The next in my focus on Power players is our own quadzilla Ollie Wines.

Ollie has been a phenomenon in the league since he joined the Power at the start of the 2013 season. In his first season he was a very popular pick in AFL Fantasy as everyone knew he could play. Since that first game against Melbourne he hasn’t missed a game. That is exactly what we look for in a Fantasy player. Durability. There is nothing more important than knowing that your Fantasy player will be out there week in and week out.

Most seasoned AFL Fantasy coaches will tell you the second year blues is a real thing, most players will drop their average in the second year and they will have a breakout in their third year. This is what has got the Fantasy world buzzing about Wines. Not only did he have a great second year and avoid those blues, we are all hoping he can still have that third year breakout and take his game and scoring to a new level.

During the past two seasons he has averaged 74 and 91 points respectively. We know he will continue to improve his game as he continues his very young career and the result of that is his Fantasy scoring will join in for that ride! His possession stats have increased from 18.8 to 24.4. Importantly his kick to handball ratio hasn’t suffered too much going from 50:50 to 41:59.

Whilst it is better to have more kicks than handballs as they are worth more, this slight drop in his ratio of kicks isn’t a major concern given he increased from nine to 10 kicks per game and simply lifted his handballs by more. What would be more worrying is if a player’s K:H ratio stayed the same or slightly worsened like Ollie’s but their overall possessions dropped. The other key stats were good too. He increased by one tackle per game and kicked six more goals. Being an inside midfielder, like Brad Ebert, Ollie gets a lot of tackles, five per game is fantastic from a second year player. This only serves to boost his scoring further.

He will gain more attention from opposition, but I am confident his new leaner frame which was on show at the Power intra-club game will assist him in getting in and out of contests just that bit quicker and as with Brad Ebert in my last focus article he won’t be the first guy tagged on the team. This means the he should be able to be free to continue to gather experience and the ball! However, the more damaging he becomes the more other teams will take note of him.

The most pleasing aspect of Wines scoring last year was that he didn’t have massive fluctuations. He only had five scores below 80 and this was in the last five rounds (not ideal from a Fantasy perspective given these include Fantasy finals) but earlier in the year he had seven scores of 100 or more. He did get things going again in the finals (although they don’t count for AFL Fantasy). This tells me that it was just a slump and not a major issue. In those five games, Port lost three of them and of the other two, one was the drenched game on the Gold Coast and the other was the massive win against Carlton. So I am not reading too much into this. All players have down games, but usually they are a little more spread out than this.

One of the toughest gigs in AFL Fantasy is to try and find the next superstar before they are one, just like all those who jumped on Robbie Gray last year in Round 1 and rode his fantastic season all the way through, there are many of us out there hoping for exactly the same thing from Ollie this year. I think Ollie will break out and if he can drift forward and further increase his goal scoring this will really lift that Fantasy scoring average and he will be up there with the AFL Fantasy elite sooner rather than later.

Next up I will take a look at our 2014 best and fairest, Robbie Gray. You can find me on twitter @pkd73 and weekly throughout the season here on the PAFC website and also at www.dreamteamtalk.com

Ollie Wines AFL Fantasy vital stats
2015 AFL Fantasy Price: $517,000
2014 Average : 91.2
2014 Games Played: 22
My Predicted Average: 105