I agree North were backing themselves to finish a bit higher and get the draft pick outside the top 10 by draft night. But they would have been saying worst case scenario we finish 15th-17th and the pick is inside the top 10. As we can see by Richmond's picks ending up at 7 and 8, you would need to finish bottom for this trade to be absolutely diabolical in terms of the numbers attached to the picks.
The Hopper situation I also agree. Richmond finished a little below the bottom of what they would see as the foreseeable range. As we also saw when we traded away our 2017 natural rd 2 pick in the 2016 trade period, teams can also exceed reasonable expectations and get on the right side of the value in a trade that way. So there is nothing wrong with North backing themselves to get that pick to outside the top 10.
My guess is North were thinking this pick is nowhere near as valuable as it seems to the untrained eye when they traded it away. In fact that is obvious because they were looking to trade it out for any half decent 2024 pick they could get. And they were right. You don't sort of automatically think Grlj or Robey or Sharp etc are worth more than say Whitlock/Sims/Shanahan and 60% of Dovaston/Lindsay/Nairn or whoever. Some clubs would take the first side of the equation, some would take the second, just according to their needs and preferences. If you were talking Harley Reid v say Will Green and Logan Morris from the 2023 draft, yep, very different equation. But this situation is not like that.
We were discussing this all year like it was pick 3. The last 10 x pick 3's from the open draft were(all fell at either pick 3, 4 or 5):
Oliver, McLuggage, Dow, Rankine, Jackson, McDonald, Andrew, Wardlaw, Walter, Jagga Smith.
Looked at against the median value player from that cohort, the trade looks a mess, because the medians there might be guys like McLuggage or Mac Andrew, Wardlaw or Walter, depending on how all the younger ones develop in their careers. If you look at the 5 fully developed players drafted 2015-2019, the median would probably be Jackson or McLuggage.
But none of those 3rd picks from the open draft fell to lower than 5 in the total pool and only one got past 4.
In 2025 the pick fell to 8 and was only the 4th pick in the open pool, but in a draft where everyone seems to agree it is a lot weaker overall. If we look at the corresponding 8th player picked in the last 10 drafts, pretty much all of which were considered stronger than this one, that list looks like this:
Ah Chee, Logue, Coffield, Taryn Thomas, Serong, Cox, Amiss, Jhye Clark, Curtin, Travaglia.
Not sure who the median player would be from that list but let's say Ah Chee or Travaglia might be two candidates, and instead of 70% being guns about 30% are.
So you have to concede the pick is a lot less in value than what you would normally expect from owning a 16th placed team's first pick. And North would have known this at the time of the trade.
