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Essendon coach Ben Rutten says his AFL club is hurting at being in a lowly 16th spot with just two wins entering their mid-season bye.

Essendon coach Ben Rutten will consider "little tweaks" to try to revive a playing group hurting from a disastrous AFL season.

The ailing Bombers enter their mid-season bye in 16th spot with just two wins from 11 matches.

And there's no respite after the break: Essendon meet four top-eight teams in their next five rounds.

"There is certainly a level of disappointment and frustration," Rutten said after a 16-point loss to Port Adelaide on Sunday.

"We are not where we want to be as a group, there's no doubt about that.

"The guys are hurting because of that."

Rutten said he would use the bye to ponder just what had gone wrong, and the path forward, for a club many pundits tipped as finalists.

"We will certainly take a bit of time to digest the first half of the season," he said.

"And certainly have a look across the board about how we have been tracking and what that looks like moving forward.

"There has been some growth amongst our group individually.

"We probably haven't quite had the cohesion and the chemistry and continuity of our squad, that has been something we have wrestled with most weeks in terms of ins and outs and availability."

Rutten suggested it would be back to basics rather than wholesale changes in the second half of the season.

"It's building a really strong consistent brand around the contest, continuing to build our fundamentals," he said.

"Whether that be some of the composure and our method inside 50 and that real discipline to be able to continue to play our way, whether it be the contested fundamentals, sticking tackles ... they are little things that we need to continue to improve on.

"Because there is still a bit of that costing our game when we are not getting that right - good opposition are able to punish us and hurt us too much.

"Maybe little tweaks with our training program, maybe little tweaks with how we prepare our guys.

"But ultimately ... some of the basic stuff that we have to continue to go to work on and keep building on."

Rutten expected Jake Stringer (hamstring) and Matt Guelfi (hamstring) to return after the bye while Kyle Langford (hamstring) and Will Snelling (calf) were also nearing a return.