Delistings

[Gary]

I share the surprise / uncertainty of just what the end play may be...but we should never be swayed by how important certain players have been to "the ressies"...not an issue...never an issue...it's chalk & cheese.

[DST]

So the wash-up is we have lost 7 players and gained 3, leaving us 4 draft picks in the draft or pre season draft.

Plenty of flexibility with this outcome.

Could easily see us pick up one of either Shaw or Erickson with our third or fourth draft pick depending on whether we go to the pre season draft for a go at Notting.

DST

[gossipcom]

I'm assuming someone posted this already but just in case here are the other rookie delistings

http://www.foxsports.com.au/story/0,8659,20642666-23211,00.html

Matthew Davis, Andrew Ericksen, Earl Shaw, David Spriggs and Josh Willoughby have all been delisted by the club.

Star recruit Peter Everitt has been added to the list for 2007 along with rookie elevations Simon Phillips and Jonathan Simpkin.

Ed Barlow, Kieran Jack and Sam Rowe have been retained as the three second-year rookies while, under AFL rules, other rookies Paul Currie, Stefan Garrubba, Adam Prior and James Wall have all been delisted.

[Bas]

Originally posted by DST
So the wash-up is we have lost 7 players and gained 3, leaving us 4 draft picks in the draft or pre season draft.

Pls explain?

Do we have 4 or 5 picks? Previous thread said 5. If 5, we'll re pick 2 delistees or 1 and 1 pre-season draft pick up - Ruckman?

[DST]

Originally posted by Bas
Pls explain?

Do we have 4 or 5 picks? Previous thread said 5. If 5, we'll re pick 2 delistees or 1 and 1 pre-season draft pick up - Ruckman?

If we have removed 7 (Williams, Chambers, Spriggs, Willoughby, Davis, Shaw & Erickson) and then added 3 (Everitt, Simpkin, Phillips) then we have 4 picks spread over the two drafts.

We can however only use 3 of those and go into the season one down if we want to.

DST

[liz]

Or we can draft 6 if we want to, putting Magic and Leapin' onto the veteran list.

[Jeffers1984]

Originally posted by liz
Or we can draft 6 if we want to, putting Magic and Leapin' onto the veteran list.

This scenario is most likely for obvious reasons.

[SimonH]

Buggered if I know what they're playing at.

I was wrong way back before when I said that if you listed Leo and MOL as 'outside' veterans, you didn't get to halve their contribution to the salary cap. You get to halve it either way; so there are only two possible motivations for listing qualifying veterans as inside the 38 player senior list rather than as outside veterans:
a) leaves more room for us to pick up rookies (net total 44 list size including outside vets and regular rookies, plus 3 local rookies from NSW)
b) senior lists now must be exactly 38 players (the latitude for teams to have a senior list of only 37 players if they wanted to, ended in 2004), which means that we have to count a @@@@y extra $90,000 or so (2 extra senior players x $45,000 pa base salary for each draftee) towards the salary cap.

Neither of these seem terribly compelling reasons. Why would you want more rookies (who you can't play, barring long-term injury to someone) rather than more senior players who you can play?

And yet, if we were to list both Leo and MOL as outside veterans, we would have 6 spots on the senior list to fill. Even if we were to take a player in the PSD, this means that our final draft pick would be our fifth at #97. Unless the club has access to some extraordinary secret squirrel genius who no-one knows about, the idea that pick #97 could be a better prospect than Shaw or little Willo is an absolute joke. Utilising pick #81 is extraordinary enough. Sure, we can just draft back a delistee, by why would we when we didn't have to delist them in the first place? Three of these players could have survived, even with the Simpkin and Phillips promotion.

To have just three ruckmen on our senior list, one of whom is 32 and another who is notoriously injury-prone (and the third of whom carried quite a few niggles through 2006), strikes me as absolute insanity. Did somebody say 'Clark Keating in the PSD'? That would be an odd move in itself, but hard to think what else could be going on. We're interested in Tristan Cartledge, perhaps.

A complete head-scratcher. With Chambers and Ericksen gone in the same year, I would have thought that Earl Shaw would have had one of the safer spots on the senior list.

[liz]

Originally posted by SimonH
Neither of these seem terribly compelling reasons. Why would you want more rookies (who you can't play, barring long-term injury to someone) rather than more senior players who you can play?

Maybe because rookies are cheaper and you only have to committ to one year. It becomes a numbers game. Obviously the probability of finding players decreases as you move further down the list, but pick enough of them and you may find a couple that show something. If they don't look like they "have it" after a year, you move them on and pick another lot.

And while people turn their noses up at pick 98 or so in a draft, that is essentially what rookie players become. It is pushing it to say that the likes of Vogels, Grundy, Phillips (or Simpkin) have "made it" in AFL terms, they at worst provide some senior depth and at best could develop into decent players. Bevan has a premiership medal and is clearly in the Swans best 25.

