HPN will be covering this AFL Trade Period with daily posts, as a roundup or with progressive updates through the day. Watch for updates on social media.
One of the things HPN notices each year covering trade period is that the kinds of trades which reveal club thinking about the upcoming draft.
The work done by HPN assesses pick values in the long run using years of historical performance. Specific years can make picks look more or less valuable due to the particular players coming from each year. This is where the scouting and talent development part of football clubs apply their expertise, turning the abstract understanding of long term pick values into specific assessments based on the talent they can buy.
You can often see whether clubs think a draft pool is deep or shallow based on under and overvaluations compared to a “fair” valuation of picks. In a strong draft, picks go for a premium. In a weaker draft, future picks and players might go for more.
The same goes for the the depth of the draft – whether it is even or clearly tiered, and how they think it compares to next year’s crop.
The inaction during the first week of the 2024 trade period and what we’ve heard reported about club intentions this year is a good case in point.
General perception last year indicated that the top 8 was strong and then the crop thinned out a lot. This placed a premium on single digit picks but otherwise led to teams trying to get into the 2024 draft and fill their lists in other ways.
Now that it’s here, the 2024 draft looks deeper and higher quality to many clubs than either last year or next year. Suggestions are that there’s a very high quality top 18 or 25 or so, and so most clubs want to get into the draft and move up within that range. That’s making swaps for higher profile players harder, and leading to the general inactivity we saw around the mooted big deals this year.
The quick flurry of pick swaps on Friday by four clubs with very different goals can give us a window into what is going on.
Richmond’s pick swap with Brisbane
Brisbane are a club who are not looking to take advantage of the quality top end of the open draft pool. That’s because they have first rights on two players already in father-son Levi Ashcroft and academy player Sam Marshall. Their pick 20 was always a trade target – a very valuable one in a draft where approximately fourteen clubs are looking for exactly that kind of pick.
Winner of the first Queensland first round pick auction were the Tigers who came armed with basically, in bid matching terms, a 2-for-1 deal.
The Tigers give up a lot of value on paper but clearly will not care. With mooted player movements yet to come, they stand to hold several picks higher than what they gave up here, and with the shape of the pick market this year, the Richmond picks in the 30 and 40 range would be quite deprecated in value. They would have been struggling to find a buyer for these picks without the Lions’ bid matching needs, and it shows.
Most importantly, pick 20 is a valuable prize that fits within the widely believed “super draft” zone, the Tigers standing to reap more than anyone else from the open talent pool.
The Lions nearly double their bid matching points under the current outgoing DVI points system, their only challenge likely to be holding enough list spots to let them use all the picks. This is one of the more over-the-odds pick splitting swaps we’ve seen by a club seeking bid matching points across the years, and reflects that the Tigers didn’t have too many other takers.
It likely also came with an understanding that Richmond may have extra information that causes them to re-evaluate how they’ve rated players such as Ashcroft and Marshall at the top end of the draft. Richmond, armed with this extra information, may be less likely to bid, hypothetically, on these two players (and other players in the next year or two). This could, hypothetically, further enhancing Brisbane’s true gains. There’s even a chance that Brisbane may, hypothetically, be somewhat more pessimistic about their evaluations of Richmond tied talent given a more free exchange of information and a mutual understanding.
All of that is hypothetical and theoretical of course.
Verdict: Strongly Lions weighted trade on paper as the seller in a buyer’s market.
Brisbane’s pick swap with Carlton
The second pick trade on Friday for Brisbane was fully separate to the first, and represents a much more conventional and more balanced switch between draft years between the two teams.
The swap lets Brisbane move more value into this year to help pay for Ashcroft and Marshall and lets Carlton grab a pick for next year in a usable range.
Carlton have two Camporeale twins to select this year and likely are carefully arranging their draft hands to pay for them while still having the best possible look at the pointy end of a strong open draft.
This trade would be a reasonable swap even without bid matching considerations, as it basically sees Brisbane and Carlton swapping the years of their respective mid-to-late second round picks. Clubs would do that based on their own list and talent pool assessments depending on circumstances.
Verdict: Fair swap. Assuming Brisbane linger around the top of the ladder next year, the swap is nearly the same pick next year for the one they get this year.
Carlton’s pick swap with Hawthorn
After grabbing that Lions future second, Carlton now send off their own first two future picks. One would assume Hawthorn preferred Carlton’s future second to Brisbane’s given the events of the season just gone. With AFL restrictions on trading future first round picks, the Blues were likely only able to do this trade after grabbing the “downgrade” replacement from the Lions.
It’s worth noting that there were several bidders for that Hawthorn pick, with the Hawks seemingly betting against Carlton in 2025 with this trade.
For Hawthorn this means they vacate this year’s first round, something most clubs have been reluctant to do. They may have zagged while everyone else zigs this year, seeing the opportunity to improve their overall draft access in the medium term.
It also likely complicates the acquisition of Tom Barrass and it may have downwind consequences for what the Eagles want to do. Those deals will still presumably get done. The clubs just have to go back to the negotiating table with what assets they still hold.
On paper the trade favours Hawthorn – unsurprisingly so given they’re the rare willing seller without bid-matching interests in a highly coveted draft year. The Hawks are essentially swapping a later first rounder for probably something similar, plus a second rounder thrown in. The downside case of Carlton winning the flag in 2025 doesn’t degrade the pick values too much, and any Blues slide would amp up the gains.
Mindful of the possible Tom Barass trade to come, this swap looks like a Hawthorn play for a greater volume of draft picks over the longer term, rather than accepting a single pick with maybe higher prospects sooner.
For Carlton, the apparent lopsidedness of this trade is mitigated by the potential to take have a better look at the top of a strong draft before matching for the Camporeales. They currently hold 12 and 14, then some late picks. Ben and Lucas have slipped well beyond first round contention for most draft watchers this year, meaning the cost won’t be excessively high to the Blues. However, the lack of picks past 14 (their next is 69) and reports about them looking to use 12 and 14 to trade up, both suggest they are probably not finished trading this year.
Verdict: Big Hawthorn win in the abstract, mitigated only by many clubs’ perceptions of the relative strength of the 2024 and 2025 first round draft cohorts.
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 PAV. Expressing 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.