green_machine

God No! Miller is a very good third tall. We have just forced him to play CHF and FF which is not his role. He is a much better forward than backman as he has proved time and time again. I am also not sure who would push him out of his team. I think he adds far more than people give him credit for. His only real crime is he is not a Jonathan Brown. In any case even if he had not proven a better forward than backman moving Miller to the backline would make no sense. Our tall backs are great. In fact our third and fourth best back men (Rivers and Garland) are better than the 2nd best at most clubs. With Harley's retirement, Geelong would take either of these players at CHB. Who do the bulldogs have who is better than either of these (harris excluded). How about Collingwood (?) Presti? The list goes on. Our backline will be excellent in a few years, all it needs is a couple of small defensive running players with great skills like a Macleod or a mackie who can do stuff coming out of the backline. Miller needs to stay forward playing the role of third or fourth tall and then he will be very good value.

I do not understand how you can claim this. So far he has used picks 1,17 & 19 in 2008 for a total of 3 games, none of which have set the world on fire. Used 4 top 20 picks in 2009 on midfielders when the collective wisdom here was crying out for a tall (I agree with this personally but still....) Produced two good players in jetta and bennel with late picks but the jury is out on whether they will be a top 15 player in a premiership contender. In fact the only person you can point too and say BP has done a great job is Jurrah and that may have been accident of chance and anyone in our position would have recruited him. Hopefully BP is a gun but I think it is way way to early to tell. Frawley and Garland were decried as wasted picks for the first couple of years and everyone was wrong there. Bartram at pick 60 was top 5 in the rising star in his first year and injuries have since reduced his output. How can you tell?

I do not see how you are drawing these conclusions. BP has recruited Morton who was a no brainer at that point in the draft and Jurah / Grimes. I have got no doubt he is a great recruiter but to claim he has infinitely better than CAC is crazy in this point in time. You have to give credit to dean bailey for refusing to draft for fill gap players because that was the great downfall of CAC's years in that he had few good picks to use. CAC vs BP has to be based on the draft not on trade decisions as most of the trade decisions would have been out of Craig Camerons hands and would have been a Danniher call. Also you need to look at the draft picks that CAC actually had. He had some 1&2 in his first year where he got TJ and white, 3 & 5 in the 2003 draft which was the worst draft in history and we got the best players available. Pretty much every other player after Mclean in the top fifteen has been delisted. Beyond that he had a spatting of mid teens picks which yielded Brad Green, Scotty Thompson, Jones, Bate. A couple of failures. I think if you add up the picks BP has almost more top 20 picks in two years than If we win a flag it will be based on CAC's tall picks. I am referring to the likes of Frawley, Rivers, Warnock, Garland, Bate, Jamar. That represents the nucleus of our premiership. When we are challenging for the flag my prediction will be fully half of our best 22 will be based of CAC's picks. It is easy to forget that CAC started going tall four to five years ago and that decision resulted in Dee's struggling on the field but at the end of the day it those talls with 7 - 10 years experience that will make the difference.

I think the draft choices are great from a structural viewpoint. We needed the midfielders early because 1) we need midfielders to give us quality in the center 2) History shows a midfielder from picks 11 & 18 have a good chance of making it As I have argued elsewhere we do not need any mediocre to good KPP. We already are overrepresented with that sort of player with some really quality KPB. The draft picks look good.

It is all about getting good talls in. Everyone is deluding themselves with this concept. It is not about getting a tall it is about getting a brown (FS) or pavlich(4) or a franklin(5) or a roughie (2) or a Riwolet (1). Getting a kozki(2) or a Anthony or Hawkins (fs top 5) or an Edwards is just blah (and they are the good ones if you do not have a top 5 pick). Useless in the extreme, we do not need ok tall like players who might be able to crash packs. It just will not help us. It is about midfielders. We need three or four more good quality midfielders. The might come from our existing list but they probably will not. 11 and 18 (historically... through I know everyone discounts stats and magically assumes that this year with only eight months of age range, will be stronger than any draft in the past) you have a bloody good chance of getting a good small player. I am talking about 50% plus chance and if it hits then it will pay off when our eleventh midfielder can play rather being a depth hack. Midfielder depth counts in GF. You power forwards mean [censored] all on the big day as they rarely win the game.

