Hogan is already the hero

Let’s play a quick game of word association. Dour, bland, uninteresting. Which AFL team of the past four or five years do you associate those words with?

The Melbourne Demons.

Exciting, dazzling, ambitious. Good at football (I kid, I kid).

That would be Melbourne’s No. 1, in more ways than one, Jesse Hogan.

Hogan was drafted by the Dees in the 2012 mini-AFL draft, one of those complicated concoctions designed to give Gold Coast and Greater Western Sydney a leg-up in the talent stakes. As a 17-year-old, Hogan wasn’t eligible to play with the big boys, so he played a year in the VFL.

But that wasn’t before long-suffering Melbourne fans got a taste of his talent, with Hogan suiting up for the Dees in the 2013 NAB Cup.

During his VFL stint, Hogan bagged 39 goals in what was effectively 14 games (he went down with a knee injury in his 15th), scoring in each on his way to winning Casey’s best and fairest.

That’s right, a 17-year-old, playing just over two thirds of a season, was voted the best player on a VFL team.

It had the Dees faithful salivating at the prospect of him starting a long, storied career in the blue and red in the 2014 season. But they were forced to wait a further 12 months, after Hogan injured his back in the pre-season competition. A very sad – in retrospect at least – article on the Melbourne club website, dated March 7, 2014, summed up both the excitement and frustration of Hogan’s injury:

“Early signs are positive and he could potentially still play in two to three weeks or it could be longer.”

It was longer. Hogan played one game of competitive football for the remainder of 2014, for Casey in the VFL.

The Messiah
But, sports fans, it looks like those frustrating days are over. Jesse Hogan has played 16 of a possible 18 games for the Melbourne Demons in 2015.

To steal a phrase from a professional AFL watcher, “Boy oh boy, wowee has he played the pants off of those 16 games.”

You probably know all of this already, but Hogan has kicked a Dee-leading 36 goals (more than two a game), and has taken an equal team-leading 114 marks (but is leading on a per-game basis), with 42 of those taken inside the 50-metre arc. He is having perhaps the best season a Demons forward has had since Brad Green in 2010, and we’ve still got four games to go.

And Hogan is 20 years old.

We’re told key forwards take time to develop. Tom Hawkins was a laughing stock in his first couple of seasons. West Coast’s Josh Kennedy was traded for an established midfielder, the Blues guffawing. Joe Daniher is just emerging from his newborn giraffe phase, after 44 games.

Young key forwards do not do what Jesse Hogan is doing right now.

Want some proof? Here’s how what I would call the best key forwards of the current AFL era (post-2000 debut, played more than 100 games in their career) performed over their first 20 games, on contested marks and total points per game (goals and behinds).

Hogan is the only player of this group to average more than two contested marks per game at the start of his career, but not only that, he’s also the only one to have kicked more than two goals per game.

Yeah, this kid is alright.

There’s a bit caveat on these numbers, of course: most of the rest of those guys started off with big, established key forwards around them. Hogan is the main man (sorry, Chris Dawes), and so gets more attention from his teammates. But with that attention comes greater defensive pressure, and, well, Hogan isn’t too fussed.

Think Patrick Cripps is the Rising Star for 2015? Think again.

Just in time…
With output like that, you’d have to assume Hogan is having a huge impact on Melbourne’s offence. That’s true, to a point. After all, he’s only one man.

Melbourne’s offensive efficiency, as measured by OER, was 42.5 per cent in 2014 and in the two games Hogan hasn’t played this season – which, if you haven’t worked out by now, is not particularly good. Its not the worst, that’s Essendon, but it’s about 20 per cent below the elite levels of Hawthorn and West Coast.

When Hogan has played, Melbourne’s OER has lifted to 47.6 per cent, which is bang on average, and an increase of about 12 per cent.

Before you say that could be anything, consider this: Melbourne’s average number of inside 50s when Hogan has been out was 40.5, which is actually terrible. When Hogan has played, this number lifts 43.8, while when Hogan plays and he takes more than two marks inside 50, the Dees get the ball in the scoring zone 44.4 times a game. That’s still well below average, but it’s a start.

All told, Melbourne project as about nine points per game, or 15 per cent, better on the scoreboard when Hogan plays versus when he doesn’t.

It hasn’t quite translated to wins on the board for Melbourne, yet. While they have already won more games than their previous two seasons combined, the Dees will finish the year with a losing record for the tenth-straight season.

Paul Roos, for all of the knocks on his game plan, is eeking incremental improvement out of his charges. And for the first time in what probably feels like a century for Melbourne fans, the future is looking a little bit brighter.

That’s in no small part because of No. 1, Jesse Hogan. Melbourne simply must throw the universe at him.