Right now, North Melbourne are no closer to their next AFL premiership

North Melbourne have emerged as a perfectly adequate Australian rules football team this season. Adequate has been the club’s hallmark for some time; is it enough to begin a push for another premiership?

This column might feel like a slight to some North fans. It is not intended to be.

A 5-4 record, sturdy percentage and wins against Hawthorn, Sydney and crippled Greater Western Sydney have given the Roos a strong start to the first third of the season – one that is not entirely unexpected. As Cam Rose wrote during his preseason preview series, North’s core group of experienced players are good enough to ensure the club doesn’t enter every week with the prospect of being beaten up.

So it has been. North are currently ranked number one in points allowed per game, on the back of a high-pressure midfield defence and stout back-six that has played a lot of football together. They’ve played their schedule about two goals per game better in defence than if they were league average, the second best mark in the league behind Geelong.

It is a far cry from 2017, when Brad Scott’s handball-centric ball movement scheme turned them into a Lions-like turnstile on turnovers. Sound defence keeps you in games for longer, as we saw against Richmond in Round 8. It can also be the foundation of victory, as we saw last weekend.

But we’re not so interested in the short term for North Melbourne. A kind fixture, which still includes games against Brisbane (twice), Gold Coast, the Western Bulldogs, Essendon and St Kilda, could see the club push for a spot in the finals all the way until the end of August. That would be a stunning development, the best-case scenario for this team heading into 2018 coming to life.

Instead, it ponders this: from the outside looking in, is North’s overall strategy and direction helping them win their next premiership?

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Play it straight
There is something to be said for not ‘bottoming out’ in the way most teams would seek to at the end of a list management cycle.

We have our share of bottoming out teams in the league right now: St Kilda, Carlton, Brisbane, Fremantle, even perhaps the Gold Coast Suns given they’ve lost so many players now in prime age over the past few years. The Western Bulldogs are bottoming out, too. Melbourne reached the inflection point of their cycle last year, and will ride the crest of the development wave over the next few seasons.

This is the way it has always been done. Building through the draft, and appending the list with mature age players via trade was the only way to create a winning team for much of the draft era. But things have moved quite rapidly over the past five years, a fact obscured by the league’s expansion at the beginning of the decade.

With free agency, and the advent of contracted players behaving like free agents, clubs have the means to add quality players quickly without having to give up much by way of assets the other way. It has added a new, overarching list-build strategy to the toolkit of football departments across the league.

Now, clubs can build 90 per cent of their team fairly naturally and add the final pieces in a trade period or two to jump up to that final tier of contention. It makes avoiding a hard reset the first port of call for list management.

Things have moved quickly for the Roos since they last appeared as a subject of this column, in late 2016.

At that time, I pondered whether North should – ahem – sell up and build a treasure trove of assets in the form of young players and draft picks. After all, they had a bunch of quality middle-tier players that could have yielded them some extra draft picks and youngsters yet to establish themselves from other clubs.

As it turns out, North was pretty happy cutting its most senior players only, retaining that middle tier, and taking their picks as they came. So far, it’s working – if working means winning games of football here and now.

North Melbourne have been the elder team in seven of nine games, and the more experienced team on average in six of seven. The two where they were younger was Port Adelaide (by 38 days) and Sydney (95 days). Against the Hawks, the Roos were less experienced on average, but slightly younger. Otherwise, they have been the more game-hardened team every week this season.

That may surprise on first glance. After all, we were all fairly sure the club was entering a rebuild at the end of the 2016 season.

Similarly, the Roos have debuted just one new player in 2018 (Billy Hartung doesn’t count): Luke Davies-Uniacke in Round 1. That’s after an extraordinary 11 players were given their first game jumper in 2017, in addition to Marley Williams and Nathan Hrovat, who moved from other clubs.

Instead, North have used just 26 players in 2018, fewer than any club in the competition (including reigning premiers Richmond). They have made eight changes to their team in nine rounds, again the fewest in the league.

