it doesn't sound like Lewis wanted to leave
Mitchell appears to be a move for a future position as a coach. Get out of the system you've known for 15 odd years and broaden the knowledge.
Lewis has been pretty magnanimous about the whole thing, but you get the feeling he left on principle for being asked to potentially look elsewhere.
Yes, I think Lewis wanted to stay, but I think he wanted to stay with a contract extension that we were not willing to offer him in advance. He may well have been given another one year contract at the end of this year, but it seems we were not willing to do so. He probably asked his manager to see what else was out there after that, and Melbourne were offering 3 years which was an offer too good to refuse given we were not offering more than his existing 1 with any certainty. I think Hawthorn wanted him to stay after Mitchell was going, so I don't think he was pushed, and I think we were generous to allow him to go and break his contract. He probably wanted to stay a one club player, but not at the expense of potentially two years of income, which is fair enough.
Losing both has hurt the hawks. Undermined your midfield setup and essentially robbed you of your main weapon. Clean clearances and effective kicking from stoppages.
We've been getting increasingly bad in generating clearances with Lewis and Mitchell in the team, where we've dropped from first, to 5th to 10th in the previous 3 years. This is partly because we've also gotten worse and worse in contested possession, 6th in 2014, 13th in 2015, last in 2016. We'd done well in previous years despite not being top ranking in this area, but clearly this started to fall apart last year. Teams were finding ways to move the ball on after being tackled which made it more important to win the contested possession or get killed on clearances. Of course removing our two most consistent ball winners, and #1 and #2 in our B&F hasn't helped, but neither were they the solution to this issue, rather they appear to have been part of the problem.
Not so bad when you still hold your 1st and 2nd rd picks and a slide down the ladder can fast track a rebuild.
We've turned those picks into players we can use right now, and hopefully for the next 7+ years. Mitchell is a very able replacement for Lewis, Sam Mitchell is effectively irreplaceable, but hopefully once he has some more footy behind him JOM will be a much better immediate replacement than even a good first round pick would have been in the short term, and potentially in the long term.
In any case, this is no longer on topic for the thread now.
As for the Tiges and Prestia. I would say no. Pick 6 likely nets them Brodie, who is the closest you get to Prestia from the draft. Prestia came ready made and the Tigers have a solid enough list now.
They really only lack another quality tall defender & forward before they can push for a flag.
I would say pick 6 is probably disappointing given his output so far, but like Hawks with JOM, Tigers fans will be hoping they haven't seen his best yet - although he definitely has less excuses than JOM does so far.