Mega Thread 2018 List Management, Free Agency & Trade thread

[guidodp15]

really dont know why people are saying and wanting Taberner in the team if we get Hogan and Lobb he has been trash for 90% of his games. Never see a guy who is 199cm and 100kgs get push off the ball so easy his first 4 games this year don't change my opinion of him.

i actually think Cox goes to the back line with Lobb Hogan and McCarthy in the forward line and McCarthy will be very dangerous for us.

 

[Freo88]

For a guy who couldn't get a game at Gold Coast?

There are obviously mitigating circumstances for that as he alluded to when interviewed

 

[Purpellian Anchor]

Ho

The thing no one really talks about is how getting Lobb and Hogan affects our draft strategy.

Lobb, Darcy, Hogan, Cox, Tabs and Dixon.

We’re set for rucks and tall forwards for the next 5-10 years.

We need 1 more tall back. Other than that we can concentrate on mids and goal kickers


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

and apparently is a quality backman too

looking forward to our new look forward 6

McCarthy (crumber), Hogan, Lobb
Taberner, Dixon, Cox (roving forward)

 

[Square Peg]

So who is winning the trade period so far? North?

 

[Retzlaff]

So who is winning the trade period so far? North?

Crocmedia

 

[tonygeeks]

Interesting article supporting trading down for more picks , this is more a summary chase up the research if you want the full picture

How NFL teams ignore basic economics and draft players irrationally

For non-football fans: this is when NFL teams select college football players to add to their rosters, the new players awkwardly hold up jerseys with the number one on them, and football fans everywhere freak out. The worst teams are given the highest picks, and if they want to improve, they need to use them as shrewdly as possible.

Teams that succeed — like the Seattle Seahawks, winners of this past season's Super Bowl — tend to build their rosters heavily through the draft, and merely supplement their drafted talent through trades and free agency. NFL executives invest huge amounts of time and resources into scouting players and ranking them, hoping to draft stars in the first round and solid contributors later on.

it's not their imperfect player evaluation, but their refusal to follow the principle of risk diversification

But here's the thing: despite years of data, most NFL teams still have no idea how to work the draft most effectively.

It's not their imperfect player evaluation, but something more basic — their refusal to follow the principle of risk diversification. That's the conclusion economists Cade Massey and Richard Thaler came to after analyzing fifteen years of draft data in a series of papers — and it's still true, despite recent changes to the wages rookies are paid.

Draft picks can be traded, and the success of any one player picked is highly uncertain. Because of that, their data says that in the current trade market, teams are always better off trading down — that is, trading one high pick for multiple lower ones — but many teams become overconfident in their evaluation of one particular player and do the exact opposite: package several low picks for the right to take one player very early.

"There are one or two teams out there that philosophically follow this idea," says Massey, who serves as a draft consultant with several NFL teams that he can't disclose. "But in my experience, teams always say they're on board with it in January. Then when April rolls around, and they've been preparing for the draft for a long time, they fall in love with players, get more and more confident in their analysis, and fall back into the same patterns."

3464206

A babyfaced Eli Manning: not worth what the Giants gave up to get the first pick. Photo by Chris Trotman/Getty Images

1) It's just not worth it to trade up

The first analysis Massey and Thaler did was to compare what teams are willing to pay to pick higher (in terms of extra draft picks packaged as part of a trade) with the value they ultimately get out of doing so, in terms of player production.

To calculate how much teams pay to trade up, they looked at 1,078 trades made between 1990 and 2008. The trades work something like this: a team will trade the 16th and 32nd overall picks, say, for the 5th overall pick. They might also include picks from next year's draft.

Massey and Thaler graphed all trades, which let them assign a relative value to each pick in the first five rounds of the draft:

Screen_shot_2014-05-05_at_12.55.38_pm


Massey and Thaler 2012

The most important thing about this graph: the curve is very, very sharp in the first round (picks 1 through 32). That means teams think the very top picks are extremely valuable: the value of the 10th pick is only about half that of the first pick.

