'Under New Management': Why Matthew Nicks' Crows Are In Deep Trouble
Aug 19, 2020, 5:30AM
In this week’s entry into the 'Under New Management' series, we take a look at Matthew Nicks and the Adelaide Crows, who currently sit 0-12 on the bottom of the ladder with a percentage of 54.7.
As usual, we’re going to look across five key areas for the club: winning the ball, moving the ball, scoring, defending, and the demographics of the side.
Homer Simpson once said “if we quit now, we’ll never know how badly they’re going to beat us” – and if you’re a Crows fan, that’s about as good a motivation as I can give you for reading on.
The numbers contained herein won’t offer much to feel excited about, but if you don’t read them, you’ll never know just how bad they are. And would you really want to miss that?
RELATED: Inside Adelaide's swift fall from grace
WINNING THE BALL
Winning the hard ball wasn’t necessarily a strength of the Crows under Don Pyke last year, but it’s something they’ve become much worse at in 2020.
The Crows were ranked ninth for both clearance and ground ball gets differentials last year, generally breaking even with their opponents, yet in 2020 they’re averaging -10.2 clearances compared to their opponents, and -9.6 ground ball gets.
That puts them 17th for ground ball gets differential, and dead last for clearances.
The news isn’t any better when it comes to pressure and forcing turnovers. In 2019, Adelaide were a relatively impressive sixth in the league for pressure acts per minute, recording 5.94 per minute.
In 2020, they’re averaging just 5.31 per minute of opposition possession, which is 18th in the competition. They’ve also dropped from 7th to 16th when it comes to tackles per minute of opposition possession.
Overall Adelaide are the league’s worth team for forcing turnovers – they allow on average 49 seconds of opposition possession before making them give up the ball. This is 7.5 seconds longer than last year, when they were ranked ninth.
RELATED: Understanding how Clearances Shape the Results of AFL Games
MOVING THE BALL
Some of Adelaide’s ball-movement stats are fairly similar to what they were last year – they’re moving the ball at 115 metres gained per minute, the fourth-quickest of any side, and roughly the same pace as last year.
Like in 2019, they’re a team that tends to handball more than others, ranked 16th for kick-to-handball ratio, the same spot they were in last year. Their kick-to-handball ratio in 2020 so far is 1.28.
Where last year they had a high uncontested-to-contested possession ratio (1.62, third in the league), this year it has dropped away. Whether that’s by design or part of their poor form isn’t clear – but the latter seems likely.
Overall, they’re possessing the ball for only 38.4 seconds on average before turning it over, which sees them ranked 16th in the competition, down from 12th last year.
They had a poor inside-50 differential under Pyke last year, averaging -2.5 compared to their opponents, ranked 14th. But that has blown out in a big way in 2020, where they now average -14.3 across the season, comfortably last in the league.
SCORING
Unfortunately for the Crows, even when they do get the ball forward, they aren’t having much luck converting that into points on the board.
They are scoring just 1.2 points per minute of possession this year – ranked second-last in the competition – down from 1.6 under Pyke in 2019, when they were 8th.
Their accuracy has been poorer too. They’re going at 44% overall which is down from 48% last year. Stats Insider’s short charting tool rates them as recording +5% of their expected score last year, but in 2020 they’re going at -8%.
Last year they were able to convert 22.8% of their inside-50s into a goal, which was good enough for eighth in the league. This year that has dropped off to 18.6%, which, as you might have guessed, is the worst of any side in the AFL.
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DEFENDING
The Crows are also putting up some devastatingly poor numbers in the backline, where their 1.77 points conceded per minute of opposition is another stat where they rank last in the competition.
It’s not something they were great at in 2019 – conceding 1.6, and ranked 12th – but still represents a significant decline from those numbers.
The Crows are allowing their opponents to record an inside-50 for every 6.46 disposals which sees them ranked 17th, above only the Sydney Swans.
They’ve conceded a goal from 25.2% of opposition inside-50s – again ranked last in the competition, and up from 21.4% (ranked 10th) in 2019.
Opposition sides are enjoying 51.1% goalkicking accuracy against the Crows, fourth-worst numbers of any side in the competition, suggesting opponents are finding it pretty easy to generate quality shots on goal against Adelaide.
DEMOGRAPHICS
The makeup of Adelaide’s side has changed in a big way over the last 12 months – going from fielding one of the oldest and most experienced sides in 2019 to now finding themselves in the lower end of the pack.
Their average age was 26.4 last year, second in the league, but they’ve dropped down to 13th this year, with their team being on average 1.4 years younger.
They are fielding nearly 700 less games of experience on a weekly basis in 2020 compared to 2019, which has seen them drop form the fifth most experienced side of 2019 to 13th this year.
RELATED: For Young And Old: How Age And Experience Affect AFL Results
CLOSING THOUGHTS
Looking for positives out of Adelaide’s 2020 season is like building a house in Coober Pedy – you really have to go digging to get it done.
They’re the league’s worst clearance side, worst pressure side, worst inside-50 side, worst defensive side and second-worst scoring side. It’s pretty dire.
The demographic shift and messages coming out of the club make one thing clear: they’re rebuilding. Unfortunately, their youth hasn’t offered fans a lot to get excited about just yet.
They’ve pumped 111 games into players 23 and under so far this year, which is equal ninth in the competition – but they’ve only seen 8 AFLCA votes from players in this age category, the second-least of any side in the competition.
They haven’t gotten a Rising Star nomination yet this year, and with six rounds to go, don’t appear to have any strong candidates for one.
All things considered, it looks like a situation that may well gets worse before it gets better. But could it get much worse than this?
It should be acknowledged of course that not much has gone right for the Crows this year. What was always going to be a difficult season to navigate has only been made worse by a pandemic and an injury list that, while not the worst in the league, certainly hasn’t helped their cause.
With an injection of some draft talent and another offseason to work with the players, Matthew Nicks may well be able to turn this thing around.
Last week we looked at Rhyce Shaw and North Melbourne and acknowledged that while there was a mighty amount of work to be done, Shaw still had a few improvements of note to hang his hat on.
Nicks, simply, doesn’t. And if he wasn’t a first-year coach, and there wasn’t a pandemic going on, these would be ‘sack the coach’ numbers.
Right now he appears a strong chance to become the first person in 56 years to coach a VFL/AFL side to a winless season. Coming back from that will be an almighty mountain to climb.
Note: The stats on points from stoppages/possessions used in this article are recorded as they were published after each game in the Herald Sun.
For a small number of matches these stats were never published, and there is also known to be a small number of typographical errors in the original source data.
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