Who's afraid of the big, bad Giants?

The darlings of the prediction game, Greater Western Sydney appear one of the few finals certainties heading into the 2017 season. Be afraid, sports fans, the long-promised footballing juggernaut is here to lay waste to the AFL.

GWS enter the football year lumped with the highest of expectations. Betting market have the AFL’s newest club pegged at 15.5 wins, the highest in the league, and the market has shifted to the over since the odds were first posted.

It is year six for the Giants, right around the time league bosses pegged as the team’s peak upon their creation in 2011.

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The club hit a fresh high last year: 16 wins, with a percentage of 143.1 – the third best in the game. As we showed last week, the Giants should have been an 18-4 side according to some metrics, and there hasn’t been an 18-win side since the 2013 Geelong and Hawthorn units. It marked the continuation of a steady upward trend for the Giants, with two straight five-win improvements in 2015 and 2016.

Last season saw GWS embark on their first finals campaign, and earn their first finals win, before the red, white and blue little engine that could rolled into Spotless Stadium.

GWS had a strangely productive off-season, trading away an entire draft class (2014) for picks of varied quality, picking up another highly rated veteran in the process. Brett Deledio wanted out of Richmond, and the Giants were able to satiate the Tigers’ desires from both a draft pick and salary cap management perspective.

With their remaining picks, GWS picked four players inside of the top 20 of the draft – the fifth straight draft the Giants have brought in three or more players of such high pedigree.

In net, it means the Giants are going to market with the fourth-most experienced main list in the competition, a meteoric rise for a team which had the second-least experienced list just two seasons ago.

The addition of Deledio this season and Steve Johnson in the 2015 off-season doubtlessly boosted this aggregate, but more significant is the miles the Giants football department has worn into the tyres of the team’s drafted talent.

Over the past three years, the Giants have pumped 677 games of experience into the 14 players they drafted in their first two seasons, who are now in the team’s best 22. As a result, the Giants’ core is approaching maturity: Toby Greene, Devon Smith, Jeremy Cameron, Dylan Shiel and Stephen Coniglio will all pass 100 games this season. A bunch of other players will get close to having four full AFL seasons worth of games under their belts.

Add to that six traded players with more than 150 games of experience, and Tom Scully’s 127 games, and there’s little wonder things have been trending up for some time.

Last season, the Giants were one of three teams to have five or more blow-out victories and not allow a team to blow them out – with Sydney and Adelaide. At home, the Giants scored 119 points per game (ranked first in the league) and conceded 70; a 49-point average margin. It wasn’t against a powderpuff schedule either, beating Geelong, Hawthorn, the Western Bulldogs (home-and-away season), and Sydney at home, and lost to West Coast on the final play of that game.

Their 16.6 point home ground advantage is in the same league as the West Coasts and Geelongs of the world.

What’s more, the Giants were good away from home. GWS were the only team – the only team – that had a points for and points against that ranked in the top four both home and away. Not Hawthorn, not West Coast, not Geelong, not Sydney (just).

GWS’s game-to-game progress has been even more impressive, as we found when discussing the trade period prospects of the Gold Coast Suns last season.

The chart shows the rolling 60-game percentage of both the Suns and Giants – a crude measure of how each of the teams has performed over time if we continuously rate their past three seasons’ worth of games as new games of evidence appear.

As I said in that piece, the Suns rose sooner, but the Giants have gone faster and further. As their 2014 season drops out of the frame altogether in the next few months, the Giants will likely be rolling with a percentage of 130 or so – the mark of a very good team.

Coming into the 2017 season, it is safe to assume the Giants are a very good team. They are undoubtedly the premiership favourites, the first among a long list of equals and near-equals in a season full of great-looking units.

It all starts up front
The 2012 Hawthorn team – the one which was surprised by Sydney in the grand final – was the last team to score 120 points per game in the home-and-away season. It’s not a particularly common mark: 14 teams have kicked 120 points per game or more since the turn of the century, and four of those were in the anomalous 2000 season.

Scoring 120 points, kicking 20 goals, five per quarter, is – admittedly – a ridiculously arbitrary mark. But given the rarity, and the neatness, let’s roll with it.

GWS, with their high-powered front six and blue-chip midfield, have a chance to get close to the mark. The team already clocked a speed close to the limit at home; GWS’s 118.7 points was an agonising 14 points short of the mark – three shanked kicks from directly in front. The full season, ground status agnostic, 120 points per game is a shade under two goals per game away. That is well within this unit’s reach.

The brass at Blacktown has assembled a remarkably potent attacking set, encompassing the front six and a midfield chock full of A plus skill, speed, endurance and execution. Look at it. Caress it. Let it gaze deeply into your soul. It’s a thing of beauty.

