At the first bounce of Round 18 the numbers still wanted a three-man argument. By the last, there was one man and a formality. Round 18 was decided by Charlie Curnow — not by Jeremy Cameron's injury.
Win probability, every round since the run home began. One line goes vertical; one falls out of the sky; one flatlines and then disappears.
Curnow kicked five goals against Fremantle, and Fremantle are not just any backline. Our research keeps returning to one uncomfortable fact for key forwards: a defence's reputation for keeping scores down tells you almost nothing about how it treats talls. Fremantle rate as the hardest tall-suppressing side in the competition — a backline built to take away the first option and force the big men sideways into inferior looks. Curnow walked into that and kicked 5.1 anyway.
That's not a stat line. That's a message.
Three rounds. Three opponents of rising difficulty. The bag got bigger as the defences got harder.
A modern Coleman tends to require about 66 goals — the mark the last decade of winners keeps landing on. That single number is why the leaderboard has stopped feeling like a contest. Curnow's month has drawn him level with it; King sits six short.
King didn't disappear — he ran into Adelaide, a top-four defence that is unapologetically hostile to anyone who lives inside 30 metres, and returned 1.2. In isolation that's par. The problem was timing: on the week Curnow put five on the league's toughest tall defence, King's par became a fifteen-point haircut.
But his case is now almost entirely about the fixture — and the fixture has turned. The brutal early run we spent a month warning him about — Fremantle, Collingwood, Adelaide — is done. From here the Suns meet mostly mid-table defences plus two leaky finishers in Brisbane and St Kilda. If Curnow's form ever cools, King has a path. He just needs the favourite to have a quiet fortnight — and the favourite is playing like a man with no interest in that story.
The headlines will say a season-ending injury blew the race open. The evidence says the race had already closed the door on him. Cameron's collapse from the low-20s happened on the field, in Rounds 17 and 18 — two straight games without a goal, at the exact moment his soft run home was begging to be cashed in.
The medical report just signed off what his form had already written.
Nearly three in four says Curnow. One in six says not so fast.
Curnow leads on the board, on the model and on momentum. King is the last credible chaser — a real number, an easing draw, and a live shot at stealing it back if the favourite forgets his boots. Morris is the honest outsider, hanging around for chaos that may never come. And the rest are just kicking goals.