A few years back, Major League Baseball Hall of Famer Richard ‘Goose’ Gossage produced one of the all-time great old man yelling at cloud rants during an interview with ESPN.
While not much in the modern game escaped the Goose’s wrath, special opprobrium was reserved for sabermetrics and the ‘nerds’ (stat-heads) who’d driven baseball’s data revolution in the wake of Bill James, the Oakland A’s, Billy Beane, Moneyball and all that.
“The game is becoming a freaking joke because of the nerds who are running it, these guys played [fantasy] baseball at Harvard or wherever the f— they went and thought they figured the f—ing game out. They don’t know s—.“
I partly agree – statistics are dangerous and are often misused, abused and misunderstood. Stats can never tell the full story, but nor would any spreadsheet jockey want them to. They establish unknowns and lines of inquiry but can’t always provide the answers.
Funnily enough, in the early 2000s, not long after he retired, several ‘nerds’ started asking why Gossage was not in baseball’s Hall of Fame. While he was a little unconventional, he was quantitatively much better than most of contemporaries.
In 2008, the Goose was finally enshrined, thanks in part to a long grass-roots campaign waged by those he so derided.
So, in the spirit of nerdy and subversive inquiry, and turning rugby league into a joke by recognising excellence, it’s time for my player rating system, BEAST (baseline, equalised, aggregate stats) to hand out some awards to the cream of the NRL in 2023.
For those not familiar, BEAST is a composite of all the useful publicly available stats about player performance, with the various stats crunched into three metrics, including:
1. Productivity: what players produce in terms of measurable outputs from their involvements in the game;
2. Net metres: an effectiveness rating based on the bulk attacking and defensive stats – essentially how far players are likely to advance their teams per involvement;
3. Weighted involvements: this started life as an attempt to iron out differences in work rate (the Latrell Mitchell-Dylan Edwards conundrum) and has evolved into an interesting corollary to the other two metrics, almost a proxy for efficiency.
Without further ado, here are BEASTs awards for best overall player, most dominant position player, most effective, hardest working, average and up-and-coming players in 2023.
Johnson was looking down the barrel at the NRL scrapheap and had to fight for his right to be considered a top-level NRL half, but boy did he make some noise. Okay, that’s enough from the Beastie Boys.
He wasn’t the best running half, or the most effective kicker, or the best creator or defender, or even the hardest worker. He was the best all-round halfback, though, and the best overall player in the NRL to boot.
The two things that really stand out, especially compared to where Johnson was this time last year, are his long kicking – slightly better than Adam Reynolds and Daly Cherry-Evans – and his defence – better than every half except Nicho Hynes and Jackson Hastings.
Has there been a more dramatic turn-around in form by a veteran player, or any player?
Bluey, the beloved animated children’s character, made a foray into rugby league this year in an episode titled ‘The Decider’.
While the merits of exposing impressionable young minds to State of Origin are highly dubious, it’s at least potentially growing interest in the game, like the possibly forlorn hope that T20 cricket might be a gateway to interest in actual cricket.
Anyway, Bluey is clearly the dominant and most influential canine around these days, and this award is for the most clearly dominant player in their position.
While Kalyn Ponga had a late nip at his heels, Walsh was the best fullback in 2023 and he was better by a wider margin than the best in any other position. His speed and evasion, coupled with the Broncos’ ability to create spaces for him on the edges, made Walsh’s possessions an almost guaranteed line break, either directly or indirectly, throughout the season.
And in bad news for the rest of the NRL, there’s seemingly ample room for improvement, with Walsh’s 83% productivity rating (second only to Ponga among regular fullbacks) and net metres (second to Jayden Campbell) watered down by a quite remarkable number of errors – 2.4 per 80 minutes of playing time, compared to Ponga with 0.94, Campbell’s 0.96 and Dylan Edwards’ 0.83.
Honourable mention: Isaah Yeo, Penrith Panthers
(Photo by Bradley Kanaris/Getty Images)
A hard worker means different things in different positions. Middle forwards and dummy-halves are almost constantly involved in some way and have been known to shoot contemptuous glances at the glory boys out wide who ultimately profit from their labour.
Among the middles, the Dragons’ Blake Lawrie is far from the best, but goodness he works hard. Bless him!
There is a subset of wingers who are ersatz forwards and do a lot of hard yards while the big boys are still waddling back onside. Props to Jacob Kiraz, the hardest working psuedo forward in the NRL.
