It’s a tricky one. IF you could somehow guarantee he comes back from the Achilles fine, would continue the form we’ve seen in 2025, stop being injury prone then I’d keep him. Especially if Bryan would still re-sign! Lots of if’s there though.
But, this club has suffered from injury prone “stars” getting injured at inopportune times for years. I think we need to move past them. If we can get good compensation for Draper, I’d have him out the door. I do rate what Draper brings on field, but I can’t get past his injury history before the Achilles.
And I think the AFL will tweak the formula to get us Band 1. The optics of how poor we’ve been and losing Draper will push them.
I’m generally a fan of keeping our own talent. Draper is hitting his prime age and could be a dominate ruckman for the next five years. We can’t keep on recycling players in for draft picks. Would much rather a known quantity.
I hope we up or bid to keep Draper at the club. Money isn’t the issue it’s more so contract length and four years is fair.
He wants more years and more money. Are we going back down the path of 6 year deals that have left us hamstrung to underperforming, injured and inconsistent players?
Because that’s what makes a good footballer, having 2 or 3 standout games in 7 years, going missing for large chunks, not having basic disposal skills and completely lacking in any composure.
If Bryan can hold down the fort (not the Darcy Fort) for a couple of years, I am very confident already in what I’ve seen of Vigo that in a few years from now he has the raw ingredients to become one of the better rucks in the competition. I do think he has more elements to his game and greater athletic upside than Bryan so I reckon he’ll go past him. And his maturity as a player should correlate fairly well with when we should expect to be contending as a list.
In a rare moment of common sense, the general blitz consensus is that Draper is worth 4 years but not 5. But we all want band 1 compo, huh? That means we’d have to offer more to force suitors to do the same.
The risk then becomes Sammy accepting our offer and adding to the long list of silly contracts we have on our books. Hopefully a rival club can offer something especially generous so we can get that sweet, sweet pick 5. But we’ll have to have something in mind in case the AFL only offer us end of first compo, which we won’t be happy with.
I’m then left wondering, which does blitz favour? Unfortunately it might come down to choosing the lesser of two evils.
If the Brisbane offer doesn’t trigger band one than we need to up our bid. I’m 95% sure that the Essendon list management team know what it needs to be and will ensure that if he leaves, we get an additional pick after our first round.
We need mature age talent and can’t/won’t let Draper walk for a mid 20s pick.
That is of course assuming that he cares about the money more than success. We could up the offer to $900k and he could still just take the Brisbane or Adelaide $800k offer to try to get more success.
