KEN Hinkley was emphatic - "best list" in his time at Port Adelaide; the response was just as firm. Are you sure? Can you put that on a billboard and not be accused of false advertising?
There was the prospect of such an assertive statement biting back.
No Robbie Gray, a generational player if not a "once in a lifetime" star that crosses a club's galaxy. Junior Rioli arrived from West Coast to fill the gap, but even he would bow in admiration of Gray while trying to fill those golden slippers.
Questions on how the defence would cope after the trade period did not enhance the tall stocks for the back half, notably missing out on drawing Esava Ratugolea from Geelong. This zone was more challenged by suspension, injury to captain Tom Jonas and key defender Tom Clurey's recovery from knee surgery during the off-season.
And - as has proven to be a valid concern - Port Adelaide's most-experienced ruckman Scott Lycett was coming back from shoulder surgery, now more concerning than knee operations for ruckmen. More than half a season out of the game makes for a long road back when key position players are rehabilitating from shoulder injuries.
"Best list" in 11 years - and the promise to play "fast, attacking and tough football" - made for quite a statement to send people firmly back in their seats at the Port Adelaide season launch in mid-February. The headlines that followed, along with the push back after the over-reaction to a derby defeat that put Port Adelaide at 1-2 were just as inevitable.
If Hinkley was going out on a shaky limb with his "we will never, ever give up" that did become a billboard promotion during his first pre-season in 2013, this was - as one scribe wrote - putting your neck on the proverbial chopping block.
Best? By talent? By potential? By work ethic? By character?
Best by which measure?
Port Adelaide could be the basis for the Ph.D. thesis on list management - best individuals or best squad?
Nine weeks into the longest AFL home-and-away season in the game's history (23 matches), Port Adelaide has a 7-2 win-loss start for the first time since being 7-2 in the pandemic-wrecked 2020 campaign that delivered the club's first minor premiership since 2004.
The team has accumulated six consecutive wins (after the world seemed to end with the loss in Showdown LIII at Adelaide Oval) - the best winning streak since Port Adelaide strung together eight wins under Hinkley during 2014 from beating Brisbane in round 4 to St Kilda in round 12.
By the raw numbers on the premiership table, there is nothing that truly challenges the "best" figures chalked up across the past 11 years. Port Adelaide has averaged 92 points (equal with the scoring rate in Hinkley's first season in 2013) - and broken the watershed ton just three times (against Brisbane in the season opener, West Coast and with a season-high 135 points against North Melbourne at the weekend). The best scoring average by any Port Adelaide squad during the past decade is 100 points in 2014 when the campaign ended at the MCG in a three-point preliminary final loss to eventual premier Hawthorn).
Port Adelaide has conceded an average of 82 points - and the headlines still have not faded from the big scores leaked to Collingwood (135) and in the derby (117) in rounds 2 and 3. Not quite "best ever" figures. However, during the six-game winning streak the defence has conceded just 69.5 points - the best since 2021; the best in any Hinkley season except 2020 (50 points when matches were shortened). And the big theme in this correction is "team defence"; again emphasis on team while working to well-noted limitations across the defensive 50.
Where is Port Adelaide at its "best" in a way to give credence to Hinkley's bold pre-season statement - and to reaffirm, as the club's board noted last year, that the football program at Alberton is solid ... and Hinkley, as he should for all his experiences, is coaching (and mentoring) to probably his best in a decade?
This is probably the best Port Adelaide team for picking up the rope to have more and more contributors make the side less and less vulnerable to the form fluctuations of individuals - or the cynical coaching tactics of opposition teams.
And there is the growth of individuals, such as new defender Miles Bergman, the extraordinary consistency of Sam Powell-Pepper and Jeremy Finlayson during challenging times for him off the field while his wife battles cancer and yet another regeneration of former captain Travis Boak as a wingman.
