Message to Mr. Roos, Barham & the hierarchy.

[swantastic]

Would the Hawks still have won the flag if Richmond had drafted Roughead/Franklin instead of Deledio/Tambling?

No

[SimonH]

...
I'm not trying to make this personal but I do take offence when people indirectly attempt to mock my intelligence based on incorrect assumptions; Let me just give you an idea of what I meant by the reference to top 16 picks in a side.
...
2005 - Our first pick was Matthew Laidlaw (No. 51 overall)

2004 - Jared Moore (No. 31)

2001 - Mark Powell (No. 28)

2000 - Like Ablett (No. 24)

My apologies for 'having a go', and I didn't intend to make it personal.

My reflection on the substantive issue, though, is that Sydney has still had a top 16 (or, at 'worst', #19) pick in each year. And it has used it. It's just often used it by trading for a mature player rather than by picking an 18yo from the meatmarket.

Statistically, the average AFL career has 50-odd games in it; the average AFL career of a first round draft pick would be better than that, but there have been so many first-round busts that even with all the superstars it would be shy of 150.

So how has Sydney gone with its first pick over the last 10 years? Let's look at our first pick and any other top-16 picks we've had. They're all picks granted us by our ladder position unless otherwise specified.

1998:
No 3, obtained by trading Paul Licuria to Collingwood: Nic Fosdike, 164+ games, now 28yoa
No 4, obtained by trading Brett O'Farrell to Hawthorn (!): Ryan Fitzgerald, 10 games and traded to Adelaide for pick 28 in 2001
No 8: Jude Bolton: 211+ games, now 28yoa

1999:
No 11 (also along with pick no 41): Jason Ball, 90 games

2000:
No 8 (also along with pick no 39): Paul Williams, 117 games

2001:
No 13 (also along with picks no 17 and 45, the first of which we'd acquired as part of the trade of Greg Stafford): Big Bad Barry Hall, 151+ games, now 31yoa

2002:
No 5: Jarrad McVeigh, 105+ games, now 23yoa

2003:
No 16: Josh Willoughby, 0 games

2004:
No 15: Darren Jolly, 96+ games, now 26yoa

2005:
No 19: Ted Richards, 70+ games, now 25yoa

2006:
No 15: Daniel O'Keefe, 0+ games, now 19yoa

2007:
No 11: Patrick Veszpremi, 6+ games, now 19yoa.

Even copping on the chin the Willoughby failure, that record shows that Sydney have done outstandingly well with their use of their first pick for the last decade. You'd struggle to find that many games (of such good quality) played by first-round picks for clubs who have had many more picks up the top of the tree than us, leave alone the fact that 8 of them are still on our list.

'We have to use our first draft pick' is just a false argument. We do use it. The question is: what should we use it on? Comparing the above list (a big splurge on youth in 1998, then a solid body of trading, with a more recent tendency towards using the pick in the ND) with one of a club who's exclusively used their first pick to draft 18yos, would well and truly favour the approach the Swans have adopted.

[Legs Akimbo]

You'd struggle to find that many games (of such good quality) played by first-round picks for clubs who have had many more picks up the top of the tree than us, leave alone the fact that 8 of them are still on our list.

Where is the data to support that?

[SimonH]

Where is the data to support that?

Well, it's all on the public record. Look it up for yourself. Just to get you started with a club that's become the recent poster child for high draft picks: Carlton.

Murray Vance with pick 6 in 1998 (5 games), trading for Stephen O'Reilly who played 12 games for them with their first pick (16) in 1999, picking Luke Livingston with pick 4 in 2000 (46 games across 6 list-clogging seasons), using their top pick in 2001 on trading for Corey McKernan (played an ace year in 2002, but only a total of 41 games for them at a time where they desperately needed long-termers), using their top pick in 2002 (which even after the salary-cap punishment, was still #16) on trading for Barnaby French (51 games).

Their top picks from Andrew Walker in 2003 onwards will need to have brilliant and long careers to give them any chance of making up the kind of gap we've got on 'em, in terms of net performance of 1998-2007 first rounders. And the numbers of their first picks are on average better than ours.

I'm sure I'm not the only person with access to Wikipedia and other sites that contain the data on this stuff.

[Nico]

Gee there is some "deep" stuff going on in this thread. I'm just happy that we bottomed out at the top of the bottom half of the top 8. Gives us a great launching pad for 2009.