Discussion Paddy v Petracca

st_trav_ofWA

Norm Smith Medallist
Aug 17, 2015
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Watts was thrown to the wolves and was the wrong pick for Melbourne.

Nic Nat would have still been a gun imo but Watts would have been far better going to West Coast.
nic nat would have left the dees quicker than Scully did he would have been keeping an eye on heading home from day one .. The WCE put years of work into him from the moment he made the Swan Districts team he had their attention
 
Polec came good at his third club but was a dud pick for the lions ....
and of course injury busts are going to be counted i mean the reason Paddy was such a bust was because of injury as well ... thats the whole point its a stab in the dark that hopefully maybe th kid that gets picked turns out somewhat ok ...

Polec only spent 3 years there. My Brisbane mate freaked out when they all left. He thought he was going to be very good. He played his best footy at Port Adelaide but they got hold of Byrne-Jones and others and who're an upgrade so were happy to trade him and Pittard. I still think Paddy was below average before concussions. His brother showed more in his first season that Paddy ever did.

You can't control injury and there are hard luck stories but it wasn't in isolation with Trout, he really ****ed up nearly every draft pick he ever had. His best pick was Seb Ross which was in his first season as a recruiter and probably a hand over from the previous crew.


I had a look at what we have left from drafts since. Not a lot until 2016.
2011 Ross Webster
2012 no players left
2013 Billings Dunstan
2014 Mc Kenzie Lonie
2015 Gresham
2016 Long Battle Phillips
2017 Clark Coffield Paton
2018 King Bytel Parker Hind
2019 Byrnes Connelly

To me the best gets are Gresham, Coffield, Clark, Billings, Paton, Battle and King. A few more recent ones look promising but still lack the real top end players. We also have traded out of this years draft apart from pick 1. We really don't want to sit out of too many more so probably need to chase FAs if we are going to bring in talent from other clubs.
 

st_trav_ofWA

Norm Smith Medallist
Aug 17, 2015
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anything pre 2000 can't compare to 2014. hell even 2004 isn't compareable to 2014. you are probably wondering why?

because access to talent review and spotting was just so damn inferior. for example on the various draft podcasts they have had list managers or or those who worked in the industry explain what it was like to identify players back in the day.

for example even Xavier Clark was picked off the back of a VHS video that was like and i quote "you were watching FIFA where you had the cheat codes".

fast forward to 2014 and you have games literally coded for you by champion data. you have people performing modelling now. you have teams of recruiters. you have every games footage.

now you have an emphasis on U16 and U17 footy, given future trading. so that talent identification has gone back further.

so that scrubs off the list fraser (200+ games), waterhouse (190+ games), Hooper + Hutton (90s jeebus that far back).

now on Boyd and Patton. Boyd got GWS picks Pick 6 and Griffen. Patton still got them 89 games and 130 goals and then a 4th round pick.

in comparison Paddy got us 35 games and 34 goals and no trade renumeration.

in fact he'd be very close to the least number of games played for a pick 1.
im not disputing that but you asked in the professional era so i went back to 1990....
you keep moving the goal posts to suit your argument now you are including trade renumeration ... we went from first round picks that we got that were pulling duds more often .. to first picks that were duds to now being pick that gave no trade renumeration...

as i said im not disputing Paddy would be the worst number 1 pick nor am i ranking him against other picks .. thats pointless we know he played a handful of average games and then got his carreer ended by concussions .. the point im making is that other clubs have an as bad strike rate as we did with our early picks .. yeah paddy is the worst of number 1 picks but that doesnt mean every number one pick taken by every other club has been perfect and only St Kilda makes that mistake ..
 
you reckon?

i actually thought Jack Watts started to play some good footy for melbourne before he was traded.

but anyways he still produced a 150 games and 143 goals. then got them pick 31.

far exceeds Paddy's output.
Nah wasn't comparing Watts to McCartin, just saying Watts never really did too much in comparison to the others on that list.

But regardless, Paddy's output is still a different discussion to if he was the right pick for us.

look i dont think anyone would argue Paddy was a bust of a number one pick he obviously was but ill say our strick rate of picking dud players is well on par with every other club .. i mean no one talks about Patrick Veszpremi being taken before Cyril Rioli .... no one talks about Cale Morton being taken before Dangerfield...
no one mentions Chris Yarren taken before Jack Ziebel or Aycee Cordy being picked over Luke Shuey
Trengrove over Dusty , Christian Howard,Jasper McMillan-Pittard, dan menzel, Luke tapscott, ben griffiths all taken befor Fyfe
Gorringe taken before Tom Lynch!!

EVERY club makes massive stuff ups in drafting our stuff ups are not and worse or any better than any other clubs stuff ups
Yep agree Paddy was a bust of a pick but we can only form that view in hindsight which is what I have been discussing with others here. People acting as if the pick was a bust from the start. Paddy was a top 3 pick and the best forward in the draft.