The best-ever Port Adelaide team for thriving on the growing contributions of more and more players - rather than a team riding on the shoulders of club champion Connor Rozee - is underlined by the voting in the AFL Coaches Association award. This breakdown highlights why the question - name Port Adelaide's top five players this season - creates unease in narrowing Hinkley's best contributors in 2023 to just five. Up to the weekend's win against North Melbourne in Hobart, the Port Adelaide top-five leaderboard read:
31 Zak Butters
26 Connor Rozee
19 Jason Horne-Francis
15 Aliir Aliir
8 Jeremy Finlayson
(Finlayson's story - beyond the human tale of extraordinary focus amid enormous personal demands - is another success case from an established player moving to Port Adelaide to become a better and more admired player. He left Greater Western Sydney at the end of 2021 after 66 AFL matches with the reputation of being inconsistent while being swung from defence to attack and back and back again. At Alberton, Finlayson has answered so many team needs - to the point, particularly with his creative ruck work, that Champion Data statistician Daniel Hoyne this week made the observation: "This conversation needs to move to another level - Jeremy Finlayson needs to become Port Adelaide's No.1 ruckman. He is their Mark Blicavs." The statistics show Finlayson is the league's most-influential ruckman since the middle of last season when Port Adelaide needed to be creative to cover the loss of Lycett).
This top-five does reassure all at list management at Alberton that the regeneration of the Port Adelaide midfield with youth is on a best-ever path in a decade when Hinkley could work Travis Boak, Brad Ebert and Robbie Gray at a centre bounce.
The next five in the coaches' weekly assessments to round 8?
7 Ryan Burton (who is penalised by a two-game ban from the AFL match review officer)
6 Travis Boak, Dan Houston and Charlie Dixon in a season when his passion, his strong marking and competitive work has meant so much to an attack that has been constantly refitted to deal with injury, concussion protocols and suspensions.
5 Sam Powell-Pepper
No Miles Bergman in the most-credible voting system today with the coaches knowing exactly what they expected from a player - and which opposition players hurt their plans?
Bergman was 11th at the end of round 8 with four votes followed by Todd Marshall and Willem Drew (two each) and one to injured wingman Xavier Duursma.
This might be the best Port Adelaide team for living to the team theme of everyone contributing - the "play your role" concept that makes a squad more difficult to unravel when compared with sides that live off the brilliance of a few.
We live in an AFL era of "ranking points", emphasising the work of the individual by his statistics rather than his contribution to the team by his efforts on and off the ball, at and away from the contest.
One algorithm assembles all the statistics and all votes from coaches and media awards to rank the players - and this season's ratings again reaffirm the team focus at Port Adelaide. The best-ranked player at Alberton is Connor Rozzee at No.40 followed by Zak Butters (44), Brownlow Medallist Ollie Wines (58), Dan Houston (63) and Aliir Aliir at No.68.
This might be the best Port Adelaide team of the Hinkley era for living the team ethos, for spreading the load and expectation.
ON REVIEW: It was a big week for lawyers doing side jobs at the AFL tribunal and appeals board. Port Adelaide's legal counsel for players, Paul Ehrlich, successfully had the grading on Junior Rioli's downgraded from "severe" impact to "high". A prospective three-game ban was settled at two by arguing the context of the incident.
And yet again the AFL system has learned - and not just from the Rioli case this season - that the gradings that were to put every reportable incident into neat little boxes does not quite work. In fact, it appears more than broken.
For more than a century the tribunals of football leagues across the nation forbid "precedence" to be considered at tribunals, accepting no two incidents are ever the same - so each should be judged accordingly.
The gradings were introduced more than a decade ago making "careless", "reckless", "intentional" and "high", "severe" and "low" part of the game's vernacular each weekend whenever match review officer Michael Christian issues his verdicts.
There was the expectation of consistency - and fewer tribunal hearings.
But the grading system has become too often a case of seeking to put a square peg in a round hole. Not every moment on a football field works to the rigid grading system handed to Christian who should be allowed to use his experience in the game and his common sense.
The case for a return to the old ways of measuring a penalty by the crime - rather than a chart in the tribunal handbook - is becoming stronger and stronger.