Now, it's worth pointing out that for years, most teams followed something called "The Chart," which assigned theoretically fair point values to each pick in the draft for trade purposes. Since 2008, many teams have smartly stopped treating "The Chart" as gospel, and the curve has become slightly less steep.

But Massey says it still hasn't flattened out to anything near where it should be, in terms of the actual value derived from the players picked.

He and Thaler figured this out by calculating the odds that the first player picked at any given position will perform better — in terms of the number of games he starts in his first five seasons — than the second player drafted at that position. This is relevant because a team will often trade up when they identify a player they prefer at a needed position: they need a wide receiver, and a few highly-rated ones are available, but they trade up because they're certain one is much better.

But the data says that teams just aren't very good at figuring out when this is true. On average, the chance that first player will start more games than the second one picked at his position: 52 percent. Compared to the third, it's still only 55 percent, and compared to the fourth, it's merely 56 percent.

the chance that the first player picked at a position will start more games than the second is just 52 percent

These numbers suggest that moving up eight picks (the average distance between the first and second players at the same position) should cost a small amount, since you're only increasing the odds of a getting a more productive player by four percent or so. But as the steep curve shows, teams pay a ton to move up, especially at the top of the draft.

"It's basically a coin flip," Massey says, "but teams are paying a great deal for the right to call which side of the coin."

One recent trade epitomizes this point — and shows that even in the post-"Chart" era, teams still overvalue the highest picks. In 2012, the Washington football team traded the 6th pick, the 39th pick, and their first round picks in 2013 and 2014 to the St. Louis Rams so they could move up four spots and take Robert Griffin III — a player they were certain was a once-in-a-lifetime quarterback — with the second overall pick.

Just two years later, the trade already looks pretty shortsighted. That's not because Griffin is a bad player (he's almost one of the few that might make a crazy trade like this seem worthwhile), but because the odds of getting a great player with one high pick are so much lower than getting one with four high picks.

The team would've been better served sitting tight and just drafting the next-best quarterback (Ryan Tannehill) and using the other three picks on much-needed players. Or they could have waited and drafted a quarterback this year — say, Johnny Manziel — when they would've had the 2nd overall pick themselves if they hadn't made the trade.

2) It really pays off to trade down


470194287

Philip Rivers: just part of the valuable package the Giants gave up to take Eli Manning. Photo by Christian Petersen/Getty Images

Given that teams, on the whole, are irrationally willing to pay a lot to trade up, smart teams can reap huge benefits by trading down. Even staying put and drafting from your original spot, the researchers' analysis shows, is not a good strategy.

For each pick in the first round, they calculated all of the different two-pick packages a team could've gotten by trading down, based on the historical data (a team with the first pick, for instance, could get the 2nd and 181st picks, or the 14th and 15th picks, or any combination of picks in between that provide the same sum value).

teams are imperfect talent evaluators, so having two later picks is better than a single early one

Then they calculated what teams get out of these picks on average, in terms of the number of starts a player provides in his first five years and the number of Pro Bowls he's voted to. (They included Pro Bowls to counter the criticism that their analysis ignores the unique impact of superstar players solely available in the first few picks.)

Again, the data was unequivocal. On average, trading down and getting two players gave a team five more starts per season and slightly more total Pro Bowls.

You could chalk this up to the simple fact that more players start more games, but it's more than that. Even if you imagined that the team trading down could only keep the better one of the two players it drafted, it'd still get slightly more total starts and the same number of Pro Bowls. The truth is that teams are imperfect talent evaluators, so having two later picks is better than a single early one. Risk diversification at work.

3) Players picked lower are cheaper

All of these reasons to trade down don't even include the fact that players picked later in the draft get paid lower salaries, because the NFL collective bargaining agreement sets wages for the first few years of players' careers based on their draft slot. Saving money matters because all teams have to abide by a hard salary cap — this year, it's $133 million — so paying less to draft picks means more is left over for veteran players.