There are enough quality senior players running around in the AFL who came via the rookie draft to prove that you can unearth rough gems if you pick up enough of them and give them a bit of a polish.

[SimonH]

Originally posted by liz
Maybe because rookies are cheaper and you only have to committ to one year. It becomes a numbers game. Obviously the probability of finding players decreases as you move further down the list, but pick enough of them and you may find a couple that show something. If they don't look like they "have it" after a year, you move them on and pick another lot.

I agree generally with what you say, but it has relatively limited practical application because:

a) a member of the Swans management has said that we pay our rookies above the statutory minimum of about high $20,000s, because 'they'd be living on the street in Sydney if we were to pay them that'. (Couldn't be bothered chasing the link now.) So they're not really meaningfully cheaper than $40,000-odd draftees, especially as training, medical, travel and all other on-costs are fixed and probably more significant than wages.

b) one year simply isn't enough to know with any confidence, especially for larger kids. This is a significant issue with the rookie list, especially if the insane 'only retain 3 rookies for a 2nd year' rule (which I've never heard of before) is a reality. Earl Shaw is a case in point! Promoted after one year, delisted after the second, and it would be a very brave person who could definitely conclude as at end 2006 that he does or doesn't have what it takes to become a long-term AFL player. Players don't take any more/less time to come on because they're drafted rather than rookied, and yet the likes of Ericksen, Matt Davis and Josh Willoughby were given 3 years-- during at least the first 2 of which, the club knew full well they wouldn't be pressing for selection in the firsts, and was just looking to see how they developed.

I do agree that having access to 9 rookies (or 7 if we have outside vets) is a significant advantage for Sydney in the longer term. It's far more important than the salary cap, which gets all of the press. As has been posted on BF (I think by Weaver), if each of them has a 10% chance of 'making it', then over a decade that's 9 or so quality players in your team, where an impoverished Vic club who can only afford 2 rookies, will get 2 long-term players across the decade from the same route. If a club is already struggling financially and with facilities, it simply can't afford to give stronger clubs a head-start of a half-dozen quality players per decade into the bargain, and hope to compete long-term.

This is why the 'compulsory minimum 4 rookies for all teams' rule is one of the few parts of the new AFL strategic plan that I actually agree with.

I grant your point that '#1 in the rookie draft' (or '#1 youngster in the PSD') sounds a lot more impressive than 'pick #97 in the national draft', but in reality they're all about as low on the totem pole. It's just that one hears plenty about great players who started life in the rookie draft but pretty much never about great players who came from pick 70+ in the national draft (apart from the hoary old chestnut that is Jimmy Hird).

[liz]

Originally posted by SimonH

I do agree that having access to 9 rookies (or 7 if we have outside vets) is a significant advantage for Sydney in the longer term. It's far more important than the salary cap, which gets all of the press.

I agree that it is more of an advantage than many realise. To be "fairer", arguably the pool of rookies available to be taken under this rule should be limited to those above a geographical line to exclude those who grow up in a footy playing region.

Having said that, the number of draftees even from the Wagga / Riverina areas has hardly been impressive in recent years, suggesting that the state of development in the whole of NSW is a major issue, not just in the Greater Sydney area. But I did think that choosing Barlow and Rowe, who essentially played in the Victorian U18 system, was a bit of a "cheat".

I think that the SA and WA teams (and probably Brisbane now too, given the development programme up there) have an even greater advantage. Or maybe it is just that they are smarter in taking advantage of the resources on their doorsteps than their Victorian counterparts. Just the fact of having a decent quality local competition (and network of sub-leagues) in which their youngsters develop means that there is probably more genuine quality that they are likely to spot ahead of their interstate rivals.

I don't think it is coincidence that West Coast and Freo are probably the two clubs to have gained the most from the rookie system in terms of both quality and quantity.

[liz]

Originally posted by SimonH

b) one year simply isn't enough to know with any confidence, especially for larger kids.

Yes and no. It isn't long enough to tell whether a player will make it, but if you look upon the system as a chance to give an extended trial to a handful of marginal kids, it at least gives the club a chance to assess the intangibles, like their determination and work ethic, it makes sense. Rather than have to make the two year committment, they can trial them for just a year and see whether they have the personality traits to compensate for not being quite as naturally talented as the cream of the crop.

[Ajn]

Agree that 6 picks seems alot, but with one/two preseason picks possible there is not a great deal of difference. They were hot for Notting a couple of years ago....wouldn't suprise and Skipworth is also another chance, who fits the defensive midfielder type we like.

[hammo]

The other factor to consider is that after round 3 many clubs won't participate in the draft, so number 94 could effectively be 70 or so.

Still the club must have some strategy in place and it will be interesting to see what plays out.

[Wil]

Hmm. This just shows that when it comes to recruitment Roos has no idea. We are still playing with Eade's influence... it is probably a smart idea that Roos retires when Eade's players start to.