The 2024 Paris Olympics may have started and I might be incredibly sleep deprived already, but that won’t stop me bringing you the Eye Test’s July NRL team efficiency update.
Just over one year ago I wrote about how the Broncos defense was just as elite as Penrith’s in 2023, albeit in different ways. They were able to sustain significantly more goal line attack than any other team in the league without conceding points, and was one of the hallmarks of their run to the grand final.
However, over the past two months it’s an area of their game that has been getting increasingly worse. So along with the usual efficiency update I wanted to check some numbers behind Brisbane’s performances to see what may have gone wrong.
I’ll save the long spiel as to how everything works for these efficiency updates, but the basic premise is that we’re comparing the expected point value of possession per team against their actual points scored and allowed.
Highly efficient teams will uses lower value field position in attack, whilst highly efficient defensive teams will restrict opponents to either poor field position or bad outcomes from good field position.
First up as always we look at average points for and against to set the scene. Once we hit 18 teams and no longer have byes (Perth or NZ2 please), using averages becomes less important, but for now it’s the best option to normalise scoring. Lower to the bottom is better defense, further to the right is better attack.
Nothing hugely surprising here. Canterbury and Penrith are extremely strong defensively, while the Eels, Tigers and Rabbitohs are anything but. Manly, Melbourne, Cronulla and the Roosters are scoring a lot of points.
Next we move on to average expected points for and against per team. A quick reminder that expected points are calculated by the probability of scoring a try from a given play the ball location on a specific tackle number. Generally, the closer to the line, the higher the probability of scoring a try is, but that’s not always reflected in outcomes.
There’s a few takeaways here. The Eels and Warriors don’t give opponents high expected value field position, which given how many points Parramatta leak is a problem incoming coach Jason Ryles will need to fix as his first priority.
Penrith and Manly concede similar amounts of field position but the Panthers end up far closer to the try line than Manly does.
The rest of the league is somewhat grouped together, with the two main outliers being Cronulla, who continue to give up far more expected points than any other NRL team, and Brisbane, who give up the second most expected points but also gain the fewest expected points in the competition.
Now we start to layer some context on these numbers by plotting average actual points against average expected points, to see which sides are making the most out of their field position. The chart is split into four quadrants based on whether a team is above or below league average. The quadrants should be somewhat self explanatory – Dominant, Lucky/Unlucky, Inefficient/Unlucky, Incompetent.
Interestingly there’s no clearly dominant attacking team thus far this season. Cronulla, Penrith, South Sydney and North Queensland are all bordering the area, but no one is firmly dominant, which says something about how close the competition is this season.
The Roosters and Storm are two of the more efficient attacking sides, with Manly and the Dolphins also scoring more than their field position would suggest. Brisbane had been firmly in this quadrant for most of the season but have dropped away in the last month, starting to drift towards Incompetent. There’s clearly an issue for them getting the ball in scoring situations.
It’s not pleasant data for Newcastle fans, as their attacking output in value of field position and actual points scored is Incompetent and identical to the Wests Tigers this season with a far better playing list.
Let’s use the same chart but look at average actual and average expected allowed to gauge how good these sides are defensively.
There’s four dominant defenses this season, with Penrith, Melbourne, the Warriors and surprisingly Manly. The Sea Eagles last month had been strong defensively until the Roosters game on Saturday evening, and if they can contain sides there’s a chance of them causing some havoc from the bottom half of the finals bracket.
Past these dominant sides, again we have a group of teams around the periphery of each quadrant, with the Eels being the most inefficient side in the NRL, relinquishing the most points from field position worth the least expected points. I’d note that Brisbane are now far closer to North Queensland than the Roosters when looking at defensive metrics.
Our last step in this efficiency update is to represent the above charts as a percentage above or below expected to plot a simple picture of performance. First up is scoring over or under expected, where higher is better.
The Sydney Roosters continue to set new standards for attacking efficiency, scoring 80.5% more points than the expected value of their field position. Melbourne are the only other team above 50%, scoring 63.5% more than expected.
Brisbane and Manly are next at 44% more points than expected, which you might think indicates the main issue with the Broncos isn’t when they have the ball. However, the first two months of the season is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that 44%. When you limit these numbers to the past two months, the Broncos are only scoring at 9% above expected, which is below the league average of 21% for the same period, as shown below.
Now we’ll look at the defensive version of this chart, and in this instance lower is better.
The Eels continue to set new marks in awfulness with 95% more points allowed than an average team would score with the same field position. That mark is the worst of any team up to this point in the seasonduring the nine years of expected point data I have, beating the previous worst mark of 68% from the 2023 St George Illawarra Dragons. Even the worst teams during the 2021 season weren’t this bad at leaking points from areas of the field that had low probabilities of scoring from.
The Tigers and Bunnies continue to be woeful here, allowing 51% and 45% more points than expected respectively. For Wahs fans their number on this metric has continued to decline as the season progressed, even if their last month was an improvement over whatever June was for them.
Penrith and Canterbury continue to lead (remember lower is better) here as they restrict opponents to 15% and 16% points less than expected. The Roosters also have a negative value here as do the Sharks, but that is more due to volume of high value possession they concede than the quality of their defense.
And similarly to the prior chart, the first few months of the season are doing more heavy lifting here, as their 5.8% becomes 21% over the past six rounds.
So, what has happened to Brisbane this season? Let’s use some of the above charts but examine them year on year with a specific Broncos lens.
Looking at their expected points scored against actual points scored year on year, they’re still efficient but not at the same rate they were twelve months ago.