For every single spot in the draft, the researchers compared the amount of salary paid to a player with the value a team gets from him on the field. (For this analysis, they used a more sophisticated metric for value: they looked at the average statistical production yielded by a player taken at that spot of the draft between 1994 and 2008, then converted that into dollars, based on what teams paid a player with that level of production on the free agent market on average).

In the graph below, the red line is the actual salary paid to a player picked at each spot, the green line is the average performance provided, and the blue is the difference — the money you save drafting someone at that spot instead of having to pay more for a veteran free agent who'd play at a similar level.

Screen_shot_2014-05-05_at_1.52.36_pmMassey and Thaler 2012

The blue line peaks around pick 33, the start of the second round — making it the sweet spot in the draft. If you had to make one pick, this is where you'd get the most bang for your buck, because there's a pretty good chance of getting a productive player and he won't command a particularly high salary. But since you can get multiple picks by trading a single high one, maximizing value means moving down into round two (picks 33 through 64).

One caveat is that the salary data comes from picks made under the old NFL collective bargaining agreement, which paid players picked in the top 10 considerably higher salaries then they get currently. But the salaries for picks from 10 onward have barely changed — and because trading down is so much more fruitful, Massey says the argument still applies for the first round as a whole.

4) Teams that trade down more often win more games

The most straightforward piece of proof for all this analysis is the fact that trading down and amassing more pick value — in terms of the blue line in the graph above — correlates with more wins on the field.

Massey and Thaler came to this conclusion by looking at the number of wins a team had in any given season between 1997 and 2008, and the total value of all picks they'd made in the previous four years (the amount of time, on average, a rookie is under contract for).

They found that one standard deviation in pick value translated to 1.5 more wins per season on the field. Sure, it's a small sample size, and there's a lot of chance and other factors built into the system — a coach's strategy, for instance — but trading down correlates with a significant amount of victories, given that there are only 16 games in a season.

So why don't more NFL teams follow this advice?

174364155

Baltimore Ravens GM Ozzie Newsome knows how to draft. Photo by Rob Tringali/SportsChrome/Getty Images

If all teams took note of these findings and corrected their behavior, the principles would no longer apply. Teams would be much less interested in trading up, so the lucrative market for trading down would evaporate.

Why hasn't this happened? One answer is a widely-known psychological bias called the overconfidence effect. As people are given more information, the accuracy of their analysis often hits a ceiling, but their confidence in it continues to increase.

As people are given more information, the accuracy of their analysis hits a ceiling, but their confidence in it continues to increase

This tendency has been demonstrated in all sorts of areas, from bettors picking horses to psychologists making diagnoses. It's not hard to imagine that NFL general managers — who are given scouting reports on players that cover everything from their body fat percentage to their home life — fall victim to the same sort of overconfidence and, as Massey said, "fall in love" with certain players.

There's also the fact that the sports world as a whole tends to glamorize superstars — leading many to disproportionately attribute a 53-player roster's success to one or two highly drafted players. For a struggling GM, it might seem much easier to trade up and land a guaranteed superstar than patiently fill a roster with competent players.

The problem, though, is that there are no guaranteed superstars — and Thaler and Massey have found that, given a long enough timeframe, no teams are any better at accurately evaluating prospects than others. Sure, a GM might hit a hot streak over the course of a few drafts, but long-term, they estimate that 95 to 100 percent of the difference in teams' odds of striking gold with any one pick is driven by chance.

So the key isn't drafting better — it's just drafting more.

As Cassey noted, there are a few teams out there following his philosophy. In a recent interview, Eric DeCosta — assistant GM of the perennially-successful Baltimore Ravens — dropped a hint about the identity of one of them:

We look at the draft as, in some respects, a luck-driven process. The more picks you have, the more chances you have to get a good player. When we look at teams that draft well, it’s not necessarily that they’re drafting better than anybody else. It seems to be that they have more picks. There’s definitely a correlation between the amount of picks and drafting good players.


