The Warriors finished the 2026 NRL regular season second on the ladder, with 18 wins from 24 games, the most the club has ever managed in a regular season, and only the Panthers ahead of them on points difference. Newswire has built a database of every statistic the NRL records for every one of those games and gone looking for what actually separated the wins from the losses, who did the work, and who made the difference. The answers are below, in four scroll-driven charts and a few still ones.
The season had a clear shape. Three wins to open, two bad losses in a fortnight in April, then a run of 15 wins from the last 19 games. The six defeats were the Wests Tigers and Sharks in rounds 4 and 5, the Panthers, Sharks and Dolphins by two points each between rounds 13 and 17, and the Bulldogs in round 21. The Warriors never lost three in a row, and from round 22 they won six straight to finish, the last of them by a single point against Manly.
The first chart is the season as a race. Every Warriors player who took the field is a bar, and each bar grows by the metres he carried the ball in each round. Scroll through it and you watch the season being run, one game at a time. Some players stop early. Some keep going. One of them starts the year fourth or fifth and finishes on top.
Scroll to play the season. Bars are cumulative run metres from the NRL match centre. Built by Newswire.
Taine Tuaupiki won that race with 3,356 metres, and the shape of how he did it says something about the season. He was fourth or fifth for most of the year behind Jackson Ford and Roger Tuivasa-Sheck, both of whom stopped playing, and he passed Ford in round 17 and never gave the lead up for long. Erin Clark, a lock, finished second on 3,235 and was the only forward in the top three. Dallin Watene-Zelezniak, who led the race for three rounds in August, was third.
What separated the wins from the losses
Run metres. Not possession, not completion rate, not penalties, though all of those moved in the right direction in wins. The single number that tracks the winning margin most closely is how far the Warriors ran the ball compared with the other side. The correlation between the run metre difference and the margin was 0.75, far stronger than possession at 0.43, and the next chart walks through the season one statistic at a time to show why.
Scroll to change the statistic. Each bar is one game, in season order, coloured by the result. Built by Newswire.
The Warriors carried the ball almost exactly as often in losses as in wins, about 190 times a game either way. What changed was how far each carry went, 9.5 metres in wins against 8.4 in losses. One metre a run, across 190 runs, is the difference between winning and losing. Line breaks were the other big gap, 7.4 a game in wins and 2.8 in losses, and every one of the six defeats had four or fewer. The round 13 loss to the Panthers is the one that breaks the pattern. The Warriors completed 89 percent of their sets that night, their best of the season, made only eight errors, and lost by two.
Who did the work
Share of all the running and all the tackling is the simplest way to see who carried the load. Erin Clark played all 24 games and did 7.8 percent of the team’s carries and 8.1 percent of its tackles, missing only 1.2 tackles a game and throwing 24.0 offloads, the most in the squad. James Fisher-Harris was close behind on both counts in 21 games, and his 140 metres and 30 tackles a game came in an average of 54 minutes. The race below is the same one as before, this time for tackles, and the leader changes only in the last month.
Scroll to play the season. Bars are cumulative tackles made from the NRL match centre. Built by Newswire.
Jackson Ford did more per game than anyone. In 14 games he averaged 41 tackles and 161 metres in 71 minutes, and his 3.8 post-contact metres a carry were the best in the squad. He made 58 tackles against the Dolphins in Christchurch, the most by any Warrior in a game this season. But the team did not need him to win. He did not play after round 16 and the side went eight and two without him.
Tackles per game
Run metres per game
Players with at least eight games. Minutes are the average on the field. Source: NRL match centre, compiled by Newswire.
The bench mattered more than its minutes suggest. Tanner Stowers-Smith and Eddie Ieremia-Toeava tackled at 44 to 47 per 80 minutes off the interchange, higher than any starter, and the metres run by the bench forwards tracked the winning margin more closely than the metres run by the starting pack or the backs.
