To run with the incentive point, imagine this scenario: There is an outstanding midfield prospect from WA who everyone projects to go in the top 3 or 4 in the 2019 draft (he grew up a mad-keen Freo supporter and wants to stay in WA). Fremantle, under interim head coach David Hale, are playing away to Port in the final round of the season. Having suffered a horrendous run of soft-tissue injuries, an unprecedented string of 15 games being umpired by Jeff Dalgleish, the sacking of a coach, and Peter Bell signing himself to a 2 year contract and playing in the forward pocket (and managing to keep Matera out of the team), Freo won only 5 games for the season, and are currently sitting in 16th place. A win will likely bump Freo up to 13th, and a loss could see them drop to as low as 17th.
i. Do you play all of your best players, or do you let the ones that need minor surgery start their rehab a week early?
ii. Do you want to get one last look at Lloyd Meek or Shane Kersten before deciding their fate in the offseason?
iii. Do you see how Duman goes playing as a wingman or defensive forward, knowing spots in the backline are hard to come by?
iv. Do you start Sam Sturt or Hugh Dixon in the forward line to give them a taste of AFL football even though you suspect they’ll give you less output than Hayden Ballantyne and Rory Lobb?
All of those are legitimate list management questions, and for each one I suspect you answer based on the long-term interests of the club at the expense of a greater chance of winning that one game. You probably don’t want to end the season by 150 points, but you’d want to try a few things.
But the key question is ‘who wants Freo to win?’ The GM and the list manager holding the draft picks probably secretly want us to lose (GM/player Peter Bell suspiciously is responsible for 9 clangers in the game, trailing only Matt Taberner). The interim coach, who wants to have a job next year, probably wants to win unless it’s suggested to him that losing might be in the interests of the club and his career prospects, in which case he’s in a really difficult position. Most Freo fans probably won’t care that much by then, but the ones who are invested would probably rather have a gun WA midfielder in their team next year than beat Port in a meaningless game. The players on the park probably want to win, but they’d get a sense that their season really ended the previous week in a stirring narrow-defeat to Essendon the previous week.
Tanking is only an issue because teams would theoretically be rewarded for actually trying to lose, as opposed to not doing everything to win. You can crack down on teams being rubbish at hiding it all you like, but as long as there is a reward for being dodgy, some clubs will be dodgy.
Get rid of the incentive to lose, and it doesn’t matter if former ruckman Hale plays 6 ruckman in a game as an experiment, you can be assured the coach, those 6 ruckmen and 16 other blokes, the GM and the fans are all hoping for a win.
I also have no issue with clubs ‘resting’ players before finals, or jockeying for a better match up. The aim is to win a premiership, and if that means throwing a round 22 game, so be it.
My two preferred solutions:
At the bottom of the table: either have a weighted draft lottery for non-finals teams, or weigh the draft position over the last three years finishing position
At the top of the table: do nothing, or if you felt like being wacky, the highest placed teams pick their opponents for the finals (so if Richmond finishes top, they get to pick which of 3rd or 4th they play in their final).
