A Deep Dive into the 2025 NRL Season - Part 2
SGI, PAR, PEN, CBR, CRO and WAH
Welcome to Stats Drop, an inundation of rugby league numbers.
For a change, I’m not talking about Queensland rugby league in this newsletter. The Broncos, Dolphins, Cowboys and Titans have already received longer, standalone season previews featuring the full suite of charts below. This is for the rest of the league. This is part 2 and you can read part 1 here.
Some detailed explainers on the stats: Players, Teams and PVRTS/Sims. I didn’t include any coaching stats in this post because it is dense enough as is, but you can refer to this earlier table.
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Reminder: Datawrapper embeds look and work best on desktop, next best if you tap through on mobile and least best in email. There are so many graphs and charts, I have selected the most relevant for each team and then linked out to the others.
Dragons
Long time readers will know I have a specific antipathy for the St George Illawarra Dragons. It is not born of anything on the field, it is that they may well be the stupidest club in a league that features both Blake Solly and Bryan Fletcher on a regular basis as important people.
Among other things, there was the covid party, the character reference for an alleged pedophile on club letterhead and the underlying assumption that they are an important part of this competition because of something that happened six decades ago. In reality, the NRL would probably be better off handing their junior system over to the Sharks, merging St George into Easts and bringing the Steelers back as an independent entity.
Still, we should still look for a bright spot in this otherwise thoroughly mediocre franchise.
And there it is, right at the bottom, was an above average playmaking platoon. The backs, the pack and the overall team was below average to terrible as measured by Wins Above Reserve Grade but the playmakers were sixth best in the league by this metric.
Obviously, Ben Hunt is gone and he represented one leg of this troika, only missing two games in 2024. Lachlan Ilias is his replacement and the nicest thing I can say is that we will see what happens there. Kyle Flanagan appears to be reprising his role as five-eighth - can’t imagine why - after playing 20 games at #6 last season. Damien Cook, even on the wrong side of the age curve, is a huge upgrade on Jacob Liddle. If he stays on the field, he may even be able to make up the production difference between Ilias and Hunt.
The rest of the team doesn’t inspire a lot of confidence, and even numerically, a lot of that is being propped up by Valentine Holmes, which is best described as a quirk of the system, but maybe Dragons fans can look at their dynamic trio and hope.
Further analysis: Players by Z / Players by WARG / History / Sims
Eels
Last year, I wrote about Parramatta announcing the return of James Hardie1 as their jersey sponsor. During the off season, the Eels terminated their deal with the Northern Territory that saw them take a game to Darwin to get dacked in front of 11,000 people.
One of those commercial arrangements had some benefit to the wider sport, in addition to the financial benefit accrued by the Eels at the cost of the Territorian taxpayer, even if all came at the expense of what was left of the Eels’ collective ego.
The other is unbelievably odious. Even with everything that’s happened in the world over the last quarter century, I still can’t quite wrap my head around James Hardie being an acceptable entity to associate with but it pushes the nostalgia buttons in the most credulous Eels fans’ brains, so that apparently makes it all OK.
Anyway, I’m calling Jason Ryles as a flop right here and now. Eels will bounceback this year, largely on experience, flatline next, largely on age, Dylan Brown will finally exercise one of his contractual options and Ryles won’t see Magic Round 2027. No, there are no stats for this. I am allowed to do hot takes too.
Fine, here’s some numbers:
Further analysis: 2024 Metrics / Players by Z / History / Sims
Panthers
We’ve blown well past the ‘well, this is the year it finally falls apart’ level of analysis that I deployed for the first couple of years of the dynasty. There were no more worlds left to conquer; (Greg) Alexander wept.2
The manner in which they’ve gone about their wins, characterised by unrelenting calm, confidence and stability in applying unavoidable pressure, is as good evidence as any that things won’t fall apart. I am not convinced that Jarome Luai was the linchpin holding this endeavour together and that the collective effort of the forward pack and the dude in the coaching box both get (relatively) little in the way of praise. Those factors may erode away over time but collapse, immediate and catastrophic, is extremely unlikely.
They could win it again. Who is going to stop them? Unless PVL adds the Super League to the NRL, we’ve already thrown our best and brightest at the problem and come up with nothing.
Further analysis: 2024 Metrics / Players by Z / Players by WARG / Sims (save yourself a click and don’t look)
Raiders
This is a good get for mine. Ricky has had enough time.
I never really know how to get a pre-season read on the Raiders. Were such an analysis possible, I think we’d agree they may be the most vibes-reliant team. Some years, Ricky has it right, others not so much. Some seasons they fluke a finals appearance, other they’re a non-entity by round 15.
Is the Raiders Zone real or does the notion represent a Heisenbergian uncertainty about The Milk and the only way to reach a deterministic outcome vis-a-vis whether The Milk is off is to force a ‘waveform collapse’ by playing the season? Perhaps but this is as confusing a metaphor as trying to tease out the Canberra Raiders’ prospects.
Further analysis: 2024 Metrics / Players by Z / Players by WARG / History
Sharks
Cronulla project as the second team, the Panthers’ antagonist, for this season. The Bunnies, the Eels, the Broncos and the Storm have all had a crack at being second best and de-throning the kings, and all came up empty handed.
Other than Will Kennedy, the lowest projected player in the starting 17 has a Z score of 85. That’s just 15% below average for the second worst player on this team, as judged by this metric. That gives us an insight into the depth and width of production on the Sharks’ 17 this year.
Provided Cronulla can hang on to Tom Hazelton, this is a formidably deep team. Layer on last year’s success and the previous successive stepping stones that Fitzgibbon has lead this team over since taking the reins form John Morris, all signs are pointing up.
The last question is whether they can actually get it done.
Further analysis: 2024 Metrics / Players by WARG / History / Sims
Warriors
People are talking about the Warriors as potential spoon contenders. I don’t personally subscribe to the belief that the Warriors are special in such a way that they will never get the spoon. The only team in the league that could make that claim got the spoon in 2020, proving anyone can fall apart to a catastrophic degree but only if they really put their minds to it.
I do have New Zealand slotted in as one of the outside-looking-in, below average teams that is their natural hunting ground.
If everything goes really well - the young guys prove themselves as first graders and Andrew Webster shows that 2023 wasn’t a fluke and a few rivals shit the bed - then a low end finals spot is within reach for this team.
But it is as likely as not that one of those things won’t come off - I am yet to be convinced that Webster wasn’t a flash in the pan, the rivals could just as easily strike it rich as the Warriors, the young guys are still young guys - and the Warriors are an also-ran in the 2025 season.
Further analysis: 2024 Metrics / Players by Z / Players by WARG / History
Fun to look back and see what I got wrong and what I got right. Zac Lomax and Dylan Edwards did OK in the end, the government is giving money to NRL clubs to hand wave PNG through, Ezra Mam is looking a lot less king-like but, mostly, Billy got clowned.
Plutarch relates that Alexander had a tanty at the Ganges - he was silent on whether there was any weeping - but Hans Gruber’s formulation is more poetic.