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In any professional sports league with a draft system there are two places you want to be; contending at the top or rebuilding from the bottom.
You just don’t want to be stuck in the middle.
The Carlton Football Club has raised its middle finger to this notion in the past seven years, not finishing in the top four or the bottom four since 2007. The barren wasteland of mediocrity is painted navy blue.
The Blues did bottom out once though, and they did it with a remarkable dedication to ineptitude rarely seen in AFL history. Carlton finished in the bottom two in 2002, 2003, 2005, 2006 and 2007. However, playing loose with the salary cap cost them the #1 pick in the 2002 draft, missing out on the chance to draft Brendon Goddard or Daniel Wells.
Their first and second round picks were forfeited in 2003. After this though, Carlton put their high draft picks to surprisingly good use. Marc Murphy, Bryce Gibbs, Andrew Walker, Josh Kennedy (traded for Chris Judd) and Matthew Kreuzer were all taken in the top four of the draft.
Forgiving Kreuzer’s injuries and Walker’s late development, these picks have been relatively successful. Carlton’s problem hasn’t been at the top of the draft; it’s been everywhere else.
Over the past decade Hawthorn has established itself as the king of list management; they’re the benchmark for every other club to be compared to.
The Hawks would be nowhere without top seven picks Luke Hodge, Jarryd Roughead, Jordan Lewis and, once upon a time, Lance Franklin. The top of the draft has been kind to Hawthorn, but it’s been the trade table and the lower reaches of the draft where they’ve separated themselves from the rest of the competition.
Mark Williams and pick 9 for Shaun Burgoyne in 2009 was a heist, as was the trading of picks 25 and 41 for Josh Gibson that same year.
In 2011 they effectively traded pick 24 for Jack Gunston. Sam Mitchell, Bradley Hill, Liam Shiels and Paul Puopolo were all taken outside the top thirty of their respective drafts.
Luke Breust, Matthew Suckling and Will Langford were picks 47, 81 and 85 in the rookie draft. The Hawks largely got it right at the top, but they made an absolute art-form of the bottom. And this is where Carlton fell down.
The Blues have not found a star outside the top four of the draft. Whereas Hawthorn hit on late first round picks like Cyril Rioli, Grant Birchall and Isaac Smith, Carlton have missed badly on Shaun Hampson, Kane Lucas, Matthew Watson and Josh Bootsma.
Their draft history from the second round on isn’t any better, littered with names like Bower, Ellard, Duigan, McInnes and something called a Wayde Twomey.
Since Judd’s arrival, their trades and signings have left a lot to be desired too. While Hawthorn was trading for Burgoyne and Gibson in 2009, Carlton was giving up pick 11 for Brock McLean. The Dale Thomas signing has been a disaster so far and I’m going to say trading Sam Jacobs for picks 34 and 67 was a mistake.
Every team misses in the draft and makes bad trades. After all, Hawthorn drafted Xavier Ellis, Beau Dowler and Mitchell Thorp in the top six and traded Josh Kennedy and Ben McGlynn away for effectively nothing. But aside from the Fevola for Henderson trade (one of the all-time great ‘abandon ship as soon as you see the iceberg’ trades), Carlton has virtually nothing to point to in the win column in the Judd era.
All these misses have left Carlton where they are today. The Blues have won just seven of their past 25 games. They sit a dismal 0-2 in 2015, with two one-sided losses against a pair of teams that are by no means locks for the finals.
The most distressing statistic though is that of all 18 Round 1 line-ups, eight teams had an average games played of 96 games or more.
Seven of those teams made the finals last year – Carlton are the eighth. The Blues have the age demographic of a team that should be contenders. Instead, they’re further away now than they were seven years ago.
The Judd era has ended and Carlton has nothing to show for it. The misery of five bottom two finishes from 2002-2007 was all for nought. The rebuilding process is about to begin again, virtually from scratch.
All of this isn’t Carlton’s fault. They have dealt with some shocking luck. Jarrad Waite, Matthew Kreuzer, Brendan Fevola and Michael Jamison, their four best key position players of the past decade, dealt with serious issues, be it on the injury front or on the Brownlow Medal Red Carpet.
2014 was a write-off due to injuries and 2012 wasn’t much better health-wise. The Blues lost three heartbreaking interstate finals by seven points or less in 2009 to Brisbane, 2010 to Sydney and 2011 to West Coast.
They all could have just as easily gone the other way.
But the reality is that this Carlton team was never a contender. They hit at the top of the draft and made a revolutionary trade for at the time the best player in the competition, but they missed everywhere else. And now they find themselves in the nothing-land of mediocrity, an era of competitiveness buried in the ground, having failed to make even a preliminary final with three number-one draft picks and the best player of his generation.
The Carlton Football Club has won just one final in fifteen years. The next one seems further away than ever.
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