Blue Steel wrote:
Demetriou knows it exists, don't be fooled by the straight bat he plays in public.
The bottom line is Priority picks do what they are designed to do: give hope and keep supporters of lower placed clubs interested in the game, hence renewing their membership and fronting up at games. If you took that away then you will see some clubs face massive issues with membership and crowds. This will then be a bigger problem for the AFL in general so priority picks are a low cost solution. Yes the debate rages about whether it's fair etc, but the whole competition, from salary caps (inflated for Syd/Bris) to the draw is compromised. Why should we be suprised at all by this? If we were running the AFL this is what we'd do...(after ensuring we gave the Blues free reign on a couple of drafts!!)
To be honest that's a bit of a cop out. The fact that the AFL wants an equalisation measure that ensures clubs don't languish at the bottom for 10 years at a time, is no reason to keep in place a system that indisputably damages the integrity of the competition by giving clubs concrete incentives to not try to win games of football. The AFL should be thinking of a better mechanism and the media should stop being lazy and instead of just calling for the picks to be scapped (because the AFL's right, there should be one) should be proposing some options.
I can think of two better options and I'm not even trying hard.
Currently the only way to improve a poor list is to get more draft picks. The only way to get a net increase in draft picks without a corresponding dilution in the qulity of an already weak list, is to tank. I'm suprised the AFLPA isn't all over this arguing that limited free agency is the perfect solution as it would give players employment choice, and restore integrity to the competition by giving weak sides a option for quickly improving their list without simultaneously weakening their hand at the draft table.
The weakness of priority picks is that - Judd, Selwood and Rich aside - draft assistance leads to absolutely no short term improvement in a side, only more incentive to perform poorly in the following year as well, followed, eventually, and only if one drafts astutely, to a huge rush of improvement in 3-5 years time as quality draftees mature.
Contrast that with what happened when we got Stevens for all intents and purposes as a free agent at the end of 2003. The inclusion of a quality mature age player made an immediate, demonstrable improvement to our performance the following year.
Now sure, our improvement wasn't sustainable. But I think we're a bit of an outlier. Most teams who finish bottom 4 now don't have a list anything like as poor as we did at that time because:
a) it took us years and years of short-sighted trading of draft picks for hacks to build our 2002 spoon side;
b) our draft penalties constrained our ability to rebuild the list in a sustainable fashion.
IMO today's bottom 4 sides generally only have a relatively weak - but not fundamentally unbalanced -list, plus an unfortunate run of injuries. Often the only thing that makes them distinctively poor sides is that they are actively trying to underperform due to the incentives provided to do so.
IMO for most of them, if they could use their excess salary cap space to add one or more quality mature age free agents to their list
without weakening their draft position, it would achieve exactly the sort of equalisation outcome Demetrio and the Commission seem to be dedicated to, only quicker, and without making the competition a joke by giving clubs incentives to lose.
If you asked most footy fans where they would rather a free draft pick went - to a team actively trying to lose games (however you want to dress that up), or to a team who lost a free agent as formal compensation (however inadequate), I think most footy fans would prefer the latter.
That's now how I'd do it of course!! I'd get rid of draft picks altogether. They're an anacronism that artificially links access to draftees to onfield peformance, and shackles the whole compeition to primitive and unworkable bartering sytem.
Under the current draft system, there’s really only one to rebuilt a list - bottom out, collect your future super stars, spend the next few years adding depth, cross your fingers and hope you don't end up like the Bulldogs - short one piece of the puzzle with no way to access it.
But it gets worse. Every year clubs have the ritual “best available” or “fills a need” debate. If you want to add a superstar who
actually fills a specific need, you need to bottom out, and you need some dumb luck. Twice. You need a class player who fills your need available in that draft (some years the KPPs all suck), and you need a low enough pick to secure that player even if they are there. If we had genuinely wanted Hurley last year (for example), pick 6 still wasn’t low enough to get him.
Why should this be the case? Why do we have a system where a mid-table battling club is going out and doing their best to win every week, with a coach who is extracting the most out of them (often more than the fans or media thought was possible), but desperately needs a class KPP to take the next step, can’t access that player without choosing to play worse?
Why is a local talent forced to move 1400kms away to play for a club he has no affinity with because his local AFL clubs, who may be desperate to draft him … would move heaven and earth to draft him, can’t get within 10 draft picks of him because clubs are now conditioned to retain picks at all cost, so no-one will trade them a top 5 pick?
Why do clubs drop matches to improve their draft position, refuse trades for perfectly accomplished AFL players to retain those picks, only to use those picks to draft a player than probably half the teams in the comp wouldn’t have drafted at that point anyway. If we had pick 9 last year, instead of pick 6, we would have drafted Robinson. That's on the record. In the end, Robinson was drafted at pick 40 … but only because we drafted him. The other 15 clubs had already passed him over him 2-3 times, and for all we know, may not have drafted him at all.
When you look at the draft in its entirety, isn’t it … well … a completely absurd way of distributing young footballers? At the risk of sounding like the Productivity Commission, wouldn’t a more market-based approach to player acquisition allocate draftees more efficiently to the benefit of all clubs whilst improving the integrity of the competition?
Imagine an AFL where we don’t force clubs to go backwards to go forwards. A world where the link between a club’s on-field performance, and its capacity to rebuilt its list, aren’t directly linked. A world of choice, where clubs are empowered to decide when to pay a fair price to add a superstar draftee to their list (and which one), and when they would be content to add a vanilla player who would simply improve the depth of their back 6. Or perhaps even no player at all.
For those who haven’t already figured out where I’m going with this. If I was the AFL, I'd retain the salary cap, but replace draft “picks” with some sort of draft “currency”, allocate a fixed amount of this currency to clubs every year (perhaps slightly weighted for ladder position, but lets not go off on a tangent about that ), and then auction every draftee. Before you say it, remember a list needs all types, and the salary cap means there is a limit to how many superstars you can afford, and how good your back 6 can realistically be (refer Supercoach for proof).
Think about it. If your club really really needed a ruckman, and Matthew Krezuer was being auctioned, and you thought Special K would solve your ruck problems for the next decade, wouldn’t you pay a fair price for him? Wouldn’t you pay almost any price for him? Even if that price constrained what other draftees you could “buy” that year, or perhaps even the following year? Even if it meant other clubs got other players that your list doesn't need at a bargin price?
Certainly you’d pay far more than a club with a strong ruck division (whose priority might instead be a speedy flanker or a CHB).
Perhaps even more than the worst club in the comp, who could use a Matthew Kreuzer, but could equally use a Trent Cotchin or a Cyril Rioli and think either will work out cheaper in this draft (or perhaps both if they bid well) and thus be a more efficient use of draft capital. That is to say, as the club with the most holes in their list, the worst club actually have the most flexibility in how to improve it, and the most scope for picking up steals as a result. Particularly if overlooking the best player in this year auction, doesn't preclude them from buying the best next year.
Unlike our current system, in a world where you could bid for any draftee, in any season, or perhaps bank your currency for a year and buy better draftees in a future draft (without having to spend several seasons trying to lose for that privilage), there would be a multitude of roads back to a balanced list.
Now obviously there would be some implentational issues with this. Some clubs have very strong lists, and others don't, so you couldn't start everyone from the same blocks. But realistically, they're nothing that couldn't be solved if the AFL just took a fraction of the money it is devoting to fighting a losing PR battle over tanking, and gave it to some smart investment banker chaps and got them to model it all up for them.
Anyway, that's my 2 cents.
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