And defensively they share more in common with their 2020/21 campaigns than 2023 as they’re no longer better than league average in points allowed (note this chart is using longer term league averages than the prior 2024 only chart).
Checking their percentage of points against expected for the past nine seasons also shows how much of an aberration 2023 was defensively. Below is their year on year chart for Rounds 12-21.
Attacking wise it’s a similar story, as they’re much closer to league average during the similar rounds.
You could argue that 2023 was the one year Brisbane weren’t affected by Origin, but other teams have had just as many, if not more players selected. Injuries probably have played a bigger part, especially with their depth tested as Herbie Farnworth, Kurt Capewell and Tom Flegler departed. Clearly there are bigger issues here and it’s not looking like Kevin Walters has the answers currently.
So where are things going wrong for them? Firstly, let’s look at their average margin by minute by season.
Especially compared to last season, the numbers aren’t too different. There are periods (around the 45th and 68th minutes) where they drop off, unlike 2023 where it was a mostly steady incline to their 80 minute average margin of 6.89 points.
But again, if we limit it to just rounds 13-21, the numbers are incredibly opposite. With Brisbane not having a single minute where they’ve had lead (on average) during this time.
The same narrative exists looking at percentage minutes played whilst behind on the scoreboard. For the season Brisbane have had just 35.8% of minutes behind on points, one of the better marks in the competition. But from Rounds 13-21 that number balloons out to 58.8%, one of the worst numbers.
One reason for this is that Brisbane are spending far too much time bringing the ball out of their own area all season. 62.7% of their play the balls have come on their own side of halfway, the largest share for any club in the NRL this season.
It’s also the lowest percentage of play the balls inside 20 metres that the Broncos have had in the last decade.
That’s not a huge problem though since Brisbane score their tries from further out than any team in the NRL other than THE Dolphins.
They start the play that their tries are scored on average 29 metres from their opponents line. Their ability to put points on the board from anywhere on the field is almost unmatched, and why that 15.8% is less of an issue.
But the 62.7% is, as they were 57.7% for the same metric in 2023 ranked them 10th, indicating this is one area that the club is struggling with this season. Scoring tries from your own half is far less likely than scoring from 30-40 metres out. This year they’ve scored 37% of their tries from outside the red zone, down from 45% last season. They can score long range tries, but they’re not coming off as regularly as they were last season.
For the Broncos it’s not about getting to as close as possible to the try line to score, it’s just about getting close enough to launch an attacking shift, and they’re not making that progress in 2024.
The Broncos are also giving up the third most total sets to opponents this season in the first halves, only trailing Cronulla and South Sydney. Their second half total are mid table as well, indicating they’re on the losing end of possession battles, and possibly tiring late in games due to heavy early game workloads.
Looking at their heat map of play the ball locations year on year you can see just how much more possession they’ve had to endure in their own half. That’s hardly a recipe for success. Unless you’re Melbourne it seems.
Not only can you see they’re playing wider out of their own half, something I noted a few rounds into the season, they’re also seeing less ball on an opponent’s try line, which we saw above. In 2023 they didn’t need to be close to the line to score, but if they go there they would convert.
Their opponent play the balls year on year are far more similar with some subtle differences.
Yes, teams are playing the Broncos slightly wider as well, but that’s more in the attacking half than on yardage sets. There’s also a stronger intensity on the right hand side of the Brisbane try line, implying that opponents are attacking there, or using it as a set up point for right side shifts. Either way, given how well Brisbane defended the middle of the field last year it’s not surprising that there’s a wider spread in 2024.
I mentioned earlier in the year when talking about how Cronulla allows a lot of high expected point value possession that you need to be almost perfect in defense for it to pay off. The Broncos approach of letting teams waltz up to their try line before being stonewalled worked last season because they were nearly perfect.
This year that hasn’t been the case and they aren’t showing similar levels of commitment defensively as they’re stretched wider on their own line than last season. This season they’ve let in 58 tries inside their own 20 metre zone, last season to this point in time it was just 46. Their tries allowed from 20-40 metres out have more than doubled too, from just 5 in 2023 to 11 in 2024.
My initial thought was having Adam Reynolds out played a huge part in their field position, which in turn would affect them defensively, as returns from his kicks are some of the lowest in the NRL as talked about on the site last week. But that wasn’t the case in their game against Canterbury. It’s much harder to lean on your defense when your attack is struggling to get close enough to score. They scored 22 tries from 20-40 metres out last season in the first 21 rounds, this season that number is just 13.
We all know how prone the Broncos are to making errors. They have the make errors in the competition, and their error rate (receipts per error) is the lowest in the competition at 33 touches per error. The interesting thing about their error issues is when they make them. They mostly come in the second half, as shown below.
Their first half errors per set mark of 0.26 (one every four sets) is in line with the rest of the league. In the second half they get far riskier with the ball, averaging one every three sets (0.35 errors per set). No other team in the league has an average higher than 0.3 for either half.
Brisbane make more errors than any team from in the first 10 minutes of the second half than any other NRL side, and the most between the 61st and 70th minutes as well. Which correlates with the margin chart we saw earlier. Outside of those two time periods the Broncos aren’t that worst than league average for committing errors.
The recipe for beating them this season appears to be controlling possession, reduce your owns errors and limit them to bringing the ball out of their own half. This year’s Broncos are a team that if you can keep them in check early, more than likely they will self-destruct in the second half as they’re the second worst side for committing unforced errors. It’s a far cry from the 2023 side that made the grand final, but without the strong goal line defense they had last season it’s an impossible task to repeat, and I’m not sure how Walters corrects things from here.
