The 26-year-old instead believes a horrendous injury toll and lack of performance by senior players in the opening six weeks dug the club into an unfamiliar hole at the foot of the ladder before recent wins against Brisbane and North Melbourne laid the platform for a potential revival.

Sydney returned to pre-season training later than most clubs, and have generally done so for most of the last two decades. They've played in three of the last five grand finals, and have finished in the top eight on 18 occasions in the past 21 years.

Playing in a grand final generally delays pre-season by a month compared with the 10 teams that miss out on the play-offs in the previous season, but Hannebery said any potential effect that had on a slow start in subsequent seasons was a myth.

"Personally I think it makes absolutely no difference whatsoever," Hannebery said.

"The only thing that might hurt teams or players is if you get that surgery so you lose that four weeks to recover from and you start running later. I didn't run for six weeks but that's the case for most players anyway that have played the majority of the year, they won't run for four or five weeks.

"From a team perspective I don't think starting late is a bad thing, it means you're playing deep into finals which is a good thing. It wouldn't bother me and it wouldn't bother the footy club if that was the case for the next however many years.

"It's a thing that we've always been good at adjusting to. By January or February you've done a number of sessions and by the [pre-season] you're generally all ready to go and there's no excuses come round one.

"There's still three or four months to prepare [after playing in a grand final]. There's an enormous amount of time whether you play in a grand final or not to get yourself ready physically and mentally to produce the football that's required at AFL level.

"You might miss a few weeks here or there but in the overall scheme of things it accounts for nothing and doesn't make any difference whatsoever."

Hannebery spent six weeks after last year's grand final recovering from a knee injury, but the durable midfielder enjoyed a solid pre-season.

He played in the club's intra-club trial match, all three pre-season games and every one of the Swans' AFL games this year, but by his own admission was one of Sydney's leaders who was down on form in the opening month of the season.

That's turned around in the last couple of weeks with Hannebery averaging a shade under 30 touches per game, and it's no surprise the team's fortunes have turned in that time.

"As leaders of the footy club, the buck stops with you guys," Hannebery said.

"The leaders need to be setting the tone week in, week out. Some of the leaders were and were playing decent footy and there were some that weren't playing anywhere near the footy that we needed to.

"It started with the leadership group and I think when you put in a strong performance like that as a group it sets the tone for the rest of the team and that's the way we played our footy last year.

"There weren't too many weeks [last year] where we had more than one or two guys down in that group and certainly at the start of the year we had a number of guys in that group that were down on the day, plus the injuries in that group that we had.

"That's where it started for me and it was important that we got that group playing the footy that they're capable of playing."

The Swans welcome back another one of their leaders this weekend in Dane Rampe, who has missed seven games after fracturing his arm earlier in the year.

Rampe's inclusion is a huge boost for Sydney's defence, and will provide another calm head down back to replace veteran Jarrad McVeigh who injured his hamstring in the win over North Melbourne, and looks set to miss at least two weeks.

"It's a massive inclusion, he's a vice-captain, he's a really loved teammate and he's certainly one of those guys that gives you good direction out on the field," Hannebery said.

"He's a strong leader, he always more often than not delivers with his actions the way he defends. The way he leads and the way he sets his example for the team is second to none. There's a lot of stuff that you can't put a value on with him being in the team.

"He's a resilient type. Even when he did the injury, as bad as it was it only took him a day and he bounced back and accepted it for what it was and it was straight away trying to help out the rest of the group, especially the younger players, trying to get them better.

"It shows the quality of the bloke and the quality of the leader that he is. He's almost been to a point a fair bit annoying he's been that in the face of players."