The interesting thing about GWS trading Jack Steele for St Kilda’s 2017 pick is that both clubs will likely extract more value from their newly acquired asset than the original owner would have.
For Steele this is obviously because the Canberran has struggled to crack a deep midfield at GWS. He has played 17 games in his 2 years at the club, spending a lot of time in the NEAFL. As an overage draftee, and being mostly injury free, he might well have played 40 senior games by now for another club.
Due to his short time in the system, we don’t have 3 years of data for Steele so we’re still rating him at a modest discount (84%) on his market value draft pick. He was drafted at pick 24, but the bid from North Melbourne came at pick 15 which is the value we’re assigning.
For GWS, the improved value of pick ~28 compared to St Kilda’s possible use of it is due to Academy bidding discounts. GWS have several Academy prospects again next year (Spargo, Brander and Powell chief amongst them) which means that – possible AFL rule changes aside – GWS will be using this pick to match bids and thus using it at a discount. Under the AFL’s bidding points system, GWS would be able to use pick 28 to match a bid of pick 22.
We rate this trade as fairly even. As Canberrans, HPN have paid close attention to Steele, rate him pretty highly, and think he’s an absolute monty to overperform the 83 games projected for him based on the typical output of his draft pick. But GWS weren’t going to extract as much value from Steele as the Saints would, and should get plenty of value out of the pick they’ve received.
Verdict: This is the definition of win-win.