West Coast Eagles are as disappointing as Richmond

A 13-9 record is nothing to sneeze at, except if you’re the West Coast Eagles in 2016. For a team expected to back up a grand final appearance with a similar arc, a prospective first-round finals exit should be considered nothing less than a disappointment.

West Coast were second on the Premiership betting line in the pre-season, behind the deities of Hawthorn. They are now in sixth, paying 3.5 times the odds of the team rated fifth most likely to win the flag. Their final four games include a derby, travel to face a likely top two finisher (GWS), hosting the premiership favourite on a Friday night (Hawthorn) and travel to a team that puts up more points on its home deck than any other (Adelaide).

Since the bye, the Eagles have won four of their five games, with an average margin of 24 points. That sample includes their 78-point clawhammering of Essendon, and just one game against a fellow top eight combatant (North Melbourne). Their past three weeks include two close wins against Melbourne and Carlton respectively, and last weekend’s loss to Collingwood.

They have been missing who is clearly their most important player Nic Naitanui over that whole stretch, but he isn’t going to fix this. There are a number of problems holding this iteration of the West Coast Eagles back.

Richmond’s capitulation came at the perfect time for West Coast. Outside of the West Australian media bubble, there’s been nary a word written about the Eagles’ struggles. That form line suggest the Eagles are being sucked towards the middle rung of the ladder, and were it not for a substantial home-field advantage, that’s where West Coast would find themselves.

A fruitless offseason
Middle of the road is not what this team was geared for; West Coast’s off season was all about topping up a team that was just hitting its straps.

The Eagles bought in Sydney’s Lewis Jetta, Brisbane’s Jack Redden, and journeyman Jonathon Giles, losing rookie-elevated ruckman Callum Sinclair for Jetta, their first round pick (17) for Redden, and traded down from pick 57 to pick 62 to pick up Giles from Essendon. West Coast also saw Scott Selwood leave as a restricted free agent, which netted them an end-of-second round pick which the Eagles ended up using to pick up Tom Cole (who is one of the few bright spots this season).

They were to regain key defender, and near-captain, Eric McKenzie, and fellow key defender Mitch Brown, who collectively played about 15 minutes of home-and-away football last season. Prior to his ACL injury, McKenzie had genuine claims to be considered as the game’s premier key defender – he was to slot into a unit that was rated second best on my Defensive Efficiency Rating (DER) system last year.

Jetta and fellow outside gunner Andrew Gaff were to form a deadly combination running up and down the wings of Subiaco, while Redden was the answer to the extreme workload that inside animal Matt Priddis had carried for years. Giles was there just in case the unthinkable happened to the Eagles’ ruck stocks.

In aggregate, the Eagles went from the League’s 12th oldest and 10th most experienced in 2015 to sixth and fourth, respectively, this season. In both cases, they were the biggest leaps any individual team had made from one season to the next.

Champion Data’s list rating system had the Eagles listed as the most “prime age” contender in the game: 13 player had between 100 and 150 games of experience (the most in the League), all of whom would be considered best 22 players. A further four players had 150 games of experience, Mark LeCras, Josh Kennedy, captain Shannon Hurn and Brownlow medallist Priddis.

This was a team that was good to go. But as it turns out, West Coast’s off season has born very little fruit.

Jetta has played ten games, through a combination of injury and form, and averaged just 13 touches a game. Redden has been dropped once, and has regressed to his sophomore year on the stats sheet. McKenzie has, similarly, been in and out of the team, and has looked like a ghost of the player he was in 2013 and 2014. None of the impact additions that were intended to push the Eagles over the edge have made an impact.

Lewis Jetta’s season in particularly is worthy of further examination. The move was seen as a match made in heaven. Jetta would be able to use his leg speed on the expanses of Subiaco Oval, and would take some of the heat off Gaff to provide drive on the outside. Instead, when he has been given opportunities, he floats a possession away from the play, waiting for the ball to come to him to advantage.

He was expressly bought into the team to provide outside drive; his 298 metres gained per game puts him outside the top ten at West Coast, and outside of the top 100 for players across the League. His season long number is down 30 per cent, and that’s after he was criticised for having a bad work ethic at Sydney towards the end of his tenure. It is no exaggeration to call his recruitment a failure.

The Redden signing has been more positive, if only because Redden has shown that he can play. His issue is consistency. For an inside ball winner, ten or contested possessions is a good day (which he’s achieved four times), and four or less is not a good day (which he’s also achieved four times).

Run it back
It makes the slide from contender to also-ran in the past two months all the more perplexing.

West Coast have had one of the most stable 22s in the competition; 17 players have played 15 games or more, equal to Adelaide and behind Geelong (18) for stability. This was similar to last year, where the Eagles had 17 players play 20 games or more (including finals, so the numbers aren’t strictly comparable), behind Hawthorn (20) and Sydney (19).

The Eagles have been most stable down back – critical to the team defence systems which dominate the game today. Shannon Hurn and Brad Shepherd haven’t missed a game, while Jeremy McGovern, Will Schofield and Sam Butler have missed one, one and two respectively. Sharrod Wellingham has played every game after his contractually obligated off-season injury for 2016 derailed his start to the year.

So, what gives? Cam Rose wrote in May last year that everything seemed to be breaking right for the Eagles. Based on the output of 2016, that might not be too far off base.

Look no further than the difference between their fixture from 2015 and 2016. Last year, the Eagles played a relatively meek slate of games away from home, which involved trips to play just three top eight opponents (and none of those were top-four finishers). This season, they’ve played the Hawks, Swans, Cats and Dogs in their own surrounds, and end the year with trips to the Giants and Crows. It is likely that they will come away from those games with an 0-6 record.

