Raiders, Brumbies or Capitals – who is Canberra’s best sporting team?

By Deputy Chief EditorNovember 22, 2018

212 4 minutes read

We've all had the conversation, most likely after a couple of drinks at the pub. Who's the best team in Canberra – the Brumbies, the Raiders or the Capitals?

Surely the Green Machine's effort in the greatest grand final of all, back-to-back titles and some of rugby league's biggest names set them apart. Big Mal, Ricky, Laurie, Chicka and Clyde – argument over.

The Brumbies won Super Rugby titles in 2001 and 2004.Credit:Simon Alekna

Someone else chimes in with: "But what about the Brumbies, their golden era of the early 2000s, two championships, World Cup winners and Wallabies legends?"

And then there's the Capitals – the most successful team in WNBL history with seven titles over an 11-year stretch and a team boasting Australia's greatest basketballer: Lauren Jackson.

It's OK. You can stop the argument because someone else, or something, has done the analysis for you and the Brumbies have come out as the No.1 Canberra team of the past 25 years.

Gain Line analytics and Platinum Asset Management have formed a partnership in the hope of finishing the un-winnable debate to determine the best Australian or New Zealand sporting team from the period of 1994-2018.

It involved creating a system to analyse 74,426 matches between 222 teams from 14 leagues over 24 years and creating criteria that included cohesion as a factor, takes salary-cap penalties into account and strength of competitions.

Clubs and their 24-year history were compared rather than putting individual years against each other to avoid the debate of the 1994 premiership-winning Raiders going up against the 2001 champion Brumbies.

The Raiders' first two premierships in 1989 and 1990 fell outside the scope of the data, while the Brumbies won titles in 2001 and 2004 and played in four grand finals in five years.

Super Rugby powerhouse club the Canterbury Crusaders were ranked as the No.1 team, followed by the Brisbane Broncos and the Geelong Cats. The Brumbies were ranked No.14 and was the only Canberra team in the top 25.

Mal Meninga celebrates after winning the 1989 Canberra-Balmain grand final: "All I ever did was play good footy."

Former Brumbies and Wallabies prop Ben Darwin helped design the analysis system to feed the data into and spit out results.

"It's something a bit different – trying to see which teams have been consistently successful," Darwin said.

"We had stipulations – teams had to be in existence for longer than 10 years. It wasn't just about winning grand finals, but constantly winning, the stability of the competition they're in as well.

"If you won the NRL in the late 1990s, it was easier than winning it in the early 1990s because of the flux of the competition. The hardest part is the size of competitions, for example the Sheffield Shield against the NRL or AFL.

"We had to create a system that would allow for success of a team in the Sheffield Shield to be regarded as successful, however is coming first in the Sheffield Shield as easy as finishing second in the NRL?

"We wanted to try to have an understanding of the strength of the competitions, and just winning titles isn't successful … you can jag titles and grand finals. It's about who is consistently successful.

"We tried to make it as quantitative as humanly possible and take emotion out of it."

Many have attempted to settle this debate before. Like ESPN writer Sam Walker, who tried to set six criteria to find the best sporting teams around the world.

The All Blacks made that list, twice, as well as the 1993-2000 Hockeyroos, the 1927-1930 Collingwood sides and the 1949-1953 New York Yankees. But no Manchester United, Chicago Bulls or St George Dragons.

In the Australian version, premierships were important in the criteria, but only to a certain extent. Overall wins, the strength and depth of individual competitions and the make up of finals were taken into consideration to negate differing play-off systems.

For example, Super Rugby used a top-four finals system for most of its existence while rugby league has been a top eight from 1995.

On win-losses records alone, the Brumbies are slightly ahead of the Raiders for the 25-year time period. The Brumbies have won 182 of 321 games including finals and the Raiders have won 311 of 618 games since the start of 1994.

The Capitals won their first title in the 1999-2000 season and then dominated the WNBL for the next 11 years, playing in eight grand finals and missing the play-offs just once.

"The thing with the Brumbies is they haven't had many abhorrent years. They've had some hard years, but a reasonable level of success in a hard, pretty stable competition," Darwin said.

"Super Rugby had a top four finals. But our system doesn't care if it's top four, six or eight. The Brumbies have had two periods of reasonable success and a rough period."

So the argument is finished, right? The Crusaders are the greatest team in Australia and New Zealand and the Brumbies are at the top in Canberra.

Unlikely. The debate is impossible to end. How does the impact of Mal Meninga stack up against George Smith? Or Ricky Stuart versus Stephen Larkham? And what about the Canberra Cannons? It's an argument you can never win.

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