The Magpies swapped picks 42 and 48 for selection 39 shortly before the deadline passed, satisfied to have extracted two first round picks and three players from the near three week exchange period well before the final rush began.
With selections 18 and 21 in their possession for Sharrod Wellingham (West Coast) and Chris Dawes (Melbourne), Quinten Lynch and Clinton Young acquired as free agents and Jordan Russell picked up on Thursday for the fourth round selection received from the deal that sent Tom Young to the Western Bulldogs, the Magpies were already satisfied that their selective strategy had worked for them.
National recruiting manager, Derek Hine, and director of football, Geoff Walsh, headed into the AFL’s first free agency market keen to strengthen Collingwood’s list in two ways; for today and tomorrow. Essentially, the Magpies traded players out (Wellingham and Dawes) for first round selections in next month’s national draft and replaced them with free agents (Lynch and Young) of a similar ilk at no cost.
With its own first round selection, Collingwood can address its future needs with three picks inside 21 (18,19 and 21)and four inside 40. But with the experience and physical maturity of Lynch, Young and Russell added to the squad contention for 2013 has been shored up.
“I thought it was really important that we were able to improve our list but at the same time with a real eye towards the draft,” Hine told CTV.
“We have traded out of the draft the last two or three years. So we wanted to try and move our way up the order and obviously to do that you need to give something away. We were prepared to make some strong decisions in order to facilitate that.
“At the same time we were also looking at ways of improving our list and with free agency coming along the opportunity was there to bring in some player s that were going to address some particular needs for us in a short period of time with no loss.
“We’ve brought in similar sorts of players albeit we feel that Quinten is going to be a little more suitable as the guy that can pinch-hit for short periods of time in the ruck.
“Clinton is a little different as a player to Sharrod. We feel that he’s more of a wingman who can carry the ball; he’s a left footer and he’s got good depth on his kick and we saw that as an area we would really like to improve.
“Fortunately both boys saw the club as a place they would like to be.”
Hine said that, on balance, the competition’s first experience of free agency was a success.
“I think it is a positive. If you do your due diligence and you’re very clear on what you want and you’re not bringing in players for the sake of bringing in players - there’s a plan and a purpose to what you’re doing - it’s another mechanism or tool,” he said.
With the collection of first round picks, especially, Hine will have a hand in the national draft he hasn’t had for some time. Not since 2006 has Collingwood taken two first round picks to the draft table.
He believes that with the relative strength of Collingwood’s list, the club can take a best player approach rather than a needs based philosophy with them to the Gold Coast, where the draft will be conducted on November 22.
“From our side of things we will pick the best player,” Hine said.
“Our list is reasonably well balanced so we can attack the draft with a view to bringing in players who we feel suit us, in terms of the quality. If they fit our needs, well and good, but we’ll be bringing in the best player.
“The mature age players we’ve brought in, we’d like to think they will have a sustained impact. But also we’re also quite bullish about Jarrod Witts, who we feel is a young developing ruckman, and Josh Thomas is now starting to see some blue sky, in terms of where his injury is.
“Touch wood that he’s going to be able to get a sustained run at it. We feel that Josh is going to be a really good player for us if he can stay on the ground. We saw (in 2012) what Paul Seedsman can do and we got a very quick snapshot of Caolan Mooney. There’s these sorts of guys who are going to be available to us and we hope that purely from their maturity….and then you couple that with Brent Macaffer coming back and Luke Ball coming back.”