On iPad using BigFooty.com mobile app

 

[Deathly]

Do we have Lobb yet?

 

[Admiral Byng]

*snores*

 

[apuchar]

The shield cricket is keeping me going

 

[G Mus]

Not sure if you can compare with the 53 man rosters and 90 man training camp of the NFL

Likewise the 5 starters in the NBA

 

[arsesmart]

Interesting article supporting trading down for more picks , this is more a summary chase up the research if you want the full picture

How NFL teams ignore basic economics and draft players irrationally

For non-football fans: this is when NFL teams select college football players to add to their rosters, the new players awkwardly hold up jerseys with the number one on them, and football fans everywhere freak out. The worst teams are given the highest picks, and if they want to improve, they need to use them as shrewdly as possible.

Teams that succeed — like the Seattle Seahawks, winners of this past season's Super Bowl — tend to build their rosters heavily through the draft, and merely supplement their drafted talent through trades and free agency. NFL executives invest huge amounts of time and resources into scouting players and ranking them, hoping to draft stars in the first round and solid contributors later on.

it's not their imperfect player evaluation, but their refusal to follow the principle of risk diversification

But here's the thing: despite years of data, most NFL teams still have no idea how to work the draft most effectively.

It's not their imperfect player evaluation, but something more basic — their refusal to follow the principle of risk diversification. That's the conclusion economists Cade Massey and Richard Thaler came to after analyzing fifteen years of draft data in a series of papers — and it's still true, despite recent changes to the wages rookies are paid.

Draft picks can be traded, and the success of any one player picked is highly uncertain. Because of that, their data says that in the current trade market, teams are always better off trading down — that is, trading one high pick for multiple lower ones — but many teams become overconfident in their evaluation of one particular player and do the exact opposite: package several low picks for the right to take one player very early.

"There are one or two teams out there that philosophically follow this idea," says Massey, who serves as a draft consultant with several NFL teams that he can't disclose. "But in my experience, teams always say they're on board with it in January. Then when April rolls around, and they've been preparing for the draft for a long time, they fall in love with players, get more and more confident in their analysis, and fall back into the same patterns."

3464206

A babyfaced Eli Manning: not worth what the Giants gave up to get the first pick. Photo by Chris Trotman/Getty Images

1) It's just not worth it to trade up

The first analysis Massey and Thaler did was to compare what teams are willing to pay to pick higher (in terms of extra draft picks packaged as part of a trade) with the value they ultimately get out of doing so, in terms of player production.

To calculate how much teams pay to trade up, they looked at 1,078 trades made between 1990 and 2008. The trades work something like this: a team will trade the 16th and 32nd overall picks, say, for the 5th overall pick. They might also include picks from next year's draft.

Massey and Thaler graphed all trades, which let them assign a relative value to each pick in the first five rounds of the draft:

Screen_shot_2014-05-05_at_12.55.38_pm


Massey and Thaler 2012

The most important thing about this graph: the curve is very, very sharp in the first round (picks 1 through 32). That means teams think the very top picks are extremely valuable: the value of the 10th pick is only about half that of the first pick.

Now, it's worth pointing out that for years, most teams followed something called "The Chart," which assigned theoretically fair point values to each pick in the draft for trade purposes. Since 2008, many teams have smartly stopped treating "The Chart" as gospel, and the curve has become slightly less steep.

But Massey says it still hasn't flattened out to anything near where it should be, in terms of the actual value derived from the players picked.

He and Thaler figured this out by calculating the odds that the first player picked at any given position will perform better — in terms of the number of games he starts in his first five seasons — than the second player drafted at that position. This is relevant because a team will often trade up when they identify a player they prefer at a needed position: they need a wide receiver, and a few highly-rated ones are available, but they trade up because they're certain one is much better.

