Axis of Bob

Sharp is a good player and will provide excellent value to a team that selects him over a long period. The issue is more about how many of these players a team can carry at any time. You can’t select 23 players who all win the ball 30 times because that’s not how the game is played. You don’t have the opportunity to have every player around the ball all game to do that. There are only so many possessions to win in a game and if you have too many accumulators they just start winning possessions against each other - they cannibalise their own ball winning value. Your need to complement a select few midfield ball winners with players that can turn those wins into scores and prevent the opposition from doing the same. If teams already have a player like Sharp then he’ll be less valuable to them and more valuable to teams that don’t. Sharp is a very good player but I’ll be surprised if we pick him.

Then why not trade both our F1 picks plus our 2027 F1 for first round picks this year and then we can select 5 guys that we like now?

Why are people so convinced that we’ll trade a valuable future 1st round pick for a 3rd first round pick in a weak draft to select a mature age small forward with almost no exposure beyond SANFL reserves? I’m not saying he’s not a good player but if he’s good enough to trade a F1 then he’s pricey valuable enough to take with pick 12 or so this year.

Basically it's just saying that the picks themselves aren't important, it's the players that are important. The players available to pick each year are different, so pick 7 in 2024 is not the same as pick 7 in 2025 nor 2026. So when you're thinking of value of draft picks, think of the player you can select with it (not the draft pick number). X Lindsay is a good example, as he was a pick 11 in 2024 but would probably have been a top 5 pick in 2025.

I think we all get caught up in ‘pick x’ vs ‘pick y’, but those are just numbers. The value is the picks is the pool of players that you have available to pick from with that pick, which I think gets really easily forgotten. For example, we the chance to pick Xavier Lindsay last year for what became pick 5 this year. If we still had pick 5 and grabbed Lindsay we’d be over the moon. If we traded it and Langford was available at pick 5 then we’d have lost out. As it is it’ll probably be a player like Sharp. In each of those situations we’d have pick 5 but the difference to our list would be having Langford, Lindsay or Sharp, depending on when we traded it. The aim isn’t to select with the best picks, it’s to have the opportunity to put best players on your list. The players are people, whilst the picks are just the mechanism to choose your favourite from that pool of people.

Agreed. I think he’s near certainty to at least be a good AFL inside midfielder. Great size, contest winner and a style that translates very easily between juniors and seniors/AFL. The question the clubs need to ask is if they want that type of player as a priority. The answer will be different for each club. It would surprise me if Essendon didn’t want him, given their sustained paucity of big bodied contest winning midfielders.

There's a lot of real estate to sell between Max Holmes and Dylan Stephens.

I don’t think he has a high ball drop. If anything, when he kicks for goal, he doesn’t drop it high enough. Those kicks come out low which is why it seems like he’s too close to the mark. But he did kick 22.7 for Centrals this year and 22.12 last year so it certainly doesn’t seem like it’s much of an issue.

It suits the style of game that King sounds like he's implementing. A good sized medium forward who is an excellent runner but really is a utility wing/flank. It gives a lot of options as a connector in a fast paced game style. There are a lot of ways that a good sized flanker with good hands and great running ability can succeed at AFL level. I'd love to have seen his SANFL U18 games where he played high possession games up the ground, particularly more around the ball. I think that would probably be the vision that would determine if you'd use a high pick on him.

I find these drafts far more informative that the usual ones that just have the same players but move them around 3 spots to seem original. In a shallower draft like this teams are going to have very different ratings of players based on what it’s important to them and what individual recruiters see in the different players. Most drafts that are out in the public are repeats of each other and overweight production far above the future ability to the players to play AFL style footy. It happens every single year. Players with proper AFL athletic traits but lower production are always undervalued by amateur watchers.