Lots of people are claiming we have a surplus mids. They do it heaps of threads, with no real justification of why we have enough mids. Before launching an examination of our mid list in 3 years times (when it matters) I thought it would be useful to put some starting assumptions out there. 1) You need a minimum of eight mid fielders. At any point of time you have six back man, six forwards and six in the middle (5 mids and one ruck). If that is your running stock you need at least three mids on the bench for rotation purposes. 2) Geelong at various points of time have had four backman, two forwards, two ruckman and everyone else rotating through the midfield. That adds up to 14 midfielders. 3)For this analysis I am going to assume you want at least 10 top midfielders and preferably 12. That basically corresponds to 8 in the guts and bench and 3 to 5 rotating through the forward / back positions on the field. 4)I am also going to assume that Scully and Trengove make it into a suitable category to fill two of these spots. 5)I am also going to assume that as great as Bruce, Mcdonald and Green are they will be fringe by the time we are challenging for the premiership. 6) The mfc midfielder this year was our worst performing. Backline stood up across the board and forward line stood up on efficiency stats. Now we need to look at Melbourne's existing list A grade. Davey, Sylvia (included with some trepidation after all he has played maybe 6 A grade games all in 2009 but still only 6). Morton (he will make it but probably more useful in forward line / backline) Good midfielders. Moloney, Jones Showed something. Grimes, Bennel, jetta (showed stuff but not neccessairly midfielders) Unknown. Picks 11 to 50, blease, strauss, Maric, bail (statistically one or two might be a midfielder) Doubtfuls: Bell, Bartram, dunn, petterd, wonaeamiri , cheany (good players but not suited to midfield.) Based off this list you have 4 to 5 A grade mid-fielders, 2 good mid -fielders. That gives you 6-7 known midfielders. The question is are we going to get the required (4-5 extra) midfielders that we need? If 50% of early non top 5 picks make it as a midfielder than we should get two more good to A - Grade mid-fielders from our listed unknowns ( blease, strauss, Maric, bail ). Even if they come on we are well short of a benchmark like Geelong with 15 players rotating through the midfield and potentially short of even the 12 benchmark that we are aiming for. I am a fan of picks going to the best available rather than recruiting for needs but I reckon our midfield needs the picks thrown into it.

I totally agree with rpfc, our forward line should have enough talent based on who we have now. A few players who can play as a reasonable marking target and mid-fielders rotating through. My concern with using picks 11 & 18 on a tall just because we deem we need a big bodied KPF is that the pick will be wasted. You are not going to get a decent one. You only need to look through previous drafts at the sort of quality you get in a tall picked up from 8 to 30 to see that this is not the answer. Jamar / Johnson and Martin can all play the big crash and bash style player with different levels of effectiveness, they are not browns or riewolts but they are as good as anyone you will get with picks 11 & 18 based on history. The only top level forward I can think of picked up after pick 5 (excluding father sons) is Fev and he is hardly your bash and crash forward that everyone is fixated upon. If you want to disprove my argument, do not just repeat we just go butcher because he is the best, instead go through the naughties drafts and name the players picked between 8 and 30 that you think represents a tall good enough to slot into our future forward line. If you can not do this, then for goodness sake stop carrying on about how we should go for one of this set of talls because they are the best.

I think everyone arguing to go for height with picks 11 and 18 are taking butcher (or equivalent) and then somehow imagining he will turn out to be a Riwolt, a brown or a franklin or a Pavalich or a roughhead. Chances of that is almost nil. All the champion KPF forwards (fev excluded) were pretty much classed as top 5 prospects and selected as such. We gambled for a player like this last year by grabbing Watt's. Realistically the sort of tall player that we are talking about getting with pick 11 and 18 are; 2001 Luke molan (9), MAcguire, Seaby, Charlie Gardner 2002 Laycock (9), Nick Smith (15), Minston (20)Lonergan (23), Paul Johnson (24). 2003 No serviceable talls picks 9 to 25 2004 Bate, Dunn, Cameron Wood, Rusling You are not getting "Great" players by punting on talls with these picks. If you punt on midfielders over the same period there are a number of "Great" players in the same pick range. If you think Butcher will be as good as Brown then argue black and blue that we should get him and take your case direct to headquarters. If you are arguing we should get this tall or that tall or this other tall because you want tall. Well then the list above tells you what you are getting, if you are happy with pick 11 to be a Seaby then good. Someone is going to come up say that we are better at drafting these days but that just means that anyone good will go top 5. Clubs should pick talls, WB, Collingwood, Richmond and others all have place for a Seaby. Melbourne doesn't so that is why directing picks towards talls is pointless. Best available talent every time.

