🏉 Want to build an all-time defence? Copy the NRL’s Penrith Panthers

My Week in Sport(s): Cohesion in rugby league, Barça's future and Sabrina Ionescu

Welcome to My Week in Sport(s) — a regular newsletter from Plot the Ball.

In this edition:

• 🏉 Lessons from one of the best defences in rugby league history

• ⚽️ The core of the next great Barcelona team

• 🏀 Another three-point threat in women’s basketball

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🏉 Want to build an all-time defence? Copy the NRL’s Penrith Panthers

‘Cohesion’ could so easily be just another poorly defined term thrown around in descriptions of sports teams — were it not for the work of one Australian sports consultancy.

The belief that drives Gain Line Analytics is that “great teams are the product of the linkages and connections within the organisation” — and in their work they attempt to systematically measure the strength of those connections.

One of the operating principles that follows from that belief is that both a long-term squad-building approach and consistency of selection are paramount when it comes to building strong connections between players.

As Gain Line’s co-founder Ben Darwin puts it:

“The more stable you are the greater level of understanding you have. You can buy skill but skill doesn’t manifest itself in chaos. If you have lots of different players coming in from different places with different habits it’s hard to get them on the same page, particularly defensively.”

And it’s on the defensive side of the ball that poor planning — and the weak connections between players that result — often shows up most glaringly.

This is the way I sometimes think of it, across sports: all it takes is a couple of strong connections between a handful of talented players to create an opportunity when their team has the ball — but even a single weak connection between a pair of players can leave a team vulnerable to being breached without it.

Rugby league — one of the most popular sports in Australia — is where Gain Line has tended to receive a lot of its publicity.

And it’s a particularly interesting sport from a defensive perspective. Teams are constrained from passing the ball forwards like in rugby union — but it does away with some of the most technical aspects of its sister code.

Set-piece restarts are much more perfunctory — and there is much less ball progression¹ done via kicking downfield.

What’s left is an aerobically punishing contest between two lines of 13 players, in which the team without the ball repeatedly works forward and backward in unison in order to prevent their opponents breaking through.

If you want your team to excel in this discipline, you need your players’ understanding of how their teammates next to them will move to become instinctive.

And it’s possible that over the last few seasons we’ve been watching the best defence in the modern history of Australian men’s rugby league: the Penrith Panthers, who have appeared in the last four NRL Grand Finals — and won the last three.

Since the league came into existence in 1998, only 11 teams have had a defence at least 8 points per game better than the NRL average in that season.

Four of those 11 are the four seasons the Panthers have played since 2020² — and their mark of 11.2 points per game better than league average in 2021³ is the best on record, by more than a whole point per game.

They did this by subscribing to Gain Line’s principles. Since Ivan Cleary took over as head coach for the 2019 season, they have built a first-team squad that knows each other inside out.

Taking those five seasons since 2019 together, the Panthers have eight players who played at least 60% of all possible regular-season minutes for the team. On average, other NRL teams had just four each.

While their top players don’t play an exceptional amount compared to other teams’, they were incredibly experienced down their line-up. This becomes clear when you rank the minutes played by each NRL club’s 13 most frequently used players over the last five years.

The Panthers’ two most frequently used players since 2019 actually played fewer regular-season minutes than the median club’s — but no other team’s 6th, 7th, 8th or 9th most used players got close to as much playing time as Penrith’s did over the last five seasons.

Given what we know from Gain Line’s work, it isn’t entirely surprising that a club which has distributed its available minutes like this — identifying the core of its team, and giving them time together to build strong linkages⁴ — has put together an unmatched stretch of defensive dominance.

But that stretch might already be approaching its end.

The Panthers have to operate under a salary cap in the NRL — and one of the league’s officially stated objectives is to use this constraint as a mechanism for “spreading the playing talent” between clubs.

A pair of important role players — Apisai Koroisau and Viliame Kikau — had already left after winning the 2022 Grand Final.

And the club is about to be impacted by a couple of even more significant departures. When they kick off their 2024 campaign against Wigan Warriors in the World Club Challenge later today, they’ll be without star centre Stephen Crichton — who has played 73% of minutes since 2019, ranking 4th on the team.

Penrith also already knows that Jarome Luai — who currently partners Nathan Cleary in the halves, and has played 72% of the minutes available in the last five seasons (5th) — will be playing elsewhere in 2025⁵.