S Mumford C Ward D Shiel
T Scully S Coniglio J Kelly

B Deledio J Cameron T Greene
S Johnson J Patton D Smith

That doesn’t include Lachie Whitfield (serving a six-month suspension for integrity-related violations) and Rory Lobb – more on him in a bit.

Those 12 players are all in the upper echelon of their respective positions, and together, they form the best midfield-forward group in 2017.

There are a few contenders to that title. Sydney come close, but outside of Lance Franklin have a weaker front six. Hawthorn, with the return of Jarryd Roughead and insertion of Ty Vickery, Jaeger O’Meara and Tom Mitchell, could challenge for the title. There’s a bevvy of teams that have great starting midfields, but average starting forward lines (Geelong, the Western Bulldogs) and average starting midfields but great starting forward lines (Adelaide, maybe St Kilda, although I suspect their midfield will continue to improve this season). No single team can hold a candle to this group.

The unit’s strength is in its flexibility. The five midfielders populating the starting six can all swap positions, save for Scully, who is a pure outside runner. The forward players can, for the most part, play tall and small – Devon Smith and Jonathon Patton may be the exception. Deledio and Greene are more than capable of playing in the midfield. So is Johnson, but the advent of Deledio will likely see him stay at home more permanently.

And that’s ignoring Rory Lobb, the two-metre tall key to unlocking the potential of GWS’s scoring power. Lobb, taken at pick 29 in 2013, and who re-signed with the Giants late last year, is a unique player. No other current AFL player combines his size, strength, overhead marking ability, ruck tap work, endurance and kicking ability into a single package. Lobb can play in any key position post on the ground – albeit as a spare defender, not an accountable one – as the team’s primary ruckman, and a link man through the middle of the ground.

The Giants want to go tall? Lobb goes forward, Greene heads up the ground, and there are three high marking threats in the Giants forward line. Need some help down back? Lobb goes to full forward and Patton can pinch-hit down back – as he did in the latter stages of last season. Need to put the brakes on the opposition? Stand him at centre half back and watch the ball go sideways. Something different? Greene goes to the forward pocket, Lobb to a half forward flank and runs the wings.

Most teams dream of having a tall player with positional flexibility, albeit that generally means a ruckman who can play as a goal-a-game full forward. Lobb is that, but so much more. There’s a reason he was chased hard by both Western Australian teams in the back half of last year, despite having 30 games under his belt.

Last year, Rhys Palmer and Smith played a combined 26 games, booting 29 goals, assisting on 18 more, and averaging 15 touches. While I’ve got Smith in the starting line up above, one lens to view GWS’s forward half through is Deledio, the grizzled 230 game forward half whiz, hungry for a premiership, will replace those 26 games.

He’s not worth two goals a game on his own, but when network effects are taken into account? There’s a strong chance.

The unconventional back half
While much of the flash of the Giants is centred on their forward half, the newcomers’ back six is just as interesting. The early retirement of Joel Patfull has meant GWS will enter the 2017 season with five absolutely lethal kickers populating the defensive arc – and just one genuine stopper.

Matt Buntine, Nick Haynes, Heath Shaw, Zac Williams and Nathan Wilson are all elite kicks and outstanding decision makers, while the Williams-Wilson pair are outstanding on the ground, too. Effective disposal percentage is a misleading statistic, but it’s the best we’ve got (#freethestats), and it shows Buntine, Haynes, Williams and Wilson all run at a disposal efficiency of 78 per cent or more.

Heath Shaw is more normal at 75 per cent. Williams – one of the most under-rated players in the league, probably because he plays in the most anonymous position on the lowest profile team in the league – disposed of the ball at an obscene 82 per cent efficiency last year.

While there are plenty of players running at percentages higher than this, they tend to be key defenders and inside midfielders, who handball to their teammates and get them to execute the more difficult skill. These guys are all kickers. The collective kick-to-handball ratio of the group is 2.75; the league-wide kick-to-handball ratio last year was 1.21. It’s incredible.

That’s not to say it’s all about launching scores. On the contrary, the Giants were one of the most effective teams at stopping their opponents from scoring once the ball entered their defensive 50 last year. Their opponents kicked a goal or behind on 41 per cent of their trips inside the stripe, ranked second to the ball-breakers at Sydney (38 per cent).

Indeed, the kicking defenders are also very good defenders in their own right.

A lot of credit goes to the team’s hard running midfielders, who fill space in zone defences as well as any top eight side. This has the added benefit of allowing the Giants to kick start a spread counter-attack offence from their back half – a tactic we saw them put to use with devastating effect last season.

