The question would then be why are we not able to assemble the best team? How do we change that?
Two things that spring to mind to me are better injury management and key position recruitment.
We have had good teams that have had unfortunate injuries. Noting the administration has tried to address this, Davoren was given the flick, although you could argue whether enough has been done.
We have failed to focus enough attention on key position recruitment and when we have we have often gotten it wrong. This is easy to point out in retrospect of course but if we had made some different decisions we might be in a better position. There's calls like McLarty over B. Cox. Or failing to see value in Ben Brown. Sticking by incumbents like Cloke for too long. Or injury prone players. Get a few of those decisions going your way and the talent on our list might be elevated to a level where we arent failing because of a lack of talent in key areas.
There could be other areas to focus on too but those are the ones that stick out to me.
Yep, we've focused way too heavily on recruiting/trading in midfielders and it's left us in a big hole KPP wise. We're extremely lucky Dunn played as good as he did and some of our other medium sized defenders stood up big time (Langdon) because if that didn't go our way our defence would've been ripped apart weekly. Now in 2019 we're basically relying on Dunn coming back from an ACL at 31 in good form, Cox becoming a consistent number 1 forward and Moore's body holding together. Bringing in Roughhead is another "oh s**t we have no depth" moment.
If Dunn struggles post ACL (likely) and Moore has another injury prone year we probably have bottom 4 in terms of KPP players and an elite midfield trying to pull it all together