Obviously it's valid to look at the difficulty of a draw and grade teams on a curve based on that mid-season, but you can easily take this too far. I do think that generally the ladder and percentage is your best guide for how teams are going, because if Gold Coast losing to Richmond and Geelong losing to St. Kilda are 'outliers', our home loss to Geelong could be too, or the Freo game or whatever.
The area in which I'd argue we've yet to show meaningful improvement this year is winning away from home. So far we are 6-1 at home which is a good record that includes comfortably beating a few decent mid-table teams and a solid opponent in GWS. Our one home loss was against a good top 4 contending team where we fell over in the second half off a 5 day break, so not a total disaster. Away from home we're 1-3 with some pretty credible performances and one very poor one, which is pretty much how Adelaide has performed since 2023, so it's valid to point to that and say until we can consistently win games away from home we're not doing better than 12-13 wins, and not winning a final.
I just don't really rate the 'Nicks record against X teams' metric, especially when you're talking about a 6 year span now. It's just making way too much of a coincidence between last year's draw and this one. The Adelaide team that will play Sydney this weekend has 5 players in common with the team that lost to a Longmire-coached Swans team in 2020. That game was a 3 point loss, after which the Swans also finished bottom 4 and have played finals every year since. It's about as relevant as saying we have the wood over the Dogs because of the 90s prelims.
edit: You kinda make this point yourself by putting Richmond in the 'guaranteed win' category even though Nicks doesn't have a great record against Richmond at all (1 win, 4 losses), and we lost to them last year. The difference is that Adelaide has improved over that time period and Richmond has gotten worse. It's even an away game.