My point was less about how useful a KPF would be... A top KPF would be great, but rather about our ability to speculate in the draft to try and get one. A 60 goal KPF is great but in the past decade their has been how many of them... maybe ten.... Fev, Brown, Hall (?), Richo (?), Riweolt, Franklin, Roughhead, Pav and in any given year maybe 5 score more than 60 goals. Yet as Diablo pointed out over 50% of top ten picks are 190 cm or above and could play KPF and presumably the trend extends backwards in drafts. What that tells you is people keep picking talls and they do not magically become a franchise KPF. My point is that if we pick tall and get a PJ or a Garland or a Dunn which is a pass mark for picks 11 or 18 then we are no better off. If we go a midfielder and we get a Jones or a grimes or a green or a bruce or a moloney which also represents a pass mark then that midfield running player will contribute to our premiership. We have enough serviceable players over 190 on our list, in fact we have an excess of them which is a blessing. In regards to my preferred options at 11 & 18 in the draft, I do not have any. I have not seen any under 18 football live and nor have I interviewed any potential draft picks so I am not going to speculate based off highlight clips that Player A has loaded of himself onto the internet. Whoever Melbourne picks I will support. Perversely if Melbourne selects a tall we are better of selecting a Newton type, who has the potential to make it big but probably will not make it all, rather than selecting a Bate sort who will succeed but probably not as a true KPF. Another good tall just will not help at this point. For the record I think Bate is great and at my work when the Judd trade was being talked about, he was the few I put on the table as untouchable.

Where did this formulated opinion that we do not have enough talls come from? Was it the fact that our forward line was rubbish this year and last? If that is the reason for the groundswell of opinion do you think our rubbish forward line was because of a lack of power forwards? or do you think the fact that with 40 inside 50s for a game any forward line is going to struggle? The argument we should direct 11 & 18 on a KPF to my mind is foolish. There are at most 20-30 excellent talls in the game. Some sides have none (Melb, Rich, Coll, Syd, Kang, Ess) others have excellent talls in the backline but nothing up forward (Geel, WB, Adel) and others go the other way. Across all the teams there are no teams with top notch backmen and top notch forwards, but more to the point with only 20 top-line KPPs in the game it means that each draft only contributes at most 2 of these great KPP. Every year dozens of picks go towards talls, so your chance of getting a genuine top line KPP from the draft per tall picked is less than 10%. If we direct picks 11 & 18 towards a tall the chance of getting a top line KPP might be 20%, that means that 80% of the time we get at best a couple of NQR (good but not top line) talls. WB needs NQR talls, Coll needs NQR talls but Melbourne does not need any more NQR talls. Our tall stocks are surprisingly well placed for depth with our 5th best tall and 10th best tall beating 90% of other clubs. Do the exercise of rating other teams talls vs Melbourne and it is pretty clear that Melbourne has depth in "Good" height. For the sake of argument Melb's best talls are Warnock, Frawley, Garland, Bate, Rivers, Jamar Geelong's best talls are Scarlet, Harley, Mooney, Blake, Hawkins Do you really think that the worst two out of Melbourne talls are worst than Blake & Hawkins. Personally I would take both PJ and Miller over those two and I do not even have them in our top 5. Of the top five teams last year only StKilda and potentially Adelaide had better depth talls than melbourne. We do not lack talls. This is wrong! I am not even sure we lack KPP, both Bate and Frawley more than hold their own against the average KPP and Warnock & Jamar are servicable. This whole idea of needing to go KPP in the draft because we lack KPP is just herd mentality driving collective decision making. The continual repetitive statements that we should get a tall because we need a tall is frankly embarrassing. We need another genuine power forward. Agreed! The only teams that do not need a genuine power forward are Bris and St Kilda. Do we want to direct our picks to gamble on getting a top line power forward then the answer is No. It is No because unless they are top-line KPP they will not force their way into our team. Our depth of good talls means that we should not gamble on trying to get a top line power forward. Someone like WB should gamble because their outcomes are 10% top-line power forward. GREAT. 40% Good tall option. GREAT 50% dud. Not so good. Melbourne on the hand gets a failure 90% of the time because if we do not hit pay dirt the pick is wasted.