Finding Premo – Defenders

Defence… Always a very hard area to get right.

Once again I am not going to look at how to structure your defence, but purely looking broader than averages at performance in 2012.

Again I have picked what I believe to be the 14 most relevant premos available for selection in your starting squad.

I will assign a points value based on how that player ranks. 1 point for 1^st, down to 14 points for 14^th rank. At the end of the article, I will rank players based on those points. Obviously this is subjective on the way that I have chosen to measure them, but you will get a guide.

I think defence is the area that we really look for consistency, so will again look at the 3 metrics I use to measure consistency.

Consistency

For defenders I am using a benchmark of 85 points. (There were only 8 defenders that averaged over 85 in 2012)

So how many times did they score 85 or over…and to be greedy.. % of time they score over 95

Next I will look at their Purple patch. The number of consecutive games that they score above 85

Now some of these players have had multiple spurts of consecutive games over 85, where that has happened, I have taken the higher average.

Last measure of consistency is Standard Deviation… this is a fairly standard statistical measure, that in layman’s terms looks at the variance between highest and lowest scores (its more complex than that, but you get the gist).

For this the lower number is the better, however Std Dev can be deceiving as if a players floor (lowest score) is 100 and their ceiling (Highest Score) is 155 you would probably be happy with a high std dev, so I think it is important to also look at their % of time they score under 85.  I have then multiplied these 2 figures to get what I call an Acceptable Std Dev.

Consistency Rank

Now differently to when I ranked Mids, I am providing a rank across those first 3 consistency measures as I believe this is extremely important in defence. I will also attribute a 70% weighting to consistency when looking at overall ranking.

Ceiling

Now let’s look at ceiling… When they go BANG…. how Big do they Bang!!

Whilst I rank consistently very high, it is also good to look at scores above 100 (let’s face it, this is what we want all of our premos to be scoring each week).

When they score over 100, how much do they score and what do they average after they raise their bat?

Coming Home

Now let’s look at how these guys finished 2012.

Looking at the year in halves and going under the assumption that those that finished better than they started will continue that form in to this year.

Starting with a BANG!

How does there 2013 draw stack up?

Are they better to start or to upgrade too?

I have looked at the teams they play prior to their bye and used their scores from 2012 to determine a rough average (this is obviously assuming they score the same, not allowing for any improvement or decline)

DT Spread

We know that a good rebounding defender loves a +6 (Mark and Kick) run in to space and do it again. No Ranking on this measure, but interesting to compare.

Non Consistency Rankings

So there we are. All of the above does not take into account, role change in team, competition for the pill and a million other things but gives you a bit of a stat breakdown and a snapshot into more than an average.

When we combine the 2 rankings and attribute the weighting, the rankings play out like this:

Bear in mind these ranking are just how I skew the numbers; they can be sliced a million different ways. Finding how they relate and how you can apply these to selecting your starting side becomes the challenge.

The secret here is to look further into the numbers, as there is some real gold to be mined if you look in the right places.

Cheers

Rainman

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