There is a higher risk for key forwards because they is much more projection required for them. The ones that go high tend to be the ones who are athletically gifted or physically dominant at that age because it's easier to see the pathway to success for them. Cadman falls into this category because he was much more of an athlete than a footballer as a key forward, with Walter being the same. Van Rooyen has done well as a physical key forward despite his lack of class. Jefferson has a heap of class but his physical traits needed time to develop, which creates a wide variance of what that player looks like when/if that happens. The variation for contested ball winning smalls is much, much smaller because the traits required for that role are much more obvious at an earlier age. The flip side of that (and there's always a flip side!) is that it is incredibly difficult to get good key forwards with ordinary picks. Have a look at the top 10 key forwards in terms of goals: Cameron, Gunston, King, Thilthorpe, Naughton, Georgiades, Morris, Darcy, Hogan, Cadman. That's 4 top 5 picks, 2 first round picks, 2 second round picks and 2 pre-listed 17 year olds (who would have been top 2 picks). So effectively, the overwhelming majority of good key forwards need early picks to get and almost nothing outside the top 30 players drafted. So yeah, you're going to miss on a decent number of key forwards drafted early but if you don't do that then you're almost no chance of picking up a decent key forward to build around. Ludowyke played 3 CTL games this year and kicked 10 goals. Kicked 3 in the Academy game. A full year and I don't think these same conversations are being had about him being a reach at that pick. Athletically he looks like a future AFL player and he certainly has the class and size. I'd be happy to take him early (albeit just as some rando on the internet).

Cadman wasn't a standout. He was a player who was part of a broad group of good players (behind Ashcroft) and he played himself into mid top 10 consideration through a productive draft year. He wouldn't have been pick 1 except that GWS traded for pick 1 with the intention of taking him (with a lot of Vic Metro boys they weren't comfortable with selecting in that range). There's nothing to say that Ludowycke wouldn't have had a similar year and played himself into that position had he been healthy. He certainly has some excellent traits that I think make him a reasonable possibility at our picks. He certainly would bring a level of athleticism that we don't have in our mix of key forwards on our list.

I think that the posters like Pennant St Dee and ChaserJ seem (to me) to offer some great judgements and insights here, although aren't necessary prolific posters. I'll always stop to read when I see that they've posted something. I'm sure there are others (apologies to them) that I know when I see them but I can't think of them at this moment. I think if you cast your eye around and read over time you'll start getting a decent idea about who knows what they're talking about and who is just an enthusiastic video watcher like me.

Thanks, I appreciate it. There are a couple of people here who genuinely know what they’re talking about and I try to listen to them whenever they post. For the rest of us I think it’s important that we know we’re just having interesting conversations and that none of us should take ourselves too seriously because we don’t know half as much as we hope we do. 😁

I'm not really a fan of Schubert. I see him as being a big guy who is good at the small guy stuff (for a big guy) but not very good at the big guy stuff. At AFL level the big men don't have the same opportunity to play like little guys as they do in juniors. The game at AFL level is so fast that those relative mobility advantages they have are actually mostly useless. The skills that he needs, and should be mostly judged on, are his ability to play as a dominant tall player (marking, crashing packs, playing with power etc). Thilthorpe is the player that most people compare him with but Thilthorpe isn't succeeding because of his small man skills, he's succeeding because of his dominbant big man skills (with his mobility as a nice add on). As a junior Thilthorpe showed that he could command a pack as a long target, with his ground play complementing that. Schubert relies on his mobility more than his attack on the football and ability to command a marking contest and he won't have time for that at AFL level. AFL key forwards need to be able to beat their opponent in a contest and I'm not sure that's Schubert's strength. That's a big red flag for me because there are better players than him that have played like that and failed at AFL level. But, as always, I'm just a nobody who has watched some videos, so what would I know?

Bowey is much quicker and more agile, able to twist and turn out of danger and deliver quickly. I can’t think of a good recent AFL comparison for Lindsay, which in itself is an issue. Maybe Kane Farrell? Trent McKenzie? Lindsay appears to be an outside defender with ordinary athleticism and an outstanding boot. It’s not a combination that you see often at AFL level, with a lot of the defensive distributors in the AFL being quick or being midfielders/forwards that get moved into defensive positions to maximise their strengths. But maybe there’s something this keyboard warrior is missing, as I’m no expert and am just going of the same videos everyone else watches.

