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Port Adelaide’s vice-captain Hamish Hartlett may be at a new AFL club next year after former Port player Kane Cornes wrote on The Advertiser that Hartlett had been told by the club that they are look to trade him.
Hartlett had a number of suitors last year late in the season with both North Melbourne and Richmond offering long-term, lucrative deals to try and lure him to Victoria.
However he rejected both these offers and signed a contract with Port Adelaide that extended him out until the end of the 2020 season.
He was also named Port Adelaide’s new vice-captain under Travis Boak before the season began.
That’s not the kind of story that usually ends in a player being on the trade table less than a year later but, here we are.
The notable thing with Port Adelaide is that they haven’t had a pick inside the first round of the draft in three years and as a result are very low on young talent coming through at the moment.
In 2013, they traded away their first round pick to secure Jared Polec. In 2014 they spent both their first and second round picks on Paddy Ryder. In 2015, they spent their first rounder and their 2016 second rounder on Charlie Dixon, and shuffled down their 2015 second round pick to get Jimmy Toumpas.
None of those four recruits could be considered a success at this point in time. That might change in time. It might not.
Jarman Impey and Riley Bonner are the only two players they have recruited inside the first two rounds of the draft across a three year period. That’s it. And they’re already short their second round pick in this year’s draft.
This has left them without that fresh wave of young talent coming through that would be considered necessary to allow the team to continually improve. While there are no doubt many factors behind them not making finals over the past two years, that is probably at least one of them.
In a purely economic sense, trading away a senior player who they don’t believe is essential to future success for a high pick is a smart move. But there is a lot more to footy than economics.
It’s deplorable. What ever happened to “Never tear us apart”? Hartlett made the admirable decision last year to remain loyal to the club that drafted him. Now they’re making the decision not to remain loyal to him.
A player who wants to do the right thing and stick by his club shouldn’t have to bear the bad fruit of the list management team’s stuff-ups.
It’s not hard to see why the Power have seemed to lack passion on the field this year if this is the way they view their players and I suspect that trading Hartlett away would only worsen those issues.
Cornes mentioned in his article that Hartlett is now weighing up his options and that the chance to play for a club in flag contention would probably be the most likely avenue for him to leave by.
However, Cornes also intimated that Port’s design would be to get involved in the impending deal being made between Gold Coast and Richmond over Dion Prestia.
Prestia officially confirmed that he wants to move to the Tigers earlier in the week and the mooted trade is that Richmond will give up pick 6 for him.
However the Suns would prefer to get in mature players rather than more draft picks and that is where Port likely see themselves stepping in – making a deal that would see Richmond gain Prestia, Gold Coast gain Hartlett, and Port gain pick 6.
I suspect though that Hartlett would be pretty hard to convince on that one. If he does decide to move you’d think it’s probably to Victoria. As a North fan, I can tell you I’d be ecstatic to have him.
We talked a bit about Travis Cloke earlier in the week and it now looks like he’s following my advice and looking to the Western Bulldogs as his preferred destination for a trade.
Cloke wants to reinvent himself as a player and be part of a winning culture and of the clubs said to be interested there’s no better place to do that than with the Bulldogs.
However the really interesting part of this situation is just how the move might be made.
Our own Ryan Buckland picked up this interesting little screencap on the Collingwood website earlier this week…
.@CollingwoodFC? ? #AFL pic.twitter.com/ZZXfd88uIp
— Ryan Buckland (@RyanBuckland7) August 31, 2016
However the Pies actually haven’t released Cloke, they’ve just stated that he has requested a release, and said they’re open to trading him. The image above is no longer on the Collingwood website.
If they were to release him from his contract it’s possible that he might be considered a free agent and allowed to move via that method – likely netting Collingwod a compensation pick of some sort.
However, the rules of free agency don’t make it clear at this stage whether or not the system works like that.
It’d be a very dangerous precedent for the AFL to set if it does, because it might make the process of releasing players and taking compo picks rather than seeking to trade them commonplace – and that could lead to the draft being seriously unbalanced.
Speaking of making the draft unbalanced, AFL CEO Gillon McLachlan suggested during the week that Brisbane will probably receive a priority pick in this year’s draft.
That’ll likely be an end-of-first-round pick, which would give them three picks inside the first 21 – 2, 19, and 21 – before any trading, compensation or bidding takes place.
Personally I believe priority picks should be used only for extreme situations where clubs have been robbed of talent due to non-football-related circumstances.
When the reason a football club is ailing is because they’re not very good at being a football club, giving them priority picks is the equivalent of giving someone a cholera vaccine to fix their gunshot wound.
Jaeger O’Meara is another story we’re following pretty closely and there’s been some murmuring that North Melbourne have officially ruled out recruiting him on the basis of his medical report.
Damian Barrett claimed as much on the Trade Radio podcast, and named Collingwood, Carlton, Essendon and St Kilda as the clubs leading the chase for O’Meara.
Hawthorn are in with some interest as well but their key focus at the moment is reportedly on securing Tom Mitchell from Sydney, and it’s also believed that they will sign Tyrone Vickery as a free agent.
If the Hawks recruit both Mitchell and Vickery this off-season it’s unlikely that they’ll have either the salary cap room or the trade capital to make a serious play for O’Meara.
In other news this week we have some players both mature and young who have declared or hinted at their desire to seek trades this off-season.
Michael Barlow is set to talk about the future with Fremantle this week but he is out of contract and with Fremantle looking to rebuild, seems likely to move to a Victorian club.
Nathan Brown is eligible to move as a free agent this off-season and despite having an offer on the table to re-sign with Collingwood, has reportedly attracted interest from North Melbourne.
Young highly-rated key defender prospect Caleb Marchbank has officially requested a trade away from GWS with Carlton believed to be the club leading the race for his services, with several others interested.
Marchbank was a top ten draft pick for the Giants and has played seven AFL games. Like a lot of GWS youngsters, there just doesn’t seem to be a lot of immediate opportunity for him on the horizon.
Ben Lennon, a first-round draft pick, is also set to request a trade away from Richmond, after playing just a handful of game this year.
Lennon was inexplicably dropped by the Tigers on the eve of finals last year and being out of contract when that occurred took his time to agree to a new deal with the Tigers.
Given little game time despite Richmond’s poor season and youth focus in the latter half of the year, he’s now looking to move somewhere where he’ll get greater opportunity to play at senior level.
That’s a pretty big blow for the Tigers to lose what was a highly-rated talent given the criticisms that have been made of their list this season.
However, Lennon – or the draft pick they receive for him in a trade – could prove to be valuable in other negotiations.