Seven wins across almost two seasons won’t be the criteria Stuart Dew is judged on when Gold Coast assess the coach’s long-term viability at the club.

Dual AFL premiership player Dew still has a season to run on his maiden senior coaching contract.

The Suns, in their ninth AFL season, have never finished higher than 12th and will collect the wooden spoon in 2019 after losing 17 straight games since a promising 3-1 start.

But Suns chief executive Mark Evans indicated Dew’s future looked rosy on the Gold Coast, even suggesting the club would look to hire an experienced figure in a head of coaching role to “speed up that development”.

“Stuart’s shown us he has some great traits that we think will stand him in very good stead to be a senior coach for a long time and to deliver success and we want that to be at the Gold Coast Suns,” Evans said.

“He has a great way of connecting to players, a great football brain and is so eager to learn.

“We think that’s more important than X’s and O’s.”

Vice-captain Touk Miller will play his 100th AFL game in Sunday’s final round against GWS and is choosing to look deeper than their win-loss record when it comes to the club’s health.

“It’s funny because I think we still have progressed,” he said.

“In terms of where we’re going as a club in the past five years, I’ve seen a lot of progression and in the last couple of years especially with Stuey Dew coming on and a lot of new faces.”

Evans said the club wouldn’t rush to appoint any extra coaching support given it had “been a bizarre and tumultuous time in football”, in reference to Ross Lyon’s shock departure from Fremantle on Tuesday.

“We would consider anything we thought would speed up that development (of Dew),” he said.

“But it’ll need a few weeks for that to settle down and we can make our assessments at the end of the year.”