Nick Daicos is the best second-year player the AFL has ever seen
Second year Collingwood player Nick Daicos is currently doing what nobody thought possible and he’s only going to get better.
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Nick Daicos entered the AFL under gargantuan expectations.
The son of a Collingwood legend was touted as the best talent in the land and if not for the AFL’s Father-Son rule, would easily have been taken with the number one pick.
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Instead he was ultimately selected with the fourth overall pick after three teams opted to not bid for him and force Collingwood to give up more than they needed to.
That draft took place on November 24, 2021. Five hundred and nineteen days ago, Daicos’ name was read out as a draft selection for the Collingwood Football Club.
Now we’re sitting here having discussions about if he is the best player in the AFL.
It’s not a ludicrous remark or statement to make either, you can’t just hear it and scoff and tell the person they’re a nonce.
It’s a serious topic of debate and as it stands right now, Nick Daicos may well just be the best player in the competition.
The 20-year-old is producing a second season unlike anything we’ve seen in the history of the AFL and the numbers back it up.
Before you pull the trigger and label me a moron, here’s where the Pies youngster ranks after the opening six rounds of the season.
He’s first in the competition for the following: disposals per game, effective disposals per game, uncontested possessions per game and total metres gained.
Daicos has now become the outright Brownlow Medal favourite at a ridiculously short price of $2.75. Ahead of Marcus Bontempelli ($6) and Clayton Oliver ($7).
On Tuesday it was the third time in six games this season he’s amassed over thirty disposals and kicked multiple goals. No other player in the league has done it more than once.
Triple M’s Ethan Meldrum went a step further with the statistics, pointing out the young star had done something no other player had done in the history of the game.
“31 games into his career and Nick Daicos has already recorded 40 disposals/multiple goals in a game twice, the earliest a player’s ever done that in history,” he tweeted.
Former Collingwood coach Nathan Buckley summed up his influence on every game he plays in after his Anzac Day masterclass.
“He makes the game look simple and that’s what all the guns do. He makes the simple decisions and does the ordinary extraordinarily well,” Buckley said on Fox Footy’s On the Couch.
“That little banana that he did, if you watch that in slow-mo the way he was able to place that ball. He was unfussed, under pressure but executed it perfectly.”
Neutral fans have been calling for coaches to throw a hard tag onto him and keep a body on him at all times, but those have fallen by the wayside.
Teams have attempted to put a player on the supremely talented Pie, only for him to use his insane footy smarts to elude the tag and continue to rack up the footy at will.
The tags of just how good he is and can be have come in thick and fast throughout this season, even the legendary Peter Daicos says his early influence on the game can’t hold a candle to what his son is doing.
“For sure, they were different eras, but his (first 31 games) have been better … way better,” he said after Collingwood’s Anzac Day win.
He wasn’t alone in his assessment either with Essendon coach Brad Scott praising the youngster for performing well above his years.
“I think he’s just a very special player who is doing things that someone in the system for 10 years can’t do,” Scott said post-match.
“But we all knew this coming through. We all watched him as a junior.
“The father-son rule has worked for a few clubs over the journey and we think it’s a really good rule.
“He’s having a huge influence and teams have tried different things to try and curtail it and he finds a way to get around it.
“He’s always going to get the ball. You can do your best to stop it, but he went from the 18th-ranked player on the ground at three-quarter time to the first or second by the end of the game.
“That’s just a quality player stepping up at the right time and we couldn’t match it.”
Collingwood fell painfully short in 2022 after losing in the preliminary final to Sydney by a single point.
Behind the meteoric rise of Nick Daicos, they’re out to go a step further and through the opening quarter of the season they’ve shown they’re the team to beat.
Originally published as Nick Daicos is the best second-year player the AFL has ever seen
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