We aren't sitting here saying Max King was a bust of a pick but if he does another ACL or his career is eventually cut short by it (touch wood it isn't) then I would assume the same people would say the pick was a bust too (using the same logic).

Both King & McCartin came into the draft with injury concerns, funnily enough one could argue that King's was more serious in terms of football longevity. McCartin's head knocks are serious for football of course but mainly for different reasons. Only reason people say it was a bust pick is because of his output. Not like he wasn't highly rated before the draft. And for our needs at the time and the money needed for those kinds of players, drafting one of them instead was the right move. If you take the names and labels out of it you are left with a KPF and a inside midfielder both ranked in the top 5. Then you need to work out your needs. For us it was basically all over the ground. Then, I'd assume, you work out what it would cost to bring in those types of players from other clubs. Looking at the Boyd deal it's clear the thinking the club had behind the McCartin selection, not to mention his obvious talent.
 

st_trav_ofWA

Norm Smith Medallist
Aug 17, 2015
5,810
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Polec only spent 3 years there. My Brisbane mate freaked out when they all left. He thought he was going to be very good. He played his best footy at Port Adelaide but they got hold of Byrne-Jones and others and who're an upgrade so were happy to trade him and Pittard. I still think Paddy was below average before concussions. His brother showed more in his first season that Paddy ever did.

You can't control injury and there are hard luck stories but it wasn't in isolation with Trout, he really f’ed up nearly every draft pick he ever had. His best pick was Seb Ross which was in his first season as a recruiter and probably a hand over from the previous crew.


I had a look at what we have left from drafts since. Not a lot until 2016.
2011 Ross Webster
2012 no players left
2013 Billings Dunstan
2014 Mc Kenzie Lonie
2015 Gresham
2016 Long Battle Phillips
2017 Clark Coffield Paton
2018 King Bytel Parker Hind
2019 Byrnes Connelly

To me the best gets are Gresham, Coffield, Clark, Billings, Paton, Battle and King. A few more recent ones look promising but still lack the real top end players. We also have traded out of this years draft apart from pick 1. We really don't want to sit out of too many more so probably need to chase FAs if we are going to bring in talent from other clubs.
im not disagreeing with you but the question was early draft pick that didnt work out for their club and if you are Brisbane and you had that draft again they would not pick the guy who ran out on them at the first chance he got so from that prospect Brisbane did muff up the pick by picking a guy who was not going to stay
 
look i dont think anyone would argue Paddy was a bust of a number one pick he obviously was but ill say our strick rate of picking dud players is well on par with every other club .. i mean no one talks about Patrick Veszpremi being taken before Cyril Rioli .... no one talks about Cale Morton being taken before Dangerfield...
no one mentions Chris Yarren taken before Jack Ziebel or Aycee Cordy being picked over Luke Shuey
Trengrove over Dusty , Christian Howard,Jasper McMillan-Pittard, dan menzel, Luke tapscott, ben griffiths all taken befor Fyfe
Gorringe taken before Tom Lynch!!

EVERY club makes massive stuff ups in drafting our stuff ups are not and worse or any better than any other clubs stuff ups


Both Melbourne and Richmond copped it for years about their misses, Tigers used to go nuts about missing out on players while the Hawks drafted a golden generation in the same period and winning a few premierships while they continued to bobble along. Melbourne and Tigers missed finals for years because of bad drafting and were ridiculed for picking Jack Watts, Oakleigh-Nicholls and Tambling.

Even Scully and Trengove who were both good players but when they were forced to take on the pressure of the team they went backwards. Trengove was really unlucky with injury too. Melbourne missed finals for 12 years and it was all self inflicted in an era that makes it hard to fail. Richmond similar length of time. We are 9 years in and people were starting to laugh at us last year but we have shut people up by winning games again.
 
im not disagreeing with you but the question was early draft pick that didnt work out for their club and if you are Brisbane and you had that draft again they would not pick the guy who ran out on them at the first chance he got so from that prospect Brisbane did muff up the pick by picking a guy who was not going to stay

Brisbane had a whole lot of young guys leave and with those picks drafted what they have now. They actually wouldn't care about any apart from Yeo. They turned Longer into Mc Stay while we turned Mc Evoy and Dal Santo into Longer, Acres and Dunstan with Savage thrown in. We thought we'd nailed the s**t out of it. Two guns into 4 spuds. Pelican was a genius.
 

st_trav_ofWA

Norm Smith Medallist
Aug 17, 2015
5,810
15,541
AFL Club
St Kilda
Both Melbourne and Richmond copped it for years about their misses, Tigers used to go nuts about missing out on players while the Hawks drafted a golden generation in the same period and winning a few premierships while they continued to bobble along. Melbourne and Tigers missed finals for years because of bad drafting and were ridiculed for picking Jack Watts, Oakleigh-Nicholls and Tambling.

