With Port Adelaide crashing out of the finals in straight sets, the pressure on Ken Hinkley has ramped back up again.
The Power coach earned a reprieve from the heat when he was offered a two-year contract extension just last month.
But with the club’s 23-point Semi Final loss to GWS on Saturday night seeing yet another season without premiership success under Hinkley, Port Adelaide’s decision to re-sign the 56-year-old will come under increased scrutiny.
David King has been proven right in his prediction that the Power’s style wouldn’t stand up in September and believes Hinkley hasn’t shown enough in his 11-year coaching tenure.
“I think Ken is a good, average AFL coach, I think he’s Kenny average and that’s fine,” King began on SEN’s Whateley.
“The gameplan that they play, for me, exposes their lack of talent in certain areas more than any other gameplan.
“If you’re going to win flags on talent, you’re going to take a long time to get a list that’s stacked everywhere.”
The North Melbourne great named several calls he believes Hinkley has faltered with across the season.
“I think they made some errors late in the year. One minute on the wing for Ollie Wines is one too many, I don’t understand what that achieved,” King continued.
“He’s a Brownlow Medallist, he’s a clearance player out of clearance form. The only way for him to get clearance form back is to play him at the clearance. I never understood that move.
“If you keep telling Travis Boak he’s finished, he’ll be finished. That’s what you get for the back half of the year.
“You drop Jeremy Finlayson and it becomes a big story and everyone assesses his form and say ‘you are horribly out of form’ and then you play him as the sub… there are so many things there where I go what are you setting up? What are you doing?
“They’ve been a known product down back all year. If you’ve got a backline that’s just going to bleed heavily like that, you have to ensure it doesn’t get down there. So you have to come up with a method of defence that’s better than what they’ve had. That’s on Ken.”
Hinkley put pen to paper on a two-year deal on August 15, barely a month ago. The club had put contract talks off until later in the season but after Hinkley led Port Adelaide to a club-record 13 consecutive home and away victories, a new deal was considered a formality.
But since replacing Matthew Primus as Port’s full-time coach in 2013, Hinkley has never led his side past a Preliminary Final.
Over the off-season, the decision to extend Hinkley is set to come under increased scrutiny. King believes Port Adelaide pulled the wrong rein.
“We can dance around all these issues and say they won a lot of home and away games. But even when they were winning those games, I kept saying the model is not right. It doesn’t have Preliminary Final integrity,” King added.
“They can argue all that and I get it… I think Damien Hardwick showed you how to do it with role players. And I don’t think they had a whole lot more than Ken had at his disposal.
“The midfield are brilliant… but if that’s all they’ve got, they’re going to run aground a bit.
“So I just think you’ve got average. If you waited until the end of the year to re-sign Ken, would you make the same decision?
“Change is okay, change is good. Change regenerates the whole thing. Does it need that or does it need stability? They’ve been pretty stable for a decade.
“I think change was at the right time for Port but they’re not going to get it.”
Saturday’s loss marks the third time in four years Port Adelaide has bowed out of the finals race at Adelaide Oval, with GWS as the victors to play Collingwood on Friday night.