2022 AFL Trade Period – Day 4 featuring only Josh Corbett

HPN will attack this AFL Trade Period in one post a day. Check back here as the day progresses to get our take on the day’s “action”.

Only one trade today as several start to creep towards completion. Beyond the usually climactic final day, there may be a subtle cascading effect through the weekend and next week.

Most clubs and agents have been talking about the broad construction of these trades for weeks or months, so it’s really the process of nailing down the specifics and making sure the sequencing is right. Expect there to be increasing chatter about the top five to seven picks, where there appears to be the first floor in talent.

Josh Corbett slots into Freo’s forward depth

Having shed a few players, Fremantle now bring in cheap depth as replacement in one of those areas. Josh Corbett has sat pretty deep in the Suns’ forward line pecking order. Clearly behind current first choice forwards Mabior Chol and Levi Casboult, presumably also behind the returning Ben King next year, he’s been a fringe option in the mix with Sam Day, “Frosty” Miller medallist Chris Burgess and Jack Lukosius (who is probably of more use up ground) but mostly toiling in the VFL. Part of the issue is he’s something of a third tall forward in a side that don’t always play a true one, and not quite big enough to hold down primary target duties.

At Fremantle, absent Logue and possibly Lobb, he’ll get a chance to crack into a side that has recently fielded some form of third tall option. Corbett’s fortunes should be heavily dependent on Fremantle deciding how they want their forward system to look.

Fremantle’s forward setup struggled this year and they have problems to solve going into next year. Corbett now becomes a piece of Fremantle’s talls puzzle. Some of the questions they need to solve include:

  • Do they want to persist with three talls?
  • Do they want Fyfe as a permanent forward fixture?
  • Who among Corbett, Taberner, Fyfe, Treacy and Amiss actually gets the key spots up forward?
  • How do they fit both Sean Darcy and probably Luke Jackson in (and Rory Lobb if he stays) around their ruck duties?

Not much can be said for sure about the Dockers forward structure next year except that it will probably look different to 2022.

The trade is a pretty token one. Gold Coast probably have a use for the future fourth rounder in bid matching next year and the pick on its own can produce a bit of value, but swaps this late are speculative on both sides.

Verdict: trade notionally favours Gold Coast

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. Readers can explore these values with tools such as the HPN Trade Calculator to evaluate potential trades.

Elsewhere, read much more about the method and theory behind PAVExpressing the value of players and picks in terms of expected future PAV provides a common currency for comparing them in trades and other movements. Players are projected using PAPLEY, a method to derive expected future PAVs.

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