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Melbourne Storm is the best team of the NRL era.
And sorry Warriors, Raiders, Panthers, Tigers, Rabbitohs and Titans fans – your teams are below average.
Dissecting the competition tables and finals records from each season of the NRL, and applying points according to a team’s overall finish each year, it reveals the Storm are the NRL’s most consistent performers.
All 24 clubs that have contested the NRL from its inception in 1998 were graded according to how well they fared in each of the 19 complete seasons to the end of 2016.
The higher a team finished on the competition ladder and the deeper they went into a finals series, the more points they earned.
Teams were given one point according to what position on ladder they finished – eg. one point for 16th position, two points for 15th, up to 16 points for first position. Minor Premiers score ten bonus points.
(AAP Image/Julian Smith)
Points were also allocated for performance in the playoffs: grand final winners get 40 points, runners-up earn 25 points, with five points given for each week a team played finals football.
The ultimate footy indignity – collecting the wooden spoon for placing last – saw teams deducted ten points.
Each club’s total score was then divided by the number of seasons that team played in the NRL.
Melbourne scored an average of 31.63 points per season. Subtract points for grand final wins and Minor Premierships (between 2006 and 2009) revoked because of Storm cheating the salary cap, and the Victorian club sits just 0.41 points behind Brisbane.
Having missed the finals just twice in 19 years – an NRL record – the Broncos are not surprisingly at the top end of the list with 26.73 points.
Four NRL Minor Premierships and six grand final appearances (for two wins) put Sydney Roosters third in the overall standings. Next best are Manly, Canterbury and St George-Illawarra.
They mightn’t have NRL Premiership silverware in the trophy cabinet and claimed back-to-back wooden spoons in 2012 and 2013, yet Parramatta ranks eighth overall ahead of grand final winners Cronulla, North Queensland, Newcastle, Penrith, Wests Tigers and South Sydney.
New Zealand Warriors are on par with the average point score of 12.94, while Canberra, Penrith, Wests Tigers, South Sydney and Gold Coast Titans are below the mean.
Despite a drought-breaking grand final victory in 2014, three wooden spoons in four seasons between 2003 and 2006 brings down South Sydney’s score enough to make the Rabbitohs the second poorest performed of the 16 active NRL clubs.
Only Gold Coast Titans, with just one finals win in five attempts and one of seven teams to finish last after making the NRL playoffs the previous year, has a worse overall record of the current clubs.
The best-performed of defunct NRL clubs are St George Dragons and North Sydney Bears; the worst the Adelaide Rams, Gold Coast Chargers and Western Suburbs Magpies, wooden-spooners in 1998 and 1999.
Points of interest
* Before the arrival of Johnathan Thurston and a breakthrough debut finals appearance in 2004, the North Queensland Cowboys were behind only Souths and the defunct Wests Magpies as the NRL’s worst team.
(AAP Image/Mick Tsikas)
* While merged entity Wests Tigers has performed better than its parent clubs Balmain Tigers and Wests Magpies, both Manly and North Sydney fared much better separately than did their Northern Eagles joint venture of the early 2000s.
* Trent Robinson (Sydney Roosters) is the best performed of current NRL coaches, followed by Craig Bellamy (Melbourne), Paul Green (North Queensland), Wayne Bennett (Brisbane), Des Hasler (Canterbury) and Michael Maguire (South Sydney).
* The worst performed of current coaches (up to the end of 2016 season) is Trent Barrett (Manly), followed by Brad Arthur (Parramatta), Shane Flanagan (Cronulla), Paul McGregor (St George Illawarra) and Neil Henry (Gold Coast).
* With Wayne Bennett as coach, the Brisbane Broncos average 31.77 points per season. Under the coaching of Ivan Henjak and Anthony Griffin between 2009 and 2014, the Broncos drop to eighth overall in the list at 15.83 points per season.
* In three years under Wayne Bennett, St George Illawarra averaged around 35 points per season, the total points Newcastle scored during Bennett’s three-year tenure in the Hunter region.
Overall standings
1. Melbourne *
2. Brisbane
3. Sydney Roosters
4. Manly
5. Canterbury
6. St George-Illawarra
7. St George
8. Parramatta
9. Cronulla
10. North Sydney
11. North Queensland
12. Newcastle
13. New Zealand
14. Canberra
15. Penrith
16. Wests Tigers
17. South Sydney
18. Illawarra
19. Gold Coast Titans
20. Balmain
21. Northern Eagles
22. Adelaide
23. Gold Coast Chargers
24. Western Suburbs
* Relegated to second after stripped Premierships andamp; Minor Premierships deducted from point score
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