigh and Ben McGlynn. There are only 11 players with more than 100 games experience, too. This will be the greenest Sydney Swans team to go to battle for, well, at least a decade.

The loss of veteran heads has opened up plenty of spots for Sydney’s recent influx of very good-to-elite young talent. This group is headed by the 101-game Luke Parker, and includes recent draftees Tom Mitchell (39 games), Isaac Heeney (14) and Callum Mills, who despite being drafted in 2015 already looks a lock to start for the Swans in Round 1.

These four players look like the building blocks of a more balanced midfield group in, say, three or four years time, as the likes of McVeigh, Kennedy, Hannebery and Jack begin to age and move to more peripheral roles.

If Sydney wanted to be really brave, they could consider throwing Heeney into the midfield mix as early as this year, and substituting Kieran Jack into a role as a running defender off the half back line. The presence of elite lockdown defender Nick Smith afford Sydney some luxury in this respect – hey, how do you think Rhys Shaw could keep getting a game despite playing defence like James Harden – and Jack would give the Swans some extra oomph behind the ball.

It would make for a young inside midfield group, given Mitchell is already plying his trade through there, but it could be an option should the Swans be seeking some extra run.

All told, there is a clear incongruence between Sydney’s playing stocks and their want to move the ball with run and carry on the outside. The building blocks of an elite midfield group are still in place, but without an injection of pace the Swans will likely struggle to move the ball in the way they would like to.

What to do about Buddy?
Which leads us to the final point on the Swans for now: what to do about Buddy?

Franklin is entering the third year of a nine-year contract with the Swans, and is now smack bang in the middle of his prime age years at 28. His 2015 season was, in many respects, the worst of his career. He played 17 games (the least since 2006), kicked 2.8 goals per game (lowest since 2005), and had 14.7 disposals per game (the least since 2007).

Franklin’s year ended early due to mental health issues, and was arguably one of the catalysts behind Sydney’s finals fade out along with injuries to Parker and captain Jack.

At his best, Franklin looks like the only non-midfielder with the chops to pinch a Brownlow medal from those pesky midfielders, a feat he almost accomplished in 2014 in what was clearly his best season.

The Swans have another seven years of work to get out of Franklin – at the end of his contract he will be pushing 37. To put that into context, there is currently one player on an AFL list playing at this age: the indefatigable Brent Harvey, who might play into his 50s at his current rate. Which is to say the Swans should be judicious in the way they use their prized asset over the remainder of his useful life.

One of Franklin’s best attributes is his speed and agility for a player of his size. Why don’t the Swans consider using that pace to solve its midfield dilemma? Franklin could play as a high half-forward, or even a wingman if the situation demanded it.

It is a role he has played in fits and spurts throughout his career, as his 23 games with more than six inside 50 launches attests. His lead up marking and size would prove a nightmare match-up for opposition wings who would be some ten centimetres shorter and 15 kilograms lighter than number 23. The only concern would be on defence, where Franklin may not have the defensive chops to match it with more traditional wing players.

But it’s not as if the Swans are short on tall players. Tippett, Sam Reid, Sinclair and Toby Nankervis have all shown to varying degrees that they can play forward of the ball. Yes, the Swans look at their best when both Tippett and Franklin share the forward line, but Sydney’s dearth of outside talent calls for some drastic measures to be taken.

Which leads me to believe this might be a down year for the Swans. There are a lot of questions to be asked, without particularly satisfying answers.

Now, we aren’t talking a down year in the way that, say, Carlton and Essendon are likely to have a down year in 2016. The Swans will still be thereabouts when it comes to the end of August. There is no way known that the Swans don’t get to 11 or 12 wins just on talent alone.

The draw is kind enough – it projects as the second easiest on Pythagorean win percentage of last year’s top eight – and the likes of Hannebery and Kennedy are just about to hit prime age.

But the competition looks remarkably even this year as we have been saying since January, and by virtue of their past couple of years, the Swans have slid back into the quagmire of teams that stretches from the bottom of the top four to the top of the bottom six.

That’s not to say the Swans will end the year with double digits on their ranking – but the unbroken finals run of the Longmire era is certainly under threat.