But the data says that teams just aren't very good at figuring out when this is true. On average, the chance that first player will start more games than the second one picked at his position: 52 percent. Compared to the third, it's still only 55 percent, and compared to the fourth, it's merely 56 percent.

the chance that the first player picked at a position will start more games than the second is just 52 percent

These numbers suggest that moving up eight picks (the average distance between the first and second players at the same position) should cost a small amount, since you're only increasing the odds of a getting a more productive player by four percent or so. But as the steep curve shows, teams pay a ton to move up, especially at the top of the draft.

"It's basically a coin flip," Massey says, "but teams are paying a great deal for the right to call which side of the coin."

One recent trade epitomizes this point — and shows that even in the post-"Chart" era, teams still overvalue the highest picks. In 2012, the Washington football team traded the 6th pick, the 39th pick, and their first round picks in 2013 and 2014 to the St. Louis Rams so they could move up four spots and take Robert Griffin III — a player they were certain was a once-in-a-lifetime quarterback — with the second overall pick.

Just two years later, the trade already looks pretty shortsighted. That's not because Griffin is a bad player (he's almost one of the few that might make a crazy trade like this seem worthwhile), but because the odds of getting a great player with one high pick are so much lower than getting one with four high picks.

The team would've been better served sitting tight and just drafting the next-best quarterback (Ryan Tannehill) and using the other three picks on much-needed players. Or they could have waited and drafted a quarterback this year — say, Johnny Manziel — when they would've had the 2nd overall pick themselves if they hadn't made the trade.

2) It really pays off to trade down


470194287

Philip Rivers: just part of the valuable package the Giants gave up to take Eli Manning. Photo by Christian Petersen/Getty Images

Given that teams, on the whole, are irrationally willing to pay a lot to trade up, smart teams can reap huge benefits by trading down. Even staying put and drafting from your original spot, the researchers' analysis shows, is not a good strategy.

For each pick in the first round, they calculated all of the different two-pick packages a team could've gotten by trading down, based on the historical data (a team with the first pick, for instance, could get the 2nd and 181st picks, or the 14th and 15th picks, or any combination of picks in between that provide the same sum value).

teams are imperfect talent evaluators, so having two later picks is better than a single early one

Then they calculated what teams get out of these picks on average, in terms of the number of starts a player provides in his first five years and the number of Pro Bowls he's voted to. (They included Pro Bowls to counter the criticism that their analysis ignores the unique impact of superstar players solely available in the first few picks.)

Again, the data was unequivocal. On average, trading down and getting two players gave a team five more starts per season and slightly more total Pro Bowls.

You could chalk this up to the simple fact that more players start more games, but it's more than that. Even if you imagined that the team trading down could only keep the better one of the two players it drafted, it'd still get slightly more total starts and the same number of Pro Bowls. The truth is that teams are imperfect talent evaluators, so having two later picks is better than a single early one. Risk diversification at work.

3) Players picked lower are cheaper

All of these reasons to trade down don't even include the fact that players picked later in the draft get paid lower salaries, because the NFL collective bargaining agreement sets wages for the first few years of players' careers based on their draft slot. Saving money matters because all teams have to abide by a hard salary cap — this year, it's $133 million — so paying less to draft picks means more is left over for veteran players.

For every single spot in the draft, the researchers compared the amount of salary paid to a player with the value a team gets from him on the field. (For this analysis, they used a more sophisticated metric for value: they looked at the average statistical production yielded by a player taken at that spot of the draft between 1994 and 2008, then converted that into dollars, based on what teams paid a player with that level of production on the free agent market on average).

In the graph below, the red line is the actual salary paid to a player picked at each spot, the green line is the average performance provided, and the blue is the difference — the money you save drafting someone at that spot instead of having to pay more for a veteran free agent who'd play at a similar level.

Screen_shot_2014-05-05_at_1.52.36_pmMassey and Thaler 2012

The blue line peaks around pick 33, the start of the second round — making it the sweet spot in the draft. If you had to make one pick, this is where you'd get the most bang for your buck, because there's a pretty good chance of getting a productive player and he won't command a particularly high salary. But since you can get multiple picks by trading a single high one, maximizing value means moving down into round two (picks 33 through 64).