Like Salem does now, as a banged up older player who's lost his speed and is hanging on with his smarts and kicking. Lindsay is like that as an 18 year old but without Salem's toughness or ability to win contested footy. For comparison, these are Salem's 2013 draft highlights. They're different players at the same age. https://www.melbournefc.com.au/video/176359/draft-pick-9-christian-salem-highlights?videoId=176359&modal=true&type=video&publishFrom=1385020800001

I can see a world where we would want him since Langford is less of a midfield extractor and more of a contest winning forward runner. It's like having Bontempelli and Liberatore in the same midfield, with one of them being the in and under and the other being more of a big roaming playmaker. Sharp also looks like he could play a good defensive inside midfielder (like Steele or Viney) which is still valuable in any midfield (like Dunkley or Atkins). I don't think you'd want many more of that type but I can see why you'd take him if you believed in his ability. The other side of it is that it relatively easy to pick up those types. Langford is the hard on to get but there are often hard, inside bulls available both in the draft and from other clubs. You can find a player being squeezed out of another midfield and offer them a role in your midfield (like Steele) because a midfield can only take so many of that type. It the same as with ruckmen, so you can just pick off the frustrated ones with the lure of opportunity.

I agree with this. He looks fantastic. A lot of Xavier Lindsay about him in that he’s quick, clean and tough. Didn’t play champs, not super prolific and a type that gets lost in the mix a bit, but looks to have some real AFL traits to him.

My view on Sharp is that he is a great size for the role as a hard ball winning inside midfielder. He should do that role well at AFL level from the bits I've seen (as some Joe Nobody on the internet). Sort of like a bigger, more inside version of Ryley Sanders. The question is whether that's the type of player that we are wanting to pick up, given the changes that we appear to have been making. If we are then pick him. If not then it's probably a really good opportunity to trade the pick away knowing that he will probably attract several interested parties that wouldn't be knocking on the door for that pick otherwise. But we don't really have enough information to know if he's the sort of player that would interest us at the moment or not.

Thanks. I certainly don't want to compare the two players directly, as I only looked at Toumpas as an example to demonstrate a point. Lindsay and Toumpas are very different players and played different roles as juniors, with strengths and weaknesses that are different. When drafted, Toumpas was expected to be both quicker and better at winning contested footy than he turned out to be, which was what did him in. Toumpas was a good kick but certainly not as good as Lindsay. Toumpas was a very efficient kick whilst Lindsay is much more creative and can work at angles Toumpas simply couldn't. It means that you can make some allowances in a player's role and accept some of the negatives to his game to be able to get a boot of that quality into the team, provided that you feed him the ball enough for it to be effective. I'm personally not sure that I would want to do that with such an early pick but I can certainly understand those that do. I think his role projection seems to be pretty limited though, so you'd be drafting a designated half back kicker and hoping that your system can accommodate it.

Dare I say, and this is certainly not a direct comparison nor even any acknowledgement of similarity with Josh Lindsay, the Toumpas trap. Toumpas was a great kick, clever, high character, classy and had a whole lot of very good AFL traits. The problem is that they were stuck behind ordinary athleticism from a low-contest player. That meant that we barely got to see his clever ball use because we didn’t get much of it and was smashed as soon as he did. If I were to pick up that type of player I’d prefer to do it later in the draft where I’m hoping to get role players rather than core pieces of the team. As for Lindsay, I’d like to see more before having a strong opinion about him.

Drafting Josh Lindsay would make me nervous. Obviously good kick off the ball and his teams look to have him use the ball off half back wherever possible. But we’re not drafting him to play juniors or VFL, we’re drafting him to play AFL. He looks very similar in style to Salem but more of a recent Salem without his previous zip or the toughness Salem possesses. One of the best correlations between drafting and success at AFL level (IMHO as someone who is not a professional!) is your ability to win contests and to play at high speed. These are like hurdle requirements to be an AFL footballer, otherwise you become a liability at the top level. If you can do these things then you give your other traits a chance to shine, like kicking etc. I worry about Lindsay’s ability to pass these hurdle requirements. As we get towards the draft and I watch more of the players this may change, but these are my early impressions.

Whilst he probably moves more like a Watson or Papley, I feel like his role probably ends up more like Gryan Miers as a half forward connector. He’s a nice kick and can work some odd angles, plus he seems to have a bit of flair for talking risks with the ball to create scores. We’ve struggled to find players that operate in that soft spot forward of the midfielders and in front of the big forwards. He works that space pretty naturally and it’ll be super important if we play the way King is hoping we will.