With knowledge comes confidence, says North Melbourne star Todd Goldstein, who believes the Kangaroos' finals experience over the past few seasons holds it in good stead for Sunday's elimination final against Richmond.

The bulk of the club's list entered last year's finals campaign with a single, bitter taste of finals football in their mouths – a 96-point loss to West Coast in the 2012 elimination final.

But against Essendon and Geelong, the Kangaroos scored brilliant come-from-behind and hang-on wins by 12 and six points respectively.

Speaking on SEN radio on Thursday morning, Goldstein said the experiences offered his teammates the belief that they could survive any situation in September.

"Coming into last year's final's series there was still a lot of unknown because, really, for two-thirds of our list we'd been part of the West Coast final where we lost by [96] points so other than that we hadn't really tasted any finals footy," the ruckman said.

"That confidence that we've been there, we've been in that situation where we've been getting smashed at half-time and we've come back, or we were smashing Geelong and they came back and we had to hold on.

"We feel like we've got a lot of confidence from those games and that we know our best footy can match up with anyone."

Goldstein has been the league's best ruckman by some distance this season.

He leads the competition for hit-outs and is odds-on to gain debut All Australian honours.

He'll come up against Tiger Ivan Maric on Sunday and said he would try to keep him moving as much as possible.

"We've always had some really close battles; he's a big boy and he's very strong so I guess it's just about not getting caught up wrestling too much, try and stay on the move a bit more," he said.

"He's probably one of the stronger ruckmen in the competition and he thrives on that body contact.

"It's just about trying to keep space and just time my runs in the ruck contest rather than going in there and locking up straight away."