One caveat is that the salary data comes from picks made under the old NFL collective bargaining agreement, which paid players picked in the top 10 considerably higher salaries then they get currently. But the salaries for picks from 10 onward have barely changed — and because trading down is so much more fruitful, Massey says the argument still applies for the first round as a whole.

4) Teams that trade down more often win more games

The most straightforward piece of proof for all this analysis is the fact that trading down and amassing more pick value — in terms of the blue line in the graph above — correlates with more wins on the field.

Massey and Thaler came to this conclusion by looking at the number of wins a team had in any given season between 1997 and 2008, and the total value of all picks they'd made in the previous four years (the amount of time, on average, a rookie is under contract for).

They found that one standard deviation in pick value translated to 1.5 more wins per season on the field. Sure, it's a small sample size, and there's a lot of chance and other factors built into the system — a coach's strategy, for instance — but trading down correlates with a significant amount of victories, given that there are only 16 games in a season.

So why don't more NFL teams follow this advice?

174364155

Baltimore Ravens GM Ozzie Newsome knows how to draft. Photo by Rob Tringali/SportsChrome/Getty Images

If all teams took note of these findings and corrected their behavior, the principles would no longer apply. Teams would be much less interested in trading up, so the lucrative market for trading down would evaporate.

Why hasn't this happened? One answer is a widely-known psychological bias called the overconfidence effect. As people are given more information, the accuracy of their analysis often hits a ceiling, but their confidence in it continues to increase.

As people are given more information, the accuracy of their analysis hits a ceiling, but their confidence in it continues to increase

This tendency has been demonstrated in all sorts of areas, from bettors picking horses to psychologists making diagnoses. It's not hard to imagine that NFL general managers — who are given scouting reports on players that cover everything from their body fat percentage to their home life — fall victim to the same sort of overconfidence and, as Massey said, "fall in love" with certain players.

There's also the fact that the sports world as a whole tends to glamorize superstars — leading many to disproportionately attribute a 53-player roster's success to one or two highly drafted players. For a struggling GM, it might seem much easier to trade up and land a guaranteed superstar than patiently fill a roster with competent players.

The problem, though, is that there are no guaranteed superstars — and Thaler and Massey have found that, given a long enough timeframe, no teams are any better at accurately evaluating prospects than others. Sure, a GM might hit a hot streak over the course of a few drafts, but long-term, they estimate that 95 to 100 percent of the difference in teams' odds of striking gold with any one pick is driven by chance.

So the key isn't drafting better — it's just drafting more.

As Cassey noted, there are a few teams out there following his philosophy. In a recent interview, Eric DeCosta — assistant GM of the perennially-successful Baltimore Ravens — dropped a hint about the identity of one of them:

We look at the draft as, in some respects, a luck-driven process. The more picks you have, the more chances you have to get a good player. When we look at teams that draft well, it’s not necessarily that they’re drafting better than anybody else. It seems to be that they have more picks. There’s definitely a correlation between the amount of picks and drafting good players.


On iPad using BigFooty.com mobile app

From a Freo perspective, the drafts from 2008-11 had comfortably the highest net of draft picks than any other four year period in their history (including the innagural four years) and netted players of the calibre of Fyfe, Hill, Ballantyne, Walters, Suban, Morabito, Roberton, Barlow, de Boer, Neale.