The organisation has undoubtedly maximised its return on this particular crop of players — and the hard work of building strong connections will soon have to begin all over again.

But — while some decline in on-field performance over the next few seasons is probably unavoidable — it sounds like the Panthers are remaining committed to the same strategy that took them to the top.

Upon receiving the 2023 award — co-sponsored by Gain Line — for ‘Australasia’s Best Sport Team’ a couple of months ago, the club’s CEO had this to say:

“Our first grade team stands as a testament to meticulous planning, robust development strategies, and the vital attribute of patience exhibited by our senior administrators. It's crucial for us to maintain our resolve.”

Team-building advice doesn’t get much simpler than ‘stick together’ — but having the patience to see things through has led the Panthers towards the sort of success every sporting organisation dreams of.

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⚽️ Run the Numbers

Another team which could benefit hugely from committing to giving extended playing time to a group of young players in a bid to set themselves up for future success: Xavi’s Barcelona, who are already eight points adrift of rivals Real Madrid in La Liga.

The club’s decision-making processes in recent seasons have been about as far from ‘meticulous planning’ as you can get — but financial constraints may yet leave ‘playing the kids’ as one of their only viable options in 2024-25:

“On Tuesday, La Liga further cut Barca’s permitted salary limit, from €648million (£553m; $697m at current rates) last year to a new figure of €204m…Barca sources…have suggested that the club would essentially be open to good offers on any of its players bar a very select few.”

Eight players aged 21 or younger have made at least five appearances for the first team so far this season — including three younger than 18 — and you could certainly persuade yourself that there’s the core of a great team in there: a pair of fullbacks in Héctor Fort (17) and Alejandro Balde (20), alongside a precocious centre back in Pau Cubarsí (17); two established first-team midfielders in Gavi (19) and Pedri (21), with support from Fermín López (20); a highly-rated young Brazilian forward in Vitor Roque (18); and, last but not least, Lamine Yamal — who at 16 is already one of the club’s best attackers⁶.

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🏀 Watch the Games

Like Caitlin Clark — who featured in this section a couple of weeks ago — Sabrina Ionescu is one of basketball’s most potent deep threats.

Ionescu recently went toe to toe with Steph Curry in a one-on-one three-point shooting challenge⁷ during the NBA’s All-Star weekend.

And she will likely be a major part of Team USA’s quest for another gold medal at the Paris Olympics later this year.

Like Clark, Ionescu can also use the threat of her outside shot to create easier scoring opportunities for teammates — and the New York Liberty guard already has a great rapport with one of her fellow national-team stars.

This understanding was on display in the USA’s Olympic Qualifying Tournament win over Nigeria earlier in February. As Ionescu breaks out in transition following a defensive stop, the eyes of all three Nigerian defenders tracking back are drawn to her at the three-point line.

Aware that Breanna Stewart is trailing the play, Ionescu waits until the window between the three scrambling defenders is just about to close — before firing a beautiful one-handed pass to hit her Liberty teammate in stride on a path towards an uncontested basket.

You can watch a clip of this sequence here.

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The next edition of My Week in Sport(s) will be published on Saturday March 2nd.

1. In a recent white paper looking at ball progression in ‘ball-based “invasion sports”’, rugby data company Oval found that “rugby league is the only sport in which running with the ball is the dominant mode of ball progression”. (I would question the exclusion — as far as I can tell — of yards made by receivers after the catch from their figure for American football, but it’s unlikely to change this particular conclusion.)

2. Only one other team — the Melbourne Storm in 2007 and 2008 — has consecutive seasons above the +8 mark on defence.

3. A quick summary of this calculation: Penrith conceded 286 points in 24 regular-season games (A: 11.9 per game); across the entire 2021 NRL regular season, 8,888 points were scored in 384 team games (B: 23.1 per game); Penrith were therefore 11.2 (B - A) better than league average on defence.

4. Really, the process started even earlier than 2019: a number of players in the core of this team — including halves Jarome Luai and Nathan Cleary, and fullback Dylan Edwards — had success together in the Panthers’ youth system. (This is something that Gain Line’s Ben Darwin has noted in the past.)

5. “We acknowledge that the situation is compounded by salary cap capacity due to the club’s recent success.”

6. If Yamal improves significantly from his current level — as we might project for a player of his age — what Barça do with their other young players may not matter all that much: they will probably have one of the greatest footballers on the planet at their disposal (again).

7. Ionescu shot from the longer NBA three-point line, rather than the WNBA line.