Can only teams with top draft picks (and father-sons) be successful?

[Twinkletoes]

It'd be nice to have recruits skate through injury free while undergoing their development phase. Black and Harps were stuffed due to injury. Thankfully Taz came out the other side.

 

[Colbys Boots]

The game changed in the mid 00's to a fully midfield based game, our sides were hanging onto older gun mids from the end of our 90's side (Harvey, Simpson, Grant), we managed to draft Wells (#2, 2002), Swallow (#45, 2005), Cunnington (#5, 2009) from the end of our halcyon days, which for a 15 year period, isn't nearly enough. With all due respect to those 3, they haven't matched the careers of the guys we had 10 years before them either.

We haven't really been able to turn 25 odd early second round picks in that time into gun midfielders either.

Given the above list only contains 3 I'd consider gun midfielders since the early 00's, the wrecked career of JWS really hurts, as he was destined to enter the list of those 3 others imo. If he had of developed into an AA quality mid as he appeared to be moving towards, it may of even pushed us into a GF at one point, especially when you consider he would of been 28 & 29 years of age during our last 2 preliminary final loses, essentially smack bang in his prime.

LDU (#4, 2017) should be the start of a "non-north" rebuild hopefully, which invests at least 80% of our top picks in this rebuild on midfield prospects. He's the perfect player to build around. We need a list of 10 or so gun mids in the next 15 years if we want to have had success by 2030.

Hindsight is 20/20 and all that but it's worth noting that from 2004 - 2007, we spent all our early draft capital on Jonathan Hay, Nathan Thompson, Lachie Hansen and Robbie Tarrant. We had a perceived weakness in KPPs but we were heading in the opposite direction to the rest of the competition. We also overstocked on ruckmen, taking David Hale and Hamish McIntosh in the first round in 2001 and 2002, just around the time when rucks started to become less important than they'd been historically.

 

[toepoker]

In a development sense, we've been trying to do it with one arm tied behind our backs not having our own VFL team. I don't think it's been great, but any assessment of our development has to be viewed in this context. Fully expect big improvement in the next couple of years

 

[andana]

Carlton says no.