Other pundits have been mentioning that the 2017 draft crop is slightly comprimised by the fact that the decent KP players are academy tied. If that's true, then that is slightly better.
Hold that thought.
I liked this post on the other thread, about that pick trade that has a few people turning cheese melts into burning-down-the-house fires...
In Monopoly, if you'd sold Park Lane and bought Oxford Street and Regent Street you'd probably have done well. Let's hope those 2nd rounders don't turn out to be Whitechapel and Old Kent Road.
...on second thoughts, it's almost another "points value" post, but as a different analogy it has some things going for it.
we seem to be betting that we ultimately trade out not Park Lane but Bond St... for two green properties. the second half is that we're backing ourselves in to pick two green or even yellow properties instead of whitechapel and old kent. but here it breaks down, because the kind of properties you want are just measured by price (=points) and not even fully measured by quality. location and mix of properties both matter for investment purposes. Oh and properties can be developed, unlike a passive "point" value.
we have a minimum of 26 chances to influence the outcome of the first half of the bet - what we give away. 3 picks in 30, 23 minor round games. If we get to finals it gets better for us with each one, not just because of what we end up giving away but also because a decent performance maximizes the value of a few players who will likely get traded out at that point to get an earlier R1 pick in 2017. If we just miss finals its break even, depending on what has happened to the "stock value" of specific players we anticipate may be traded end 2017. If we do really poorly, its a double hit to us.
not really a bet, is it. a fair bloody whack of it is up to us. the "bet" analogy a lot of people use breaks down.
so we have 2 new picks to get very right, along with pick 9 of course.
if we're going "ready to play" with kids at these high stakes, they're probably still going to rotate in and out of the side. who drops out of the picture, who becomes "rotatable depth"? I reckon Neade will find 2017 career defining one way or another. 2017 we've got Palmer, Young, White, Toumpas, Amon, Sam Gray and probably Monfries assuming 1YR happens all out of contract, most of our talls: Trengove, Hombsch, Clurey, Frampton, Westhoff, Howard, plus Pittard who is mentioned as a possible go-home case. So none of the alleged great talls we could sign in 2017 are going to help particularly for 2018. We look like we got a good one in Austin, it's unusual for a KPP to contribute like that in year 1 let alone one who isn't an early pick. It's 2018 when we can reasonably expect to draw conclusions on Frampton and Howard - keepers or not -
a year after they first come out of contract.
and I think all this (plus the astrological alignment with a few folks' job security) is why the seemingly desperate grab for mids and so help me dear Kraft God-of-all-melts-here-if-it-happens maybe even a "crafty half forward flanker with some tricks" this year for a quick bounce up the table.
because we won't be drafting talls in 2017, we'll be re-signing some and trading for some, and betting on our partly developed ones, while other clubs in a different place with their list re-stock KPP at the long-term draft end of the investment portfolio, after the Academy aligned are out of the pool.
finish your cheese melts now, pls. tell me if you think this is more plausible train of thought than my usual tl;dr