On the other hand here's a list of the picks by number selected (up to 2016):

1
Clive Waterhouse
Jeff White
2
Justin Longmuir
Paul Hasleby
3
Stephen Hill
4
Anthony Morabito
Graham Polak
Matthew Pavlich
5
Leigh Brown
6
James Walker
7
Ben Edwards
Rhys Palmer
8
Griffin Logue
10
Marcus Drum
Ryley Dunn
12
Heath Black
Ryan Murphy
13
Brad Rowe
Byron Schammer
Lachie Weller
16
Tom Sheridan
17
Josh Simpson
Michael Apeness
18
Daniel Schell
19
David Mundy
20
Hayden Crozier
Jayden Pitt
Nat Fyfe
21
Clem Michael
Hayden Ballantyne
22
Winston Abraham
23
Jay Burton
24
Clayton Hinkley
Nick Suban
26
Brodie Holland
Garrick Ibbotson
27
Adam Campbell
Darcy Tucker
29
Alex Forster
31
Clayton Collard
Jess Sinclair
32
Troy Johnson
34
Connor Blakely
36
Joel Houghton
Tanner Smith
37
Alex Pearce
Zac Clarke
38
Harley Balic
Sean Darcy
39
Adam McPhee
Max Duffy
40
Chris Mayne
41
Brennan Cox
42
Doug Headland
Robert Warnock
43
Brett Peake
44
Viv Michie
46
Adam Butler
Matthew Clucas
48
Greg Edgcumbe
Jesse Crichton
49
Ben Cunningham
Dylan Roberton
Garth Taylor
51
Dion Woods
52
Andrew R. Browne
Brock O'Brien
Justin Bollenhagen
53
Michael Walters
54
Ed Langdon
55
Mark Johnson
Ryan Crowley
Samuel Collins
56
Ben Bucovaz
Josh Mellington
Paul Medhurst
Ryan Smith
58
Brady Grey
Lachie Neale
59
Benet Copping
61
Shane Yarran
63
Brett Doswell
64
Andrew Shipp
66
Luke Ryan
Scott Thornton
67
Toby Stribling
68
Josh Deluca-Cardillo
Tim Ruffles
69
Daniel Haines
Kepler Bradley
70
Matt Taberner*
71
Cameron Sutcliffe
72
Dean Grainger
73
Sam McFarlane
77
Calib Mourish
Chris R. Hall
78
Clancee Pearce*
79
Greg Broughton*
83
Nick Lower*
87
Michael Barlow*
93
Lee Spurr*
100
Matt de Boer*
109
Alex Silvagni*
112
Jay van Berlo*

 

[Son of a Wizard]

Interesting article supporting trading down for more picks , this is more a summary chase up the research if you want the full picture

How NFL teams ignore basic economics and draft players irrationally

For non-football fans: this is when NFL teams select college football players to add to their rosters, the new players awkwardly hold up jerseys with the number one on them, and football fans everywhere freak out. The worst teams are given the highest picks, and if they want to improve, they need to use them as shrewdly as possible.

Teams that succeed — like the Seattle Seahawks, winners of this past season's Super Bowl — tend to build their rosters heavily through the draft, and merely supplement their drafted talent through trades and free agency. NFL executives invest huge amounts of time and resources into scouting players and ranking them, hoping to draft stars in the first round and solid contributors later on.

it's not their imperfect player evaluation, but their refusal to follow the principle of risk diversification

But here's the thing: despite years of data, most NFL teams still have no idea how to work the draft most effectively.

It's not their imperfect player evaluation, but something more basic — their refusal to follow the principle of risk diversification. That's the conclusion economists Cade Massey and Richard Thaler came to after analyzing fifteen years of draft data in a series of papers — and it's still true, despite recent changes to the wages rookies are paid.

Draft picks can be traded, and the success of any one player picked is highly uncertain. Because of that, their data says that in the current trade market, teams are always better off trading down — that is, trading one high pick for multiple lower ones — but many teams become overconfident in their evaluation of one particular player and do the exact opposite: package several low picks for the right to take one player very early.

"There are one or two teams out there that philosophically follow this idea," says Massey, who serves as a draft consultant with several NFL teams that he can't disclose. "But in my experience, teams always say they're on board with it in January. Then when April rolls around, and they've been preparing for the draft for a long time, they fall in love with players, get more and more confident in their analysis, and fall back into the same patterns."