Even Scully and Trengove who were both good players but when they were forced to take on the pressure of the team they went backwards. Trengove was really unlucky with injury too. Melbourne missed finals for 12 years and it was all self inflicted in an era that makes it hard to fail. Richmond similar length of time. We are 9 years in and people were starting to laugh at us last year but we have shut people up by winning games again.
see here is the key point in the whole discussion ... winning teams get a free pass for failed draft picks
so its not the case that St Kilda stuff up draft picks more often its the case that when we are not winning we are stuffing up draft picks ...
so thats a perception of how we draft linked to our on field success .. as you say Hawthorn drafted as poorly as Richmond for a period but winning flags glossed over that , also trading in players helped counter that perception of poor drafting ...

St Kilda had the triple whammy ... Poor drafting , poor performance and no one of note wanted to come to us ...
 

st_trav_ofWA

Norm Smith Medallist
Aug 17, 2015
5,810
15,541
AFL Club
St Kilda
Brisbane had a whole lot of young guys leave and with those picks drafted what they have now. They actually wouldn't care about any apart from Yeo. They turned Longer into Mc Stay while we turned Mc Evoy and Dal Santo into Longer, Acres and Dunstan with Savage thrown in. We thought we'd nailed the sh*t out of it. Two guns into 4 spuds. Pelican was a genius.
agree 1000% Pelican was the worst thing to happen to this club ... had he been around in the 80/90's we wouldnt have a club the impact he had on us ...
 
Dec 4, 2000
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Essendon have a good list they are mentally broken from their cheating program. There is no way that their list should not be playing finals. They have a sh*t coach and have had bad injury luck but they find ways to lose it seems.

Results say that do not have a good list. They have names on paper that their media propaganda enablers keep telling us are superstars. They are so overrated by the media it is not funny.

I think it is a pitiful excuse to blame something that happened over 8 years ago. They have not been top four in 19 seasons, haven't won a fina since 2004.

how could that be described as a "good" list.
 
Dec 4, 2000
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you reckon?

i actually thought Jack Watts started to play some good footy for melbourne before he was traded.

but anyways he still produced a 150 games and 143 goals. then got them pick 31.

far exceeds Paddy's output.

I reckon Paddy showed more in his 33 game injury ruined career than Watts did in his low energy, squibbing, soft 150 games. Watts was a useless pile of absolute crap.
 
Results say that do not have a good list. They have names on paper that their media propaganda enablers keep telling us are superstars. They are so overrated by the media it is not funny.

I think it is a pitiful excuse to blame something that happened over 8 years ago. They have not been top four in 19 seasons, haven't won a fina since 2004.

how could that be described as a "good" list.


I don't relate lists to ladder position. The Dogs list looks like it is a lot closer to a premiership than us IMO. The Dons list is stacked and for some reason they don't put it on the park. Not having Daniher has hurt them but something psychologically is broken there. A list is just a whole bunch of individual talents, getting something out of them is another story. As much as I didn't rate Richo he milked a lot out of some very ordinary players. Collingwood and Brisbane jumped us because we were good enough to stay mid table with an ordinary list. Lost access to top end talent while others got it and moved past us.
 
I reckon Paddy showed more in his 33 game injury ruined career than Watts did in his low energy, squibbing, soft 150 games. Watts was a useless pile of absolute crap.


I met one of his friends who'd played juniors with him around the time he left for Port. It sounds like the poor kid really struggled mentally with the expectation and hate he got. The pressure he was under ruined all the enjoyment he had in playing the game. He's one you wonder if he'd landed at the right club he could have been a decent player.
 
How can you rate a list on anything but results especially for a team with no finals success for a decade and a half? The only thing that matters is results.

You sound like Plugger.
 
I reckon Paddy showed more in his 33 game injury ruined career than Watts did in his low energy, squibbing, soft 150 games. Watts was a useless pile of absolute crap.

tell us how you really feel hahahaha

i felt really bad for him when i heard paul roos speak about how he had to tell jack watts that just because he played a bad game, doesn't make him a bad person.
 
tell us how you really feel hahahaha

i felt really bad for him when i heard paul roos speak about how he had to tell jack watts that just because he played a bad game, doesn't make him a bad person.
My best mate played TAC Cup with him at Sandringham. Said he was a great guy and pretty respectful so I'm sure the harassment during his career got to him.
 
im not disputing that but you asked in the professional era so i went back to 1990....
you keep moving the goal posts to suit your argument now you are including trade renumeration ... we went from first round picks that we got that were pulling duds more often .. to first picks that were duds to now being pick that gave no trade renumeration...

