Anyone watch Daniel’s Essendon page on YouTube? He does a really good analysis of premiership teams and how their lists are built over a period of years.
Then he does Essendons current list build, and the 2017-21 are horrible to look at and how bad the drafting/trading/list management was during this time.
Based on his analysis, and if we somehow keep the young talent, we are at least 5-6 years away from competing.
Yep. Saw it. It was great.
I thought he may have copied something I posted a few weeks back, but he put a different spin on it and looked more at drafting than where rockbottom was relative to a premiership.
It really showed how poor our drafting was for a 7 year period there and highlights why we are where we are. He could have gone a step further and critiqued players that were remaining and made it even more brutal. You could go another step and look at where all those players that left the list are now and realise the majority didn’t even reach ‘good VFL level’ and to have some go back to lower leagues is another list management failure.
I’m glad that what that video showed was a very good way to list build. We hope the 2022 draft comes good, but if it doesn’t, 2023 looks to be the one that starts the 8 year clock for the list build.
I’d love to dig a tad deeper and see the ladder finishes along the way as my bias is that when we finally have 11 players in our best 22 (a serious best 22, not one that is based on potential) that were drafted post 2023 draft, that that is the time when we spike up the ladder and at least become consistent finals competitors.
Would be good to do a similar North Melb, Fremantle and Gold Coast assessment for comparison. I’d imagine the Hawthorn assessment would look similar to the Collingwood assessment. Anyone with players from a previous premiership era (Geelong and Sydney are others) would not be the path we go on.
It’ll be interesting to see how many premiership era players Richmond hold on to during their rebuild. I think they are going the North, Freo way otherwise they would have tried to hold on to Bolton and Rioli for the next era like Collingwood did with Pendles and Sidebottom.
Hoyne from CD briefly talked about this with Hinkley if you’re interested. He said something along the lines of you need around 10 high performing junior players to then jump up the ladder from the bottom. By high performing, he meant above expected performance for someone that age.
He used Dees as an example of in 2017 to to 2019 had several young players coming through (Petracca, Oliver, Viney, Salem, Neal-Bullen, Brayshaw, Fritsch and Lever) plus later Kozzie and Jackson.
Hoyne said we only had about 6 such players, so had a couple more years of talent acquisition ahead of us.
Will likely add another 5 this year plus bewick and other ngas next year
I doubt we are going to get 5 top end talents this year. Just because you need to hit the real pointy end of the draft to be likely to get one
Or we could take some other players off Lions so they can keep Bailey.
I’m almost in the camp that Bailey stays if lions Match, as think he wants to stay.
They already have Neale gone which frees up cap.
Targets
We desperately need some speed an creativity on the flanks, forward and back. So many mid-sized, one-paced, skill-deficient players there. It kills our forward transition and hinders our ability to stop rebounds out of the forwardline. When we had the likes of Saad and McKenna, our rebounds out of defence looked much more dangerous.
Langford
Perkins
Redman
Ridley
Prior
The problem is we also need tall defenders, rucks and small forwards (for starters).
We need elite kicks. Speed by foot is important, but I think moreso in the forward 50m. Saad and McKenna were exciting, but clubs soon worked out to shut them down and we looked lost again.
Even McKay is not that built - and as for Reid 
Is this a terrible draft to get draft assistance from depth point of view?
We aren’t that far off 11 in the best 22 now in reality. Probs get there by the end of '27 and ready to climb '28. Which is the timeline I’ve thought for a while. Hopefully we start to show some potential back end of '27 so that we might be a chance to make a play for free agents… but maybe that’s another year off.
Caddy
Roberts
Kako
Robey
Sharp
Farrow
May
Prior
Day-Wicks
? Clarke
? Johnson
? Visentini
? Edwards
? Gerreyn
? Kondog
? HEA
? Artemis
Leg speed and running power in the modern game is king, it it’s not about running bounces and ball carrying it’s about transition.
Players with speed endurance combo don’t get burnt on the defensive transition and can exploit their opponents on the turnover. Also faster players up field make those chains of possession easier as the kicks and hand passes have a greater margin for error because they don’t have a defender on their backside.
Langford and Perkins both are decent kicks with penetration and accuracy but they aren’t able to cover ground at the speed required for the older game.
This is my point, we need the speed up forward moreso than down back.
This is also partly a selection issue, we can definitely put more fluid /dynamic sides on the park but choose not to.
This is a great point and one I’ve been trying too explain to my Dons mates.
The lack of speed and endurance is why most of our kicks look crap and our transition gets broken up constantly. We never get separation and the kicks need to be pin point matched with great hands every single time.
I think a handful of our players are actually around the mark comparative to other teams kicking wise. It’s just the work rate of others and lack of movement that exacerbates the skill issues
Just working through the out of contract players and who should stay and go come the end of the year. This is my view with c 10 weeks remaining:
So that has 6 definite delistings - Gresham, Guelfi, McMahon, Cox, Unwin and Setterfield, with a watch on a further 3.
There are still plenty of games ahead. As much as I don’t like it, I fully expect Gresham to hit his game trigger and end up with another season.
Trading out Merrett, Tsatas, Parish, and then delisting Perkins, Setterfield, Gresham, takes a large hit to our midfield depth and you would hope this is addressed. Even last season with Hobbs, Shiel, Setterfield (delisted and relisted), Martin (injured), we ended up drafting Robey, Sharp, Farrow. Outside of Fiorini, we didn’t exactly bring in some more season inside midfield experience.
Merrett traded
Gresham delisted
Parish - depends on interest from other clubs, could be stuck with him.
Setterfield - might be a chance for one year deal if his body holds up and others leave.
Perkins - might look elsewhere, but likely new deal.
Tsatas - might look to leave but also might stay if new coach likes him. And sees a position for him.
so they could all be gone. but likely we still have a few on the list.
You need speed between the arcs with big tanks that can transition from arc to arc .
We just need speed
