He will make it, will take time to develop his body for afl (speed etc) but has the ability to play like Lake
Collins is a jet, but it will take him time (even beyond next year being the second year him being on our list) for him to develop
his style of play to our
team style of play.
Basically his style of play is to beat his man in a one-on-one battle, if that bloke is a full forward. He beats them when the ball hits the air, and he can stop them on the lead using crafty body positioning even if he's not the quickest. Basically he's a old-fashioned FB.
Sadly our team is the complete opposite where we play a hyper-modern style involving team defence, zoning off, and understanding that all 6 defenders have to be able to run and spread offensively when we win the ball and understand structures relating to teammates. It's basically the antithesis of the lockdown style that Collins plays. Thankfully in our clubs wise assessment through interviews when we drafted him, we determined him to be a highly malleable individual in understanding structures and positioning, otherwise we wouldn't have drafted him.
Remember for Dandenong if was Collins taking the best forwards and Weitering reading the play and zoning off players. But I get the feeling given an investment into Collins long-term, once he really hits his strides in understanding that structural, zoning, positioning element to his game (and it could take 4-5 years of play at both VFL and AFL level) he really could become a premier key defender in the competition.
Weitering was drafted number 1 because he had an innate ability to read the play and know when to zone off/when to stick to his man like almost no other 17/18 year old in the modern professional draft era. But there's almost no comparison for a player of his type, so we don't have any reference point in the past to see if a player like him has even more scope for that aspect of his game to improve.
What we do know, however, that drafting 17 year olds on the premise of how they defend through rolling zones or how they understand team defences is very difficult, very very difficult.
1) Because junior footy actually bans rolling zones and some elements of team defence - ie a maximum of 12 players zoning up in kick-ins (so your basic 3-4-5 zone that forwards engage in, but your defensive unit of 6 is actually legally forced to man up and not allowed to engage in a full 18-man press that Hawthorn made the AFL norm in 2008 and everybody has followed since), and players are informally ordered not to crowd the ball and engage in heavy presses at stoppages etc. And 2) because the element of understanding structures, presses, zoning in defence takes a hell of a long time, and it's unpredictable to determine who has an aptitutde for learning that in their 20's when they're 17/18. Consider Roberts, Hamling, Biggs, Boyd, Morris, Wood, Johannisen - all are famously low draft picks and people have mentioned it on this board, but it's also worth looking at draft analysis - basically the reason that they went so low in the draft is because whilst they all had the ability to engage strongly in team defence, you can't really tell that at U/18 level.
I understand why they do it at U/18 level - you want to the success of a team to be the sum of its parts, the parts being the raw talent of the players, in order to help develop individuals and let draft watchers better assess the offensive quality of individuals. But basically that gives you no opportunity to assess how these juniors have an understanding of playing in these rolling zones etc. In fact, the very argument that players like Boyd were able to be re-tooled as a defender because in a team defence style he's not competing against anyone - because he's not competing against those who have been taught a team defence style as juniors, because nobody has been. But it means that when Bevo wants to engage in a team defence style, he's teaching the players from scratch.
So this brings us back to Collins. Basically because he's never had to play a heavy team defence/rolling zone/pressing/zoning off style of play, it's going to take us time to develop that in his game. But given his strong one-on-one abilities, it's a good starting point. Given that he's ten times the physical one-on-one defender that Fletcher Roberts is, he only has to understand our structures about 80% of the quality of Roberts to take his place in the team. And given Bevo's success etc in re-tooling players like Boyd as defenders, he's going to do a good job of it.
For example, and I know it's not much to go on, but take his 1 game at AFL level this year. Certianly looked up to it from a purely defensive role and did as much as you can hope from an 18 year old key defender from that perspective, but the offensive side and the pace of the game seemed too much for him. I remember seeing him stick to his man like glue too often and not zone off to provide the extra number, and he simply didn't really know where to run and spread from an offensive point of view (only 4 disposals from 73% game time - even Roberts who hardly touches the ball tends to get double that, and would play a similar role to Collins in the team, gets double that).
Wow, that ended up being longer than I thought. And will likely be buried given the pace of this thread!