as i said im not disputing Paddy would be the worst number 1 pick nor am i ranking him against other picks .. thats pointless we know he played a handful of average games and then got his carreer ended by concussions .. the point im making is that other clubs have an as bad strike rate as we did with our early picks .. yeah paddy is the worst of number 1 picks but that doesnt mean every number one pick taken by every other club has been perfect and only St Kilda makes that mistake ..

it factors into how i determine if a pick is a dud or not, so i'm not moving the goal posts. for example if i spend pick 3 on player, he spends two years on my list but then i trade him for two pick 3's that doesnt mean the initial pick was a bust. i've now increased the likelihood of finding a better player.

i'm not talking about what people consider to be the "professional era of AFL" i'm talking about recruitment. they're two different things. would you consider 1990 to be professional in terms of drafting? i wouldn't given they were selecting players they haven't even spoke with.

it's funny you're having a go at me about "moving the goal posts" when you yourself are doing that in the paragraph in the same post. i never once mentioned our bust rate on 1st rounders... you did.

i'm not saying we are the worst drafting football club or our track record of drafting in the first round is bad. never ever said that.

i'm talking purely about the paddy pick.
 
see here is the key point in the whole discussion ... winning teams get a free pass for failed draft picks
so its not the case that St Kilda stuff up draft picks more often its the case that when we are not winning we are stuffing up draft picks ...
so thats a perception of how we draft linked to our on field success .. as you say Hawthorn drafted as poorly as Richmond for a period but winning flags glossed over that , also trading in players helped counter that perception of poor drafting ...

St Kilda had the triple whammy ... Poor drafting , poor performance and no one of note wanted to come to us ...


Hawks got a free pass because they nailed some before blowing some. Buddy, Roughy, Lewis in one draft while Richmond got Lids, Tambling, Meyer (12),Pattison (16), Polo (20) in the same one. Hawks also nailed Hodge and Mitchell. We weren't criticised for drafting when we had Rooey, Dal etc because there was strong evidence of both good and bad.
 
i will say one thing about the current team. part of me wonders how long the club will give Libba, sitting in the main seat.

the reason i say this is if you look at the core of the side, the engine, its all been acquired from the outside, from other clubs. so it appears our real strength is identifying and trading in recycled talent from other clubs. not necessarily the draft.

if you then go one step further, we don't have a good record of drafting and developing genuine midfield talent.

now i'm not saying Libba is bad in his role and needs to go. I'm just saying as it stands now we haven't had a guy be drafted and turned into a match winning or elite midfielder.

Steele is our guy but he was traded in.

now the hope is Clark/Coffield/Bytel can move into there. Gresham as well.

but it's too early to tell/hasn't happened yet.

so i do wonder if we are sitting here in season 2022 and we still not have a genuine mid we have drafted, if they will persist with him or make a call on it.

that's not to say i don't think the drafting has been decent.
 
it factors into how i determine if a pick is a dud or not, so i'm not moving the goal posts. for example if i spend pick 3 on player, he spends two years on my list but then i trade him for two pick 3's that doesnt mean the initial pick was a bust. i've now increased the likelihood of finding a better player.

i'm not talking about what people consider to be the "professional era of AFL" i'm talking about recruitment. they're two different things. would you consider 1990 to be professional in terms of drafting? i wouldn't given they were selecting players they haven't even spoke with.

it's funny you're having a go at me about "moving the goal posts" when you yourself are doing that in the paragraph in the same post. i never once mentioned our bust rate on 1st rounders... you did.

i'm not saying we are the worst drafting football club or our track record of drafting in the first round is bad. never ever said that.

i'm talking purely about the paddy pick.


Yeah, Port are nailing drafting these days. Dougal Howard is a good example of a win even when you don't keep the player. They had paid pick 56 for him at the draft, traded him and pick 10 into 12 and 18. Howard was in and out of the side so turned a fringe player into a two pick downgrade and a second first round pick.
Picked Up Mitch Georgiades in the draft and is already in their best 22 and probably ends up a star. That's how you nail drafting. Turned Polec and Pittard into gold too.
 
Even if we had chosen Petracca, we would probably still be in the same position....one premiership
Of the last 20 #1 picks, currently only two of those players have played in premierships. Getting the #1 pick correct is not a panacea to ending Premiership droughts. There are so many factors involved in winning a Premiership and for some reason people want to obsess over this decision. The McCartin decision is part of history. We can't change it. We can only learn from it and I believe the club has learnt from that decision and other poor decisions in the past. Finally I have some level of confidence in our administration, our coaching/player development and the people involved in drafting/trading players to our club.
 
Dec 4, 2000
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He's one you wonder if he'd landed at the right club he could have been a decent player.

I actually always said that. by the time he was traded to port, it was too late. melbourne ruined so many 1st round picks. Who were the two players that useless coach made co captain at aged 21? Both were top picks, totally ruined.

Melbourne were top pick vandals
 
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