Then there are fullbacks, who’re constantly in motion, running the ball, supporting the carrier, organising and moving laterally across the defensive line, tackling and making second efforts, chasing kicks and returning them.
The Warriors’ Charnze Nicoll-Klokstad did more of that than anybody else in 2023. He was far from the most productive fullback and not even close to the most effective, but he was everywhere man. To borrow a line originally about French footballer N’Golo Kanté: 70% of the Earth’s surface is covered by water, the other 30% is covered by CNK.
The famously indefatigable Dylan Edwards wasn’t resting on his laurels either, with a typically high 23 involvements per 80 minutes. Nicoll-Klokstad had a tick over 26.
Terry Lamb is remembered for many reasons – being a multiple premiership winner, a state and national representative, and one of the best support players in the game’s history.
Then there was arguably his most decisive and effective contribution, erasing Ellery Hanley from the 1988 grand final. He was a wolf in sheep’s clothing.
Not that I’m glorifying foul play. Quite the opposite – this award is about the most ruthlessly effective player in the NRL according to the stats. Rocco Berry is arguably the most effective defender in the league. Take your pick from Joseph Tapine, Blayke Brailey or Matt Timoko for the most effective carrier. Johnson’s the best all-round player, of course.
But let’s go with a metric-based approach: the player who did the essence of the game – advancing his team down the field – better than anybody else in 2023 was Parramatta’s Mitch Moses.
His outstanding long kicking game was the biggest single contributor, but this metric takes everything into account – kicking, running, creativity, good defence and bad defence.
Moses was worth at least 12.8 metres whenever he took the ball, comfortably ahead of Brailey, Cherry-Evans, Api Koroisau and surprise-packet bopper Coen Hess.
I might be in broken record territory here, but being an average player is a good thing, a very good thing, as evidenced by this year’s mean boy.
In the unlikely event you’re wondering, the median of the 385 players eligible for at least one award is Newcastle’s Jack Hetherington.
Saying Welch is an average player doesn’t mean much in itself, so what does it mean? For Welch, it’s a step down. He was a first quartile prop as recently as 2021, the last season he spent significant time on the field.
He’s also part of a broader trend at Melbourne. Jahrome Hughes, Cameron Munster, Harry Grant, Justin Olam and Nelson Asofa-Solomona were all top dogs in their respective positions, or close to it, very recently. None were close this season.
There were positives. After a rocky start, Trent Loiero was close to an average player in his first campaign as a full-time starter, while Eliesa Katoa was a bit better than that.
The Storm didn’t lose much when Jonah Pezet deputised for Munster. Nick Meaney, who isn’t supposed to be the regular fullback, was better than half his counterparts.
But something seems to be missing. Have Melbourne’s famous standards slipped? Have the players become desensitised to Craig Bellamy pressure cleaning the dressing room walls? Or is it just injury (Hughes), ‘Caxton-itis’ (Munster), low confidence (Olam) and a messiness born of loss of experience and combinations (Grant). Watch this space.
Neither BEAST nor its predecessor (POPE) would blow their own trumpet. For every player correctly identified as on the rise (Jeremy Marshall-King and Timoko), there’s at least one who never got far off the ground (Jack Murchie and Hayze Perham). Grains of salt and all that.
The obvious and safe bet is Canterbury’s outstanding young back-rower Jacob Preston, who came within a whisker of making the team of the season (see below).
But this is about bold predictions, so let’s go for a young edge back-rower, a notoriously volatile position, playing in the sporting graveyard that is the Gold Coast. What could possibly go wrong?
The younger Haas played enough minutes to start drawing some tentative conclusions. He did enough in the defensive line in terms of raw impact and generating second-phase play to indicate he might have something, and he seems to be a competent defender, which is impressive on a notoriously tackle-averse team.
Honourable mention: Connolly Lemuelu, Dolphins
There are some surprises this year, with so many of the statistical leaders of the recent past having down years by their standards. Without further comment, other than to note that BEAST did predict a big year for Nat Butcher, here’s the team of the season.
1. Reece Walsh
2. Selwyn Cobbo
3. Stephen Crichton
4. Dane Gagai
5. Jason Saab
6. Cody Walker
7. Shaun Johnson
8. Joseph Tapine
9. Damien Cook
10. Coen Hess
11. Nat Butcher
12. David Fifita
13. Isaah Yeo
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All the team list information for Round 9.
