Sam Collins will become the ‘winningest’ 150-game player in SUNS history on Sunday.

The dual club champion and vice-captain will take a 44.6% win ratio in red and yellow into his 150th against his former club Fremantle in Perth.

He’ll join a 150-Club which welcomed Jarrod Harbrow as its first member in Round 19 2018, when the SUNS lost by 35 points to Carlton at People First Stadium.

Since then, players to reach a milestone which is generally linked to club life membership have been David Swallow (2020), Alex Sexton (2021), Touk Miller (2022), Sam Day (2023) and Jarrod Witts and Ben Ainsworth (2025).

In a statistic which is as much about the club’s improvement as it is his individual numbers, Collins heads Ainsworth (36.2%) and Witts (35.6%) at the same milestone.

Equivalent numbers for the other 150-gamers are representative of the club’s struggles in the early years. Day was 29.1%, Harbrow 27.5%, Sexton 26.0%, Miller 25.7% and Swallow 24.8%.

Curiously, Collins, one of the great second-chance stories in recent AFL years, will be the seventh SUNS 150-gamer in a row to celebrate this milestone away from home.

Swallow was in Darwin, Sexton at the Gabba, Miller in Darwin, Day at the SCG, Witts in Darwin and Ainsworth at Adelaide Oval.

It would have been a nice story if ex-Docker Collins was to play his 150th game at his former home ground in Perth – but it’s not. In his days at Fremantle the club played at Subiaco.

It won’t exactly be a homecoming. Only four current Fremantle players were at the club when Collins was there in 2015-16 and none of them will be in his vicinity on Sunday. Captain Alex Pearce, Luke Ryan and Brennan Cox are all defenders, based at the opposite end, and Sean Darcy is the back-up ruckman.

But all that will mean little to the ever-selfless Collins.

Most importantly, Collins will be looking to improve on the SUNS’ 2-5 record in 150th games. Only Miller and Witts have celebrated this milestone with a win – both in Darwin.

Witts marked his 150th for the SUNS in an eight-point win over Hawthorn in the NT capital last year, but the Miller 150th is the prototype. He had 32 possessions, 13 clearances, eight tackles and three Brownlow Medal votes in a 62-point win over North Melbourne to mark the occasion.

Miller, too, has missed the least games on his way to 150 – just 10.

But Collins has been the consummate ironman since a rough first year with the SUNS in 2019 when, after playing the first nine games of the season, he missed the last 13 with a hip problem.

Since then he’s been near-perfect, missing three games with an ankle in 2021 and three with a calf last year to end a 90-game run.

And, in a run the equal of any defender in the competition, rewarded with selection in the Victorian side this year, he’s finished 1st-4th-5th-2nd-1st-5th in the SUNS best & fairest 2020-25.

With Daniel Rioli to miss this week with a jaw injury, Collins will be one of just seven SUNS players left to have played every game this year. The others are Miller, Andrew, Ben King, John Noble, Bodhi Uwland and Leo Lombard.

The Dockers, on a club record 13-game winning streak after a 10-point away loss to Geelong in Round 1, have 12 players who have played every game – Alex Pearce, Andrew Brayshaw, Shai Bolton, Jordan Clark, Luke Jackson, Karl Worner, Neil Erasmus, Heath Chapman, Josh Treacy, Sam Switkowski, Jye Amiss and Isaiah Dudley.

They’ve used only 30 different players. The SUNS have used 34, just below the League average of 34.9, while Richmond and West Coast (39) head the list, Carlton and Western Bulldogs (38).

Free-running Dockers ruckman Jackson looms as a key figure for the home side, having picked up the maximum 10 coaches votes in each of their last two games. He’s third on the Coaches Player of the Year leaderboard with 70 votes, behind Collingwood’s Nick Daicos (83) and the Western Bulldogs’ Marcus Bontempelli (78).

The SUNS can expect nothing less than an extra-hostile Perth Stadium crowd after the Dockers’ Round 15 game against Geelong last Friday night pulled a crowd of 55,201 – the biggest non-derby crowd in history.

While the SUNS’ King will go into the game leading the Coleman Medal race with 42 goals, the Dockers have three in the top 17. Amiss (35) is equal fifth, Treacy (34) is equal eighth and Patrick Voss (26) is equal 17th despite missing one game.