3464206

A babyfaced Eli Manning: not worth what the Giants gave up to get the first pick. Photo by Chris Trotman/Getty Images

1) It's just not worth it to trade up

The first analysis Massey and Thaler did was to compare what teams are willing to pay to pick higher (in terms of extra draft picks packaged as part of a trade) with the value they ultimately get out of doing so, in terms of player production.

To calculate how much teams pay to trade up, they looked at 1,078 trades made between 1990 and 2008. The trades work something like this: a team will trade the 16th and 32nd overall picks, say, for the 5th overall pick. They might also include picks from next year's draft.

Massey and Thaler graphed all trades, which let them assign a relative value to each pick in the first five rounds of the draft:

Screen_shot_2014-05-05_at_12.55.38_pm


Massey and Thaler 2012

The most important thing about this graph: the curve is very, very sharp in the first round (picks 1 through 32). That means teams think the very top picks are extremely valuable: the value of the 10th pick is only about half that of the first pick.

Now, it's worth pointing out that for years, most teams followed something called "The Chart," which assigned theoretically fair point values to each pick in the draft for trade purposes. Since 2008, many teams have smartly stopped treating "The Chart" as gospel, and the curve has become slightly less steep.

But Massey says it still hasn't flattened out to anything near where it should be, in terms of the actual value derived from the players picked.

He and Thaler figured this out by calculating the odds that the first player picked at any given position will perform better — in terms of the number of games he starts in his first five seasons — than the second player drafted at that position. This is relevant because a team will often trade up when they identify a player they prefer at a needed position: they need a wide receiver, and a few highly-rated ones are available, but they trade up because they're certain one is much better.

But the data says that teams just aren't very good at figuring out when this is true. On average, the chance that first player will start more games than the second one picked at his position: 52 percent. Compared to the third, it's still only 55 percent, and compared to the fourth, it's merely 56 percent.

the chance that the first player picked at a position will start more games than the second is just 52 percent

These numbers suggest that moving up eight picks (the average distance between the first and second players at the same position) should cost a small amount, since you're only increasing the odds of a getting a more productive player by four percent or so. But as the steep curve shows, teams pay a ton to move up, especially at the top of the draft.

"It's basically a coin flip," Massey says, "but teams are paying a great deal for the right to call which side of the coin."

One recent trade epitomizes this point — and shows that even in the post-"Chart" era, teams still overvalue the highest picks. In 2012, the Washington football team traded the 6th pick, the 39th pick, and their first round picks in 2013 and 2014 to the St. Louis Rams so they could move up four spots and take Robert Griffin III — a player they were certain was a once-in-a-lifetime quarterback — with the second overall pick.

Just two years later, the trade already looks pretty shortsighted. That's not because Griffin is a bad player (he's almost one of the few that might make a crazy trade like this seem worthwhile), but because the odds of getting a great player with one high pick are so much lower than getting one with four high picks.

The team would've been better served sitting tight and just drafting the next-best quarterback (Ryan Tannehill) and using the other three picks on much-needed players. Or they could have waited and drafted a quarterback this year — say, Johnny Manziel — when they would've had the 2nd overall pick themselves if they hadn't made the trade.

2) It really pays off to trade down


470194287

Philip Rivers: just part of the valuable package the Giants gave up to take Eli Manning. Photo by Christian Petersen/Getty Images

Given that teams, on the whole, are irrationally willing to pay a lot to trade up, smart teams can reap huge benefits by trading down. Even staying put and drafting from your original spot, the researchers' analysis shows, is not a good strategy.

For each pick in the first round, they calculated all of the different two-pick packages a team could've gotten by trading down, based on the historical data (a team with the first pick, for instance, could get the 2nd and 181st picks, or the 14th and 15th picks, or any combination of picks in between that provide the same sum value).

teams are imperfect talent evaluators, so having two later picks is better than a single early one

Then they calculated what teams get out of these picks on average, in terms of the number of starts a player provides in his first five years and the number of Pro Bowls he's voted to. (They included Pro Bowls to counter