On 21/03/2026 at 07:38, Cranky Franky said:

The problem was overall list management from 2020 to 2024.

To let Baker, Jordon, Hunt & Bedford go while recruitining, Dunstan, Schache, Fullerton, Grundy, McAdam, Billings & Hunter is a major reason for our decline.

This comment has a clear lack of understanding about salary cap and recruiting.

Fringe 23 players are always targeted by other clubs willing to pay them well over their current clubs salary.

End of story IMO. All of those guys a good role players at best now days too

3 hours ago, DemonWA said:

This comment has a clear lack of understanding about salary cap and recruiting.

Fringe 23 players are always targeted by other clubs willing to pay them well over their current clubs salary.

End of story IMO. All of those guys a good role players at best now days too

Nonsense. The end of the story is that we totally butchered our list, making it worse instead of improving it by letting go of serviceable players & replacing them with duds

22 minutes ago, Cranky Franky said:

Nonsense. The end of the story is that we totally butchered our list, making it worse instead of improving it by letting go of serviceable players & replacing them with duds

Meh. Hindsight at its best.

Try fitting all of our flag heros into the cap and then tell me we were butchers. If we'd have turned up in the 2022 and 2023 finals it would be a non issue

3 hours ago, DemonWA said:

Meh. Hindsight at its best.

Try fitting all of our flag heros into the cap and then tell me we were butchers. If we'd have turned up in the 2022 and 2023 finals it would be a non issue

Nothing hindsight about it. It was dumb at the time.

List management is about trading players to improve the list not make it worse.

Trading in Hibberd, Melksham & May improves your list but trading in Schache, Hunter, McAdam & Billings does not.

Just now, Cranky Franky said:

Nothing hindsight about it. It was dumb at the time.

List management is about trading players to improve the list not make it worse.

Trading in Hibberd, Melksham & May improves your list but trading in Schache, Hunter, McAdam & Billings does not.

My point is that the names we gave up werent let go by choice for the most part. No employer can keep rising stars happy unless theyre paying them well and promoting them.

Also, Shaq and Billings were speculative picks - high draft picks, potentially worth a gamble given we didnt give up anything for them.

Hunter played a fair bit and was decent enough - what could have been if Gus wasnt KO'd and we hadnt capitulated against Carlton. If he had played in a flag no one would have knocked this move.

McAdam has had a bad run with injury.

18 minutes ago, Cranky Franky said:

Nothing hindsight about it. It was dumb at the time.

List management is about trading players to improve the list not make it worse.

Trading in Hibberd, Melksham & May improves your list but trading in Schache, Hunter, McAdam & Billings does not.

You'd assume there was more cap space to bring in Pig, Melk and May, the latter ones were from shopping in the clearance section.

56 minutes ago, Cranky Franky said:

Nothing hindsight about it. It was dumb at the time.

List management is about trading players to improve the list not make it worse.

Trading in Hibberd, Melksham & May improves your list but trading in Schache, Hunter, McAdam & Billings does not.

may cost the pick that became gc17's king, hibberd and melksham were both traded for great high second round picks

mcadam was the only player with significant 'cost' of that latter group, and that was for a second round pick; the others were freebies, more or less

we didn't have capacity to bring in highly ranked players as had the likes of gawn, viney, brayshaw, oliver, petracca, salem, etc. on high money deals

at the time, in 2021-23, none of them was going out

the significant player we lost was dogga at the end of 2022; we got peak value for him

other than that, we had little to trade

jj is the one that hurts, a bit, but that's because the afl and their stupid rules-on-the-run approach to allow delisted / relisted players to accomodate their stupid you-must-draft-3-players-every-year-but-you-can-prelist-a-delisted-player rule approach and, at the time, he had been very middling for us as a mid

2 hours ago, Cranky Franky said:

Trading in Hibberd, Melksham & May improves your list but trading in Schache, Hunter, McAdam & Billings does not.

Ridiculous, ridiculous comparison. May cost us an arm and a leg, a high first + second rounder, and for both Hibberd and Melksham we gave up a high second round picks. For the others, e.g., Billings was pick 61 and Schache was a future fourth rounder!

There's no comparison. All the players you named were depth players, except for perhaps Hunter who was more than useful in his first season with us and worth the trade to have a decent winger opposite Langdon.