There’s a lot of hysteria going on about our playing list, in the threads and by the people you’d expect. I personally find the discussion here in the trading forum a little bit more measured, even if some of the ideas are bonkers. At the very least, there are less asterisks per post.
There’s an argument to be had about what’s tanking and what’s aggressive rebuilding. To me tanking just the decision to rebuild and doing it really aggresively. Obviously the AFL defines it in a very different way to make sure that they can keep a straight face when they say that nobody ever does it. Anyway, tanking is at its heart a discussion about trading and drafting, and I think it’s worth discussing.
Could We Tank?
My opinion is that the steep dive, fast climb tanking that people dream of pulling off is all but dead. Any defense of tanking that uses examples from before 2010 can be completely ignored. Priority picks are gone, one bad year for two top 5 picks is no longer an option. Free agency is here, so trading out old players for high picks is gone (the uncontracted are free agents, the contracted have had their value cut by the fact they will be free agents). Making the decision to tank also puts all your contracted young players who you want to keep at risk. If they don’t like the idea of a few years at the bottom of the ladder and a good team likes the look of them, they’ll leave, that’s modern football. Sure, you might get picks for them, but a decent pick is never as good as a good young player.
It’s better than it was during the expansion teams introduction in 2010-2012, but the heady days of 2000-2005 are long gone.
Would We Tank?
Very few teams make the call to do a drastic list overhaul when they’re not bad. 8th, 11th, 7th*, 7th over the last four years isn’t bad. It’s worryingly static, and it’s not good, but it’s not bad. There’s two places the call can come from: the football department and the executive. I don’t think our football department would. That’s entirely a guess, they just don’t seem like the type to make that decision. I have no idea about the executive. Making that call (especially if it was done over the top of the football department) would be risky, and it’s been a long time since Essendon did risky things at a club level. It might mean nothing more than a couple of changes of mid tier personnel and some change in direction/messaging, but it could end up as a bloodbath that sees most of the board, executive, and football department cleared out over a couple of months of horrendous mismanagement. It’s easy to make big moves when they’re the only moves left (eg Carlton), it’s a lot harder when things aren’t too bad.
I don’t think we will. There have been three times in the last decade or so which present themselves as more obvious candidates (2004ish, 2008, 2011) which the club didn’t take, so I don’t really see this being the year the strategy changes.
Should We Tank?
Personally I think we shouldn’t, but we should veer towards rebuilding. I would stop making decisions based on what’s best for the 2016 team and worry more about the 2020 team, but I don’t think we’ll end up in a better position five years from now by burning the place down. Most of the players we have who’d get us first round picks are our most promising young players, ie the ones you base the rebuild on in the first place. Our free agents of note (Bellchambers, Dempsey, Stanton) will take care of themselves regardless of what we do; if someone wants to offer them more than we want to pay them, there’s not much can be done about it. The old guys who’d typically get the move along in a big rebuild are almost certainly retiring/getting delisted anyway.
Final point, the saga. If we suffer penalties and play 2016 with a heavily compromised list you can absolutely guarantee that we’ll also get hit with draft penalties. There’s no way known a team that’s crap because a bunch of key players are out on drug suspensions is going to be allowed to have pick 1 in the draft. If we’ve decided to tank and then get no picks that’s going to screw us for Carlton/Melbourne lengths of time.