P-man

Place your predictions for any individual or the team as a whole, good or bad, for season 2018. Closest to the pin with their quality and quantity of predictions will win the heralded Demonland Crystal Ball. Previous DCB winners 2016: wretched.sylph 2017: ding

We got him

Interesting read, cheers. Re Balic, I've placed him as High scope for a few reasons. First is the amount of football he's missed due to a wrist injury which wiped out his entire first year. Talent aside, he has played just the four games in two years so he's barely scraped the surface as an AFL player. His first run around the oval trailing the rest of the pack shows he is yet to acclimatise to an AFL environment and standard. Second is how highly he's rated by pretty much anyone familiar with him. Phantom drafters. Fremantle fans (granted they were sorry to lose Michie as well, but they seem more sorry about Balic ). Mahoney has said the club has always rated him very highly since the 2015 draft. Finally he has the look of a good player in the making. His basketball background shows with his spatial awareness and smooth moving. Even with limited opportunity he has shown he's a goal kicker. Ovviously it is still speculative, but when you combine those three factors I'm comfortable placing him as High scope. 2018 will tell us a lot more about the player we have acquired.

All reasonable calls. I think we've seen what Viney's best looks like already, as in individual games. It's a matter of him stringing 15-20 of them together in a season or consecutive seasons. In that sense he does have another level to go to, but I think we know what his best or certainly close to his best football looks like. Oliver is difficult to place because it begs the question, how much better can he actually get given he's performing at such a ridiculously high level already? I'd be happy placing him in high scope, but God help the rest of the comp if he's only tickling the surface now. Hunt can and will improve but needs to further tidy up his kicking and I'm unconvinced of the extent to which he can do that. He's a weapon no doubt but I have him medium as I think he will always be dangerous, but untidy. O Mac is still very raw. He frustrates like only a McDonald can do, but if he continues on the developmental arc he's on I think he'll become an A grade defender. Just needs time. More size. More awareness. More confidence. i like the romance around Vanders and as a fellow Canberra product I'd love him to turn into Clint's vandenFyfe or Ox 2.0, but at this stage I think it's unlikely. He has improvement in him no doubt, and he has assets which should see him remain on the list. Kent I would possibly change to low scope in retrospect. That said, he is capable of much better than what we saw this year. And I doubt we've seen his best. Stretch was a major disappointment in 2017, but he's still young. I place him into medium partly because the kid has the drive to be great. When you're a mentor for Oliver at his age, you've got something going. I'm a JKH believer. We're a dying breed but there's still a few of us left

Cheers. Interested to know what changes you'd make/who you'd slot differently, i realised I left out Filipovic and Tim Smith but can't edit posts after a certain time.

Players who are best 22 and have reached their potential (7) Jones Lewis Hibberd Jetta Pedersen Garlett Melksham Players who are best 22 and have not reached their potential (15) Low Scope for Improvement (5) Gawn Viney Tyson Frost T Mac Medium Scope for Improvement (6) Oliver Lever Hogan Harmes Hunt Neal-Bullen Large Scope for Improvement (4) Brayshaw Petracca Salem O Mac Players who are not best 22 and have not reached their potential (12) Low Scope for Improvement (2) Bugg vandenBerg Medium Scope for Improvement (6) Hannan Kent Stretch JKH King Johnston Large Scope for Improvement (4) Weideman Balic Maynard J Smith Players who are not best 22 and have reached their potential (2) Vince Wagner

Seems likely mate. At least up until reports of houses coming down on the training track.

I'll be renewing but they can bloody well wait. Couldn't muster up a win against a hopeless North from two attempts. Couldn't muster up the prunes to beat a second string Collingwood to give the supporters one measly finals appearance. Meanwhile Richmond, [censored] RICHMOND, plodded their way to a flag on the back of household names like Nathan Broad - a bloke I had not heard of until he snapchatted a stranger with his premiership medallion between her jugs. Yeah, last season still stings.

Not disputing that.

Was Woey that shocking a Brownlow choice that he can't even find a spot on the bench in these teams? Not saying it's right or wrong but it's certainly interesting.

No slight on him at all and I wish him the best of luck, but using the word "star" to describe Joel Macdonald absolutely confirms to me that the word has lost all meaning in the mainstream.

