HPN

There’s a subcategory of players in the league that appeal to the obsessive fan – the type that watches Gold Coast games in early May. Amongst those types, Aaron Hall’s name has been long floated as underrated, and due for a breakout year (without ever actually delivering). Now Hall gets

Here’s as good a chance as any to enjoy the Sam Lloyd career highlight to date, an after-the-siren match winner from a 45° angle in 2016. Drafted as a mature age player in 2013 and hitting his peak so far in 2016, Lloyd was on a hiding to nothing staying at

It’s often hard to work out whether a young player who struggles early on in his career is developing slowly or is just a draft bust. Will Setterfield presents a case as hard as they come in this respect. In his two AFL games to date, played in 2017, he

It’s always a happy time during the trade period where there is a crossover between the preferred homes of two players, and the implied values of those two players aren’t worlds apart. Melbourne had a need for a back-up ruckmen after the delisting of three so far this offseason, while

Dean Kent has seemingly been left behind by the Demons as they’ve risen up the ladder, pushed out by other players with similar roles. His best year was in 2016, when over 20 games he rated as the 9th most valuable player at the Demons in PAV terms. That was also

Dan Hannebery used to be a really good player. Fairly recently, too. In 2016, his third All-Australian year, he rated via Player Approximate Value (PAV) as a top 25 player in the league. At his best, he’s a hard-running midfielder who gets in good outside positions by burning his opponent,

Some trades just don’t make sense at face value. So let’s treat this one as an investigation into why Port would make this deal. The Freo side is obvious, it should be evident here: In order to upgrade their second first round pick five places (they also have pick 10),

Tom Hickey, once a promising young ruck at the Suns, has been traded from being one of several viable ruck options at St Kilda to probably getting a regular game at West Coast next year. Hickey was probably shaping as second, third, or fourth choice for St Kilda into the future, given

We’ve decided to write these up together as one combined trade, but technically there were two different, almost simultaneous moves here. Each party here seemingly had something someone else wanted. If you want to yell at us that the above wasn’t the official deal… fine, here is each trade in

Most of the pure pick swaps between clubs occur late in the trade period with an eye to draft positioning. Clubs have considerations such as the quantity vs quality of usable selections, matching bids for tied academy and father sun players, and how many draft picks they actually want to