Their stopping power could take a hit this year, given the departure of Patfull. The veteran formed an effective defensive pairing with co-captain Phil Davis; the two would take the best forward pairing of the opposition and look to work them over as a collective. Patfull had an offensive side to his game, too.

In comes either Buntine or the still-new Adam Tomlinson, who would likely play a more traditional defensive key position role compared to Buntine. Throwing Buntine in rather than Tomlinson would mean Nick Haynes slides up to become the second tall defender, and Buntine moves into Haynes’ role. A Tomlinson-for-Patfull swap would be status quo.

For all the success the unit has built since Shaw became their de-facto leader – at least that’s what we can surmise from his ranting and raving – they are still young and prone to lapses. Davis had his best run without injury in four years last season, playing 21 games after missing nine, 11 and ten games in the previous three years. He isn’t the best key defender in the game, but he’s very good, and the only proven stopper on their list. A prolonged absence would hurt GWS’s ability to keep teams to manageable scores.

Although… what is a manageable score for the Giants? 90 points? The team’s offensive power is such that defence matters a lot less than it does for most other teams.

Equalisation incoming
The anti-Giants case boils down to two, somewhat related wrinkles: depth and the draw. They are no longer inexperienced. They are no longer gunning for their first finals series, or first finals win. The home-and-away track record is there.

First, depth. The Giants’ league entry concessions were removed two years earlier than first anticipated, with the team now running on the same salary cap and list structure as the rest of the competition (excluding an AFL-administered rent assistance program for players earning below a certain salary threshold).

The Giants had an extra $760,000 in salary cap space (over and above the $10.6 million the rest of the competition had available) and an extra four full list spots over and above the standard AFL limit of 38-40.

HQ removed these concessions under the guise of their competitive balance policy, which was negotiated and implemented after the initial run of concessions were granted. One suspects they were also removed in part due to the Giants’ looming success.

It contributed to GWS’s off-season, where the organisation let go an array of quality talent. In all, the Giants traded out eight players with a combined 243 games of experience, and bought in one: Deledio. Later in the player exchange period, the Giants picked up a further 240 games of experience from discarded Fremantle duo Matt de Boer and Tendai Mzungu – the former on their full list.

While few of the departed players would have been in the Giants best 22, they were on the bubble, and would have been among the first called up in the case of a forced deviation from the regular line up.

The Giants now have around 194 games of experience on their list sitting outside of their theoretical best 22 (which includes the suspended Whitfield), when de Boer and Mzungu are removed from the equation. That’s disingenuous, because the two Dockers were bought into the group specifically to cover this weakness. Still, it isn’t a position the off-field leadership would have anticipated they’d be in 12 months ago.

Not that depth is a luxury most teams can afford. The league’s economy is set up in such a way that ‘pick and stick’ is the only way to build to sustained excellence. Inevitably, that leads to choices about who gets game time and who doesn’t. The Giants have built up their core of players over a number of years, and they wouldn’t be in this dynastic position had they been more egalitarian with their match day jumper distribution. Indeed, given the list squeeze imposed, those hypothetical games granted to depth players would have vanished from their list anyway.

Second is their schedule, which has been ratcheted up in difficulty from a relatively meek 2016. The Giants’ home slate starts relatively softly, with Gold Coast, Port Adelaide, the Western Bulldogs (can. not. wait.), Collingwood, Richmond and Essendon between Rounds 2 and 11. From then, the Giants face Geelong, Sydney, Fremantle, Melbourne and West Coast to close out their season. On balance, it’s probably on par with 2016. The Giants went 9-2 at home last year.

Away from home, it’s a far tougher proposition. The Giants travel to Adelaide to face the Crows, Tasmania to face North Melbourne and Hawthorn, Perth to face West Coast, Geelong to face the Cats, and to Melbourne to face St Kilda and the ‘Scrays. GWS play Sydney at the SCG, too.

Name a tough road assignment and the Giants will have to face it in 2017. If you’re looking for dark clouds, that’s a good place to start.

There’s a saying in sports analysis circles: progress is rarely linear. Teams experience ups and downs as they grow and develop; West Coast looked like the heir to Hawthorn’s throne this time last year. The difference here is that we’ve not seen the likes of what the Giants are building towards in the AFL.

After their early struggles, Greater Western Sydney have most certainly fixed themselves onto a linear progression, a trend which will see them lay waste to much of the competition in 2017.

The complaints will be loud, and numerous. The concessions were too generous. No one even likes football in Western Sydney. They don’t deserve it.

Resistance is futile. The Giants are here, the dynasty has begun.

But guess what? It’s going to be a whole lot of fun.