Who was missed
Comparing results with and without each player is the crudest test there is, and with a 24 game season the samples are tiny. It is still worth looking at, as long as the caveats travel with it.
Chanel Harris-Tavita and Ali Leiataua both missed rounds 4 and 5, the two heavy defeats of the year. With Harris-Tavita on the field the Warriors won 16 of 20 by an average of 15 points. Without him they won two of four by an average of two. Leiataua’s numbers are almost identical. Leka Halasima, Fisher-Harris and Sam Healey all missed the round 15 to 17 stretch that produced two of the three two point losses. The problem is that these absences overlap so heavily that the data cannot say which of them mattered. What it can say is that the two worst results came when the spine and the centres were disrupted at the same time.
The bottom of the chart is mostly a trick of the calendar. Marata Niukore, Adam Pompey, Charnze Nicoll-Klokstad and Taine Tuaupiki all have better records when absent, but their missed games cluster in the run of big wins over the Titans, Broncos, Rabbitohs and Knights late in the year. The halves are a cleaner story. Tanah Boyd started the first ten games at halfback and the team went eight and two. Te Maire Martin started the next 11 and went seven and four. Luke Metcalf’s two starts at five-eighth were both losses and his two at halfback were both wins.
Who made the impact
The last race is the one that decides games. The Warriors scored 127 tries in the regular season, and the chart below plays them out round by round. One winger scored 20 of them, and he took the lead with a hat-trick in a losing side in April and never let it go.
Scroll to play the season. Bars are cumulative tries from the NRL match centre. Built by Newswire.
Dallin Watene-Zelezniak was the finisher. He scored 20.0 tries in 21 games, made 19.0 line breaks and 50.0 tackle breaks, threw 19.0 offloads and ran 149 metres a game. He also made 29.0 errors, the most in the squad. Alofiana Khan-Pereira scored 16.0 tries in 17 games with 18.0 line breaks, the best strike rate on the team.
Metres per carry
Nicoll-Klokstad is the bellwether. His run metres in a game track the winning margin more closely than any other player’s, and his post-contact metres closer still. His 253 metres against the Titans in round 22 was the biggest single game by any Warrior this season. Leka Halasima broke tackles at 3.9 per ten carries, the best rate in the side, with 13 in one game against the Knights, and Leiataua got 10.1 metres from every carry, the most of anyone with 60 or more.
The creators were Harris-Tavita with 14.0 try assists, Martin with 12.0 in only 11 games, Egan with 12.0 and Boyd with 10.0 in 10. One weapon the Warriors did not have was the 40/20. They kicked one all season, Boyd in the 73rd minute against the Raiders in round 2. Opponents kicked two against them.
Put together, the season reads like this. The Warriors won by winning the yardage battle a metre at a time, through the quality of the carry rather than the number of them, with Tuaupiki, Nicoll-Klokstad, Halasima and Leiataua doing the damage behind a pack that Clark and Fisher-Harris held together for 24 games. Their worst results came when that structure was disrupted in more than one place at once. The finals will show whether it holds.
How Newswire built this
Every figure comes from the NRL match centre for each of the 24 Warriors regular season games in 2026, compiled by Newswire into a database of team statistics, 912 player game records with about 60 statistics each, every scoring play and 2,876 timed match events. Run metres are the NRL’s “all run metres” figure and tackles are “tackles made”. Averages in wins and losses are simple means over 18 and 6 games. Correlations are Pearson coefficients against the winning margin across the 24 games, and with a sample that small they are pointers rather than proof. Nothing is adjusted for the strength of the opposition. The with and without comparison counts a player as playing if he was on the field for at least one minute. Position groups in the race charts are the position each player started in most often. Ladder position and season totals were checked against Wikipedia and the Rugby League Project.
Your turn. Which number surprised you, and who do you think the Warriors could least afford to lose in the finals? If you follow the team closely and think the data has something wrong, or has missed something you saw with your own eyes, the comments are open below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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