I read an interesting post (if you like programming) last week, looking at how to calculate how many games any two players have played together. I think it can be used to tell us something about where the current team is at.
The most games played by a pair for the Swans is 301, played by Adam Goodes and Jude Bolton. I'd guess that > 300 shared games is pretty unusual.
It's possible to take this further by calculating all pairs of players with > N games (say N = 50) and building a network that shows connections between players. A bit of fancy maths can then group the players according to the number of connections that they share.
So - here is the network of Swans players from 1990 onwards who played 50 or more games with another player. It's interesting that the fancy maths has automatically grouped players into what we might call the teams of the 1990s (orange), 2000s (green) and 2010s (blue), with some overlap of course.
Now look at that blue group. See who is gone: Laidler, Tippett, Mitchell, Hannebery, Richards, White, Shaw, Malceski, Mattner, Towers, Birds, Rohan, Jetta, McGlynn, Mumford, Pyke. Of those left, think about how many are young, old, down on recent form or have missed significant periods of time with injury. Remember: you are only seeing names of players who played 50 or more with someone else on the team.
When Longmire says it's a different team now, he's not kidding. A massive amount of shared experience has been lost.
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