If he's half as good as Freo fans on BF claim he is then we've got ourselves a bargain.

I'm not thrilled with giving up two first round picks for, talented or not, an intercept marking defender. But I'm also not unhappy. He's a known commodity and he makes us a better side. Welcome aboard Jakey boy. May you bring us lots of money. Um, I mean success.

Shout out to the mod who added "Walker" after Tex to my post. I would hate that people thought I was talking about Tex Perkins.

He's prone to throwing the toys out of the cot. I recall he used to get very short with interviewers when asked about Dangerfield, and his post match speech at the GF was surely one of the most pathetic that stage has seen. It's fine to be disappointed but show some leadership for god's sake.

Trade Radio played audio of Tex Walker teeing off on Lever on Triple M Adelaide. Did not hold any punches. Said he has chosen "money over success". Had some respect for Adelaide as a club but they are not handling this situation with much dignity,

Hard not to get the warm and fuzzies when a quality player singles out the club as his preferred destination.

Interesting he said that McCartney told him to pick a player as a mentor to help model his professionalism. He chose Billy Stretch.

Congrats also to Petracca who came in third behind Menegola.

Finals or bust for sure. No grey area next season. I know people won't like hearing it, but it is still the third youngest squad in the league. The two that were younger than us were fighting to avoid the wooden spoon in Round 23. Depth almost always comes into play so the age of the entire squad is relevant. Whilst it is four years into this rebuild they haven't all been there for the entire four years. Oliver in his second year. Petracca essentially in his second year. Brayshaw in his third year after lengthy concussion interruptions. Hogan still a youngish player with numerous setbacks. Lewis and Hibberd brand new to the system. I'm not wanting to make excuses but these things need to be noted when talking about where we are at and where we should be at. There is no excuse for how they finished the season, but it's worth nothing there is a lot of scope for improvement. We will be extracting the last drops out of Vince and Lewis next season as best 22 players. Pending on who we replace them with, there will be a gap in experience left in their wake. Their time is now. I'm happy setting 16 wins as a pass. Even if I think it probably won't be reached. They must aim high and they must let 2017 be a lesson that is never repeated. When everything is on the line, play like it is.

Hold the phone. He liked a post of opposition players celebrating a win after essentially knocking us out of the finals? That surely can't be right. Extremely poor form if so.

Daniher has every right to feel dudded by that offer. It's worth keeping in mind that in Essendon's case there was the $4.5m in compensation payments to banned players which was counted by the AFL as falling outside of the salary cap. So players were being financially compensated and then entering into separate (in principle) contract renegotiations. New contract amounts were not allowed to fall under the market rate, but it would be naive to think that the settlements paid to players did not factor at all into those renegotiations. "Loyalty" may well have been a factor there too. Essendon's ability to retain so many of its returning players and have enough left in the kitty to chase Dustin Martin is enough to raise an eyebrow. Meanwhile Daniher, who was not one of the dozen banned players and therefore has received no additional compensation, seemingly has to accept unders. That doesn't pass the fairness test. However they have chosen to sort this mess out, Daniher shouldn't be the one getting the short end of the stick.

I think the head explosions over Oliver not being in everyone's votes were a bit OTT. Of course you could mount a case for him being in the best 5 or 6 players. Similarly though I thought the likes of Harmes and Hannan, the lesser lights, deserved some recognition for the role they played in the win. Hannan especially has been a tremendous pick up and is playing his role well. Then you have Melksham who I am not a fan of but played his best game for e club so far by a street. That deserves recognition. After that you're left with Jones, Garlett and Hibberd. All excellent on the day. Oliver will probably win it at this rate. It's not as though he's not polling well. And I think the vast majority of Melbounre supporters are well aware of the talent he possesses and how lucky we are to have him.

The conjecture around whether it hit the post or not will work against him. Flogs like KB made sure there was plenty of doubt placed in people's heads.

They had a topic on 360 discussing how "unlikely" it was at the start of the season that Yeo would be leading the Coaches award. Yeo is playing in his sixth season with 92 games. Oliver is 7 votes behind Yeo in third place. He's playing in his second season with 21 games. I couldn't help but think Gerard and Robbo were overlooking the more unlikely event. Yeo might be unlikely. Oliver is defying all logic.