There’s a seminal line in the movie Moneyball: “We need 38 home runs, 120 RBIs and 47 doubles to replace.” Abuse of the English language aside, the brass at the Adelaide Crows likely reprised this phrase in October last year, except they had 21 goals, 165 clearances and 350 contested possessions to replace.

For those unfamiliar, Moneyball is the story of how the Oakland Athletics turned to economics and statistics as their competitive advantage in Major League Baseball, a sport where money can literally buy you a championship.

The scene occurs in a dank scouting room on one of the first days off the offseason, when the Athletics’ list management team are discussing how to replace Jason Giambi, their power hitter and first baseman, who had left the team to take up a lucrative offer with the New York Yankees. I love it.

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The parallel with Adelaide’s situation ends right about there, but I’ve been looking for a chance to roll out a direct quote from this movie for some time…

So uhh, yes, to Adelaide. The Crows lost their best player – one of the top-five players in the league as far as I’m concerned – Patrick Dangerfield, to Geelong in last year’s offseason. Dangerfield was a restricted free agent, but the Crows and Cats both realised that getting it done the old school way was the way to go.

Dangerfield was important to the way Adelaide played football in the past few years – his versatility and power allowed the Crows to build a sledgehammer masquerading as a midfield. Led by Dangerfield’s 165 clearances – almost eight per game – the Crows were third in clearance differential and contested possession differential in the home-and-away season. The only other team to rank in the top four for both important indicators was Fremantle, who have Nat Fyfe, David Mundy and Lachie Neale roving to Aaron Sandilands.

But the group wasn’t at its peak, with the 2015 Crows listed as the eighth oldest and 11th most experienced squad in the league. The retirement of Brent Reilly and James Podsiadly means the Crows enter this year with just one 30-year-old on the list, the indefatigable Scott Thompson. If Dangerfield had stayed, the Crows would have improved upon their ignominious semi-final exit at the hands of the Hawks last year. Mark my words, the Crows were a rising football team.

That’s in the past now, and the Crows can’t dwell on it. Adelaide have 21 goals, 165 clearances and 350 contested possessions to replace.



A useful place to start is looking at the ins enabled by Dangerfield’s departure, because for the Crows, there were a lot.

Adelaide secured Geelong’s Round 1 (ninth) and Round 2 (28th) draft picks for Dangerfield, as well as second-year player Dean Gore, on a deal that was done on the first morning of the trade period. This gave them an incredible amount of football capital to play with, and nearly all of the trade period to use it. Adding those two extra top-30 picks meant the Crows could leverage their draft picks over both this year and next to bring in established talent. That’s exactly what they did.

Out went 2016’s second-round pick, Adelaide’s 2015 second-round pick and Geelong’s second-round pick (as well as single game sophomore Sam Kerridge), and in came Curtly Hampton (Greater Western Sydney), Paul Seedsman (Collingwood) and Troy Menzel (Carlton) respectively. The Crows then went to the draft with both their’s and Geelong’s first-round picks, taking highly rated Wayne Milera and Draft Bolter™ Tom Doedee at pick 11 and 17 respectively.

Let’s park the draftees for now, because they aren’t important to the story.

The Crows lost Dangerfield, and to replace him brought in Hampton, Seedsman and Menzel, and were gifted the untried Gore. Just for kicks, how close do we get to replacing Dangerfield’s three stats from above?

Dangerfield (2015): 21 goals, 165 clearances, 350 contested possessions.

Hampton + Seedsman + Menzel (2015): 17 goals, 21 clearances, 118 contested possessions.

And that’s not prorated, that’s Dangerfield’s line over 23 games versus the 31 games that the three others played last year. While he’s not irreplaceable – no individual is – number 32 is about as close to that superlative as we have in the league right now.

But guess what? It probably doesn’t matter.



The recruits won’t add what has been subtracted by Dangerfield’s departure, but they will provide the Crows with something they have been lacking in recent years: outside pace and a touch of class, to complement the exceptional inside midfield core.

Adelaide have ranked second last or last for the share of their possessions coming in uncontested situations in three of the past four seasons, and were ranked 15th in uncontested possession differential last year.

Much of that is scheme-oriented: the Crows like to throw their weight around and play direct, sacrificing the kick-mark side of the game that has emerged at places like Hawthorn and West Coast in recent years. They won the outside battle on just seven occasions last year, winning all seven games. Perhaps there’s something there?

Here’s where the new recruits come in. All three of the established AFL players coming in will allow the Crows to become more balanced in the way they attack: Hampton is pure run, Seedsman played as a running half back flanker in his time at Collingwood, and Menzel’s presence in the forward line will allow rising speed machine Charlie Cameron to spend more time through the middle of the ground.

It should benefit Adelaide’s attack, too. Champion Data’s AFL Prospectus shows the Crows were ranked second in scoring from centre bounce situations, and sixth from scores launched in their forward half of the ground (outside of the 50 metre arc). They found it much harder to score from defensive midfield (12th) and defensive 50 (tenth) possession gains, which I would largely put down to this unbalanced mode of possession as well as their propensity to push the ball into their half of the ground by brute force.

Hampton and Seedsman will also bring balance to Adelaide’s defensive set up, which is populated by plenty of bonafide stoppers, but lacks the rebounding threat most other sides pose. This will force their opposition to be more cognisant of the attacking potential of their defensive half in a way that they haven’t had to in the past. That may mean Adelaide’s ability to score from their defensive half remains the weakest part of their attack, but it should reduce the offensive potency of their opponents.

That’s all great. But the Crows will still be minus the clearances and contested possessions Dangerfield was able to earn at will. Or will they?

Rory Sloane is the best Robin doppelganger in football. The AFL’s official player ratings – which use a fancy algorithm to assign the contribution that a player makes to his team’s score/his team’s role in stopping the opposition scoring – has Sloane ranked as the league’s fifth most influential player, a level he maintained for all of the 2015 season after breaking into the top ten in 2014.



Over his career, Sloane’s work was doubtlessly made easier than it would otherwise be by the presence of Dangerfield (who is ranked third on this list). The problem is, we don’t have a good handle on what Sloane can do as Adelaide’s Batman: he hasn’t played a game that Dangerfield hasn’t played in since Round 18, 2013. At that point, Sloane was an elite player (ranked 27th overall), and ended up winning Adelaide’s best and fairest, but he was in his fourth full year of football, at the age of 23. He was just emerging into the player he has become.

Like Dangerfield, and really any other elite player, Sloane is a unique beast. He is perhaps harder at the contest than his old teammate, but has a stronger outside game by way of disposal. Early in his career, Sloane played a large portion of his game time on the Adelaide wings, with his inside game developing in line with his physical development. Where Dangerfield outclasses him is busting tackles and splitting packs: Sloane’s slighter frame (183 centimetres and 83 kilograms, versus Dangerfield’s 189 centimetres and 92 kilograms) makes him a less threatening proposition as a ground-ball get machine.

His partner in crime in 2016 will be the evergreen Thompson, who is a slightly inferior version of West Coast’s Matt Priddis. Together, the two will shift up a spot on the whiteboard in their opposition’s planning meetings, with the omnipresence of Dangerfield no longer there to shield them from consideration as a tagging target.

So Adelaide have lost the 21 goals, 135 clearances and 350 contested possessions of Dangerfield – and they won’t get them back. But for 2016, and beyond, it just might work out for them.