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The Troy Menzel trade was the exclamation mark on one of the the worst months of player movement in a single AFL club’s history. All things considered, Carlton have done lots of things, but precisely nothing to start a rebuild that the club so sorely needs.
Carlton have the worst list in the AFL, of that there is no doubt.
When I had a look at their playing stocks in June, what I found was a capped-out, old, strikingly mediocre bunch of bench scrubs, depth players and good-not-great stars,
The re-arrival of Stephen Silvagni, the supposed architect of Greater Western Sydney’s list build, and departure of much of the previous football administration which plied their trade in the Mick Malthouse era, bought with it the promise of a new direction. The fawning over his return was a white stallion short of a medieval fairytale.
(Just quietly, I reckon a 12-year-old with a box of crayons could have built a decent list out of 12 underage pre-listed players and 11 top 15 picks in a pretty deep draft.)
Well, that lasted all of four months. Make no mistake, Carlton have had an absolutely dreadful trade period, and done almost exactly the opposite of what they should have done as far as recalibrating their list goes.
The simplest way to go about this is to split out their activity into player movements and draft pick movements. This is what the trade period has yielded the Navy Blues in net player terms, including pre-October retirements and delistings.
Out
Matthew Watson, Blaine Johnson, Cameron Giles, Fraser Russell, Chris Judd, Andrew Carrazzo, David Ellard, Lachie Henderson, Tom Bell, Menzel.
In
Sam Kerridge, Lachie Plowman, Jed Lamb, Andrew Phillips, Liam Sumner.
You can probably add Chris Yarran to that list of outs before the end of today, too.
Carlton have lost two of their best young players in Tom Bell (in large part for reasons outside of football) and Menzel, and two above average, prime-age players in Yarran and Lachie Henderson.
The losses of Chris Judd and Andrew Carrazzo were at worst neutral propositions as far as list building goes, given both were 32 and a near zero chance of being AFL standard players by the time the Blues are next contending. The delisted deadwood is nothing more than that.
In their place come Sam Kerridge from Adelaide, and a pu-pu platter of Greater Western Sydney players that couldn’t make the team on a regular basis.
The fact that the Giants gave Carlton their 2015 first round pick as part of this deal, and that these four players are moving to the same place that the guy who recruited them just moved to, should send a shiver down the spine of every Carlton fan.
But wait! It’s all about the draft picks, right? Their draft position looks a little like this:
Before trade: 1, 20, 39, 57, 75, 93, 113
After trade: 1, 8, 20, 21, 59, 60, 113
Again, you can probably add either pick 12 or pick 19 to that list of after-trade picks once the Yarran deal goes through today, which it surely will.
That’s an improvement from two picks inside the top 20 to four, an improvement in pick 39 to pick 21, and a shuffle of the deck chairs in rounds four onwards. That’s not terrible, and indeed if Carlton end up with Richmond’s pick 12 for Yarran instead of pick 19 – an outside chance, but come 1:45pm in Melbourne, the Tigers may just pull the trigger – they will enter the 2015 draft with the most draft capital of any team in the league.
But if this was about the draft, why would Carlton on-trade Geelong’s 2016 first round pick, bought in as part of the Henderson deal, to the Giants, in order to improve their standing in this year’s draft?
Surely having an additional first rounder guaranteed heading into next year’s draft – which we’re told by those in the know projects as better in the raw talent stakes than 2015 – is better than cramming it all into one year?
I digress. This Carlton rebuild was always going to take time. But at its current pace, it will be glacial. There could be something multi-year at play here. But I suspect there isn’t.
By my reckoning, Carlton had two very clear choices: take the hard road and clean out the top end of the list, or the easy one by moving arguably better assets to get a slightly better haul of draft picks. They chose the latter.
The Blues entered the 2015 season with an average player age of 24.9 across their entire 46 player list (including rookies). Right now, before a couple more delistings and the advent of new draftees, the Blues will enter 2016 with an average player age of 24.5.
In reality, this will likely fall closer to 24 once we’re at the final list lodgement deadline of December 1. This will still put the Blues in the middle range of the league when all said and done.
That’s across the whole list, though. At the top of the age tree sit 10 players aged 28 or older, which is where Hawthorn, Sydney, North Melbourne and Fremantle fit on the age curve.
The list profile has not radically shifted. All that has happened in this trade period is that the Blues have lost some good, young talent that’s just about to enter its collective prime, replaced it with the leftover depth talent of an expansion franchise, and taken a punt on a shallow draft.
The administration re-signed Matthew Kreuzer for just long enough that if he’s lucky – and he’s due some luck – he can play a couple of good, injury free years, and scamper to a premiership contender as an unrestricted free agent in 2017.
They are umming and ahhing over Dennis freaking Armfield.
Carlton’s core of Marc Murphy, Bryce Gibbs and Dale Thomas will go around again, and for all intents and purposes be marking time while this gamble on the 2015 draft plays out in the years ahead.
Thomas will be the Mick Malthouse era’s albatross, hanging around the neck of what’s left of the previous board and football department administrators as a reminder of decisions past. He’ll be good, but if Carlton knew this is where things would end up just two years into a five-year, $3.5 million contract, they may have reconsidered both the tenure and value of that deal.
But you can’t tell me Murphy and Gibbs would command anything less than a first round pick from a middle of the rung team looking for a proven prime mover through the middle of the ground.
If you’re going to be terrible, why keep these guys around? Surely one, or both, must move in 2016 – another year older, another year of mediocrity holding them back, eating away at their trade value.
Carlton had four very good players aged 24 or under coming into this trade period: Bell, Menzel, Blaine Boekhurst and Patrick Cripps. They traded two of them away.
You think the Blues had a good trade period? Spare me. They have gone backwards, remarkably so, without any prospect of moving forwards.