Too much to too few
West Coast’s biggest problem is the ball-winning is being left to a handful of players. Everything can be traced back to this: the more middling defence, the superfluous small forwards, and the perceived Alpha-Omega importance of ruckman Nic Naitanui.

Contested possessions are a very catch-all statistic, but for West Coast, they are indicative. Last season, the Eagles had a season-long contested possession differential of +12.1 per game, ranked number one in the league. This year, they’re sitting at -1.2 per game, ranked 10th. They’ve won the count ten times and lost it in the remaining eight games, but critically, seven of the eight contested possession losses have come in the past eight games.

At the top of West Coast’s contested win tree sits Matt Priddis (278 contested possessions) and Luke Shuey (204). Third on the list sits Scott Lycett, and close behind him is Nic Naitanui. Jack Redden is fifth, and in sixth spot – which is an indictment on the rest of the midfield – is key forward Kennedy. The only players to average more than ten contested possessions per game are Priddis, Shuey and Naitanui.

It means West Coast average just two extra minutes of time in possession than their opponents this season, ranked seventh of this year’s top eight (Hawthorn are eighth, but West Coast are no Hawthorn). Their inside 50 differential has fallen from an astronomical +11.5 per game to just +3.8 per game. As a result, they’re scoring just eight points per game more than their opponents from turnovers, almost two goals less than Hawthorn.

Last season’s Eagles were a picture of flexible efficiency – a junior version of Hawthorn, but with more grunt power to help compensate for a lesser array of outside weapons. This year, they’ve loss the ruthlessness; the Eagles as a team rely on Priddis and Shuey to such an extent you could almost call them a poor-man’s Dangerwood, just without the catchy nickname.

The burden-related issues extend to the forward line, which has lost its punch on account of the midfield’s dramas. Last year, the Eagles were ranked second on my Offensive Efficiency Rating (OER), with a rating of +22.8; this year they’re fourth, but with a rating of +14.1.

A three-headed Hydra of Jamie Cripps, Josh Hill and Mark LeCras was one of West Coast’s many competitive advantages last season. This year, playing all three in the same forward line looks like an excessive opulence. LeCras in particular has fallen off the face of the earth, and like Jetta can be accused far too readily of expecting his teammate s to do the heavy lifting.

The Weagles Web is no more
Last season, the lack of available key defenders (until it emerged that Jeremy McGovern was a key forward soul destroyer) forced Eagles’ coach Adam Simpson to create a nifty zone defence. It was coined the Weagles Web, but as we’ve discussed on these pages previously, the fancy branding gives way to a pretty vanilla zone scheme, albeit one where the defenders have a loose assignment on a player that they are given the discretion to abandon if they’re not in a dangerous position.

It was really effective last season – and was a big reason why the Eagles had a huge inside 50 differential. Their zone defence didn’t allow their opponents to move with ease, and by the time the ball had to be delivered into the increasingly narrow forward 50, the available space for players was cramped. Critical to this was the midfield’s ability to press up, win the ball, and allow the back line to arrange itself.

West Coast conceded 43 inside 50s per game last season, and allowed their opponents to score on 45 per cent of those entries – league average for those marks was 50.4 and 47 per cent, respectively.

This year, West Coast’s more indifferent midfield performance, and the rest of the competition’s adaptation of this scheme, have seen their defensive performances fall back. They’re now allowing five more entries per game, and conceding roughly the same scores per inside 50. All told, they’ve dropped about three points on my DER.

It isn’t a disaster, but the devil is in the detail. Against top eight opponents, the Eagles, West Coast’s defence drops from the fourth-best in the competition with a DER of +14.1 to seventh-best with a DER of -7.9 – on account of a torturous inside 50 differential of -14.8.

Related to this, West Coast’s offence drops by more than their defence against the top eight: from +10.9 and a fourth rank to -5.7 and a 12th rank. Indeed, the Eagles’ attack has been worse than the oft-lambasted Western Bulldogs outfit when we remove the games against non-finalists. West Coast face three top eight opponents on their run home, and will by definition face top eight opponents in the finals.

Are you starting to sense a pattern? I railed against the idea that West Coast are flat track bullies earlier in the season, noting their problems ran much deeper than this fingernail deep analysis. They’re a team that loves to have the game on their terms more than most, and happen to be really, really good when they get what they want. However, this season, the getting of what they want has proven much tougher; the results speak for themselves.

The Eagles are as disappointing as Richmond
Which leads me to the grand point: the West Coast Eagles are on track to end the 2016 AFL season as nothing more than a footnote. They are a speedbump for the five unstoppable freight trains running the rails above them. This is the antithesis of where this team should be right now.

In many ways, West Coast and Richmond’s 2016 seasons share some similarities, albeit the Eagles are a tad more chipper than their counterparts at Punt Road. The Tigers had genuine ambitions, have made some moves in the off season which haven’t paid off, and have found themselves short against the best that 2016 has thrown up.

Now, this has manifested in an impending civil war in Tigerland, and at this stage nothing more than a grumpy coach out west. But make no mistake, West Coast’s administration will be mightily disappointed with how this season has panned out. And if they aren’t, then they should be.

But hey, at least they’re travelling better than that other mob from out west. Or at least we think they are – we’ll find out this weekend.

This is obviously not a terminal situation for this team. They will still be in prime age next season, have good-to-great players on every line, and boast one of the strongest home ground advantages in the game. Their young talent is very good – every fan will say that about their own club, but for West Coast, the list of names that are 21 and under is strong.

But alas, this season looks to have slipped away.