Two seasons after being pick seven in the 2016 draft, Jack Scrimshaw has been traded for basically nothing to Hawthorn.
As we said regarding Setterfield, it’s hard to tell early whether a draftee who completely fails to break into a side is a slow starter or just a regular draft bust. We’ve imputed a value for him along the lines of our treatment of first year players.
Originally a utility, but with the most potential as a taller defender right now, Scrimshaw’s four games in 2017 were less poorly rated than Setterfield, but he’s been traded for a lot less. Instead, Scrimshaw is being rated as much closer to the alternative valuation historically due a player with four games in two years, which is not much more than zero future PAV.
There’s a couple of reasons for this. Scrimshaw has a little more exposure at the top level, and hasn’t set the world alight. His 11 games in the NEAFL this year displayed flashes of potential, but by the same token he didn’t star at the lower levels like Setterfield did in his limited time in 2017. He was only named in the best six players three times in a lot of very depleted Suns NEAFL sides this year.
Hawthorn’s third round pick could be as high as 37 if they crash down the ladder, or 46 if they just miss finals, while the Suns future fourth rounder could slip backwards from 56 if they rise up the ladder. On the most likely outcomes, the difference between the two picks is 4.1 PAVs, which inherently values Scrimshaw at around that. That’s less than pick 90 according than our Draft Pick Value Chart.
However, even if the extreme outcomes were to happen, the trade still looks quite unbalanced, with 20.2 the maximum PAV difference between a third and fourth round pick. If Hawthorn get practically anything out of Scrimshaw, much less the sort of promise that Scrimshaw presumably showed to be selected at pick 7, they’ve made out like bandits here.
Verdict: Unfair trade. Extremely Hawthorn-weighted trade.
Note: This post is part of a series of posts using a valuation method called Player Approximate Value (PAV) to evaluate trades for fairness and balance. Elsewhere, you can read much more about the method and theory behind PAV and also about PAPLEY, the projection method used to derive expected future PAVs. This method expresses both picks and players in terms of expected future value allowing them to be compared on this common basis.