A pristine injury list certainly helps matters. North has four players listed as unavailable, and two of them are a test for this week. A remarkable 16 players have played every week this season, and a further three have missed just one game. Wouldn’t you know it, it is that middle-aged core that we thought would serve them well in the preseason. To this point, North’s depth hasn’t been tested, and we saw what happened when they turned to depth in 2017.

The current run may continue for the rest of 2018, and if it does, North Melbourne are an enormous shout for a finals spot, given the supersized middle class we have this season and their cushy fixture. It would continue a trend which has held for North for the best part of two decades.

Rising higher
While the Roos made preliminary finals in 2014 and 2015, that belies the generally middling performance of their team during the home-and-away season. And I say middling deliberately: North rarely drop away completely, but by the same token have rarely soared to the turn-of-the-century heights of their last premiership team.

Since 2000, they have finished fourth, 13th, seventh, tenth, tenth, fifth, 14th, fourth, seventh, 13th, ninth, ninth, eighth, tenths, sixth, eighth, eighth and 15th last year. It has been 12 years since they made the top four.

There is merit in this. Staying competitive keep fans coming along to games, helps foster team culture, and can make for some surprising upside seasons (kind of like this one). All of this has a commercial dimension too.

By the same token, the AFL is a mission-driven league; there are no owners expecting a dividend at the end of the season. So commercial considerations are important, but getting into a position to contend for premierships, and then taking chances that come your way, is the ultimate goal.

Are North building a premiership-contending list? Or is this just another middling Roos team destined to finish around eighth for half a decade?

This goes back to the notion of a new way of rebuilding, enabled by free agency and the contract power balance tipping further towards the players by the year. Clubs with the right mindset have the means to aggressively add talent to their own stable to help push from middling to contention. That looks like what North Melbourne is up to.

Take last off season, for example. North were prepared to chase both Dustin Martin and Josh Kelly, the former a free agent and the latter coming off his second contract. The Roos could’ve nabbed the pair for not much more than salary cap space and a could of picks inside the top 20 (or a pick plus an established player), and added them to the core which has performed well this season.

It’s an impossible counterfactual, but add the best attacking midfielder and one of the top handful of all-around midfielders in the competition, and I suspect we’d be talking about the Roos as top-four contenders.

And that’s the point: North’s current list may not be any closer to a premiership than those who’ve come before them.

But the current list, plus an infusion of top-end talent acquired in an off-season or two? Now we’re talking.

In some ways, Richmond did this in the 2016 off season, albeit adding players in the tier that North Melbourne has an abundance of. With a core group in place, the Tigers were able to add Josh Caddy, Toby Nankervis and Dion Prestia to their best 22, and we know what happened next. Hawthorn has been able to aggressively infuse two ready-made midfielders into an established core, addressing their biggest weakness in the process.

It isn’t a no-lose strategy, and it involves risk. Essendon and Port Adelaide were similarly aggressive last off season; one is staring at a finish in the bottom six, the other is on track for the same number of wins achieved in 2017. They are risks both the Bombers and Power would take again.

And it will be a risk North Melbourne attempts to take again in 2018. There are plenty of talented players on the market, and more will emerge as the season progresses (and more teams begin to realise it’s not their year). We’ll examine this in more depth once the market heats up, because North will be a central protagonist.

One uncertainty for the Roos is how many of the older players currently contributing to their ability to play competent football will be there over the next two to three years. Jarrad Waite and Scott Thompson are 35 and 32 respectively. Shaun Higgins, having a career-best year, is 30. Todd Goldstein is about to turn 30 and Robbie Tarrant will turn 30 in 2019. The quintet are all in the top ten on HPN’s Player Approximate Value (PAV) system for 2018.

All have been critical contributors this season, have had their own troubles with injury and form over the past couple of years, and are entering the stage of their careers where a period of unavailability can bring on the end quickly. It may mean another 2017-style dip will be forthcoming in a year or two.

But if most of them can stick around for another year or two, and the Roos make good on their designs for quality external talent, then anything can happen.

As it stands, North Melbourne is no closer to their next premiership than at the end of 2017, but by establishing such a sound platform, that could turn in an instant.