BY DAN

There is a growing consensus among the rugby league commentariat that the Canberra Raiders will struggle without Jack Wighton. It’s in the articles they write. It’s the gambling odds. Everyone expects the Milk will struggle.

You can see the logic. They’ve lost a generational star, their only Dally M and Clive Churchill winner this millennium. What’s more he played one of the most critical positions on the field, one they’ve had to fill with rookies and near-rookies. How green and singular must a person’s eyes be before they accept that perhaps another star like Wighton isn’t walking through that door?

It’s a tough place to be and I’m hardly filled with optimism myself. But having highlighted a few times since the season ended, I’ve kept coming back to this idea that perhaps the Raiders had become too Wighton-centric in recent years. For a player who’s work was best done when he was a secondary option, the weighting of Canberra’s attack to Wighton making complex decisions on the left edge always felt like a bumpy road.

Fans of American sportsviber Bill Simmons will see the immediate familiarity of The Ewing Theory in this situation. The Ewing Theory is a relatively straightforward proposition:

A star athlete that receives a large amount of media attention and fan interest—but, crucially, never leads his teams to any meaningful success—leaves their team. The team then exceeds expectations without the player

Here

It’s named after NBA and Knicks legend Patrick Ewing, a star player for the club in the 90s who did almost everything on the court except win the big one. He was a legend in his own right, a member of the dream team, 7 time All-NBA, 11 time All-Star. Many times he made the conference finals (broadly the equivalent to the prelims), and once even got to game 7 of the NBA finals. So close.

The lights shined brightest on Ewing, but he was never able deliver what New York has craved since 1973. And then towards the backend of the Knicks career people started to speculate the team performed better when he wasn’t available. This culminated when the Knicks made the finals in the lockout season in a miracle run made with Ewing injured, and the team relying on a wider range of new or underappreciated talent to succeed. A team that had revolved around turning to Ewing and asking him to solve their problems instead spread responsibility wider, allowed new growth to emerge and thrived because of it. Do you see the parallels?

It’s not an unheard of phenomenon. Another example that comes to mind is how Hawthorn thrived after Buddy Franklin left. They were plenty good with him – they won a flag after all – but arguably the best team of the AFL era only emerged because they stopped searching for Buddy everywhere, and instead provided space for the rest of the talent of their roster to find its voice.

Canberra has so many of these characteristics. They’ve gone close with Jack but in recent years it’s felt like the attack has been too reliant on him, structurally tied to finding ways for him to succeed. Periods of fluidity have coincided with more equal opportunity access to possession, particularly when Jamal Fogarty has been more prominent at first receiver. While they had plenty of success with Jack as the focal point of the attack, it’s felt increasingly difficult for him to deliver as the sole focus of an attack (notably exacerbated in the absence of Josh Hodgson).

Now of course these are just vibes, doped up on hopium in preparation for the potential pain of 2024. But there are ways we can see this demonstrated. With Wighton a tertiary part of the the attack at fullback the Raiders averaged 25 points a game through the 2015 and 2018 seasons. When Wighton moved to six over the 2019-2023 seasons that dropped to 21, even with the inflated score lines of the Vlandoball period. His error rate, once a limiter on his success as fullback that had been somewhat dormant at six, ramped up again. He was fourth in the competition (36) in 2023, first among five-eighths.

Now there’s a million variables as to why that occurred. The Raiders became a defence oriented team. Moving Wighton to six was essentially a defensive move, designed to shore up an edge defence that leaked more than Sticky backgrounding his mates at the Tele/Fox. It played to his strengths, arguably changing the identity of the club overnight. Perhaps that drove the Raiders success over the 2019-2020 period.

But even there Jack isn’t the solution he once was. While Jack made the 4th most one-on-one tackles of five-eighths in 2023, he also had tackling efficiency of 82 per cent according to Fox Sports. This was worse than most regular starting five-eighths (including Brown, Luai, Munster, Metcalfe, Foran, and Keary). The Raiders left side defence, meant to be its strength, conceded 44 per cent of the tries the Milk did (compared to 23 per cent and 33 per cent for the middle and the right edge per statsinsider.com). Wighton played his part in that, conceding the equal third most tries of starting five-eighths (behind only Matts Burton and Moylan, the latter dropped and run out of the league for his defensive deficiencies).

So perhaps there’s some hope for addition by subtraction. It is just that though. Hope. If a more equal-opportunity attacking style is possible, it’s hard to see either the rookie Ethan Strange or the near rookie Kaeo Weekes is going to become defensively elite by being chucked into the front-line (although Weekes’ tackle-efficiency was 83 per ce….no no calm down dickhead). And that’s the real problem for the Milk. They can manufacture points. They’ve been doing it for years. But stopping them. Well, that’s going to be the test of the club.

As for the Ewing Wighton Theory, it’s worth pointing out this theory is entirely circumstantial, and doesn’t hold up to much robust scrutiny, not in the least in its application to the very person it’s named after. It’s less scientific and more vibereffic. It’s less an attempt to provide an explanation that allows behaviour to be predicted, and more a post-hoc attempt to explain why other predictions failed.

But we’ll keep an eye on it. Because if all our hope and dreams come true and Playmate of the Year Victoria Silvstedt makes us pancakes the Raiders do find a way to succeed without Jack, you can bet we’ll be trotting out the Wighton Theory. Right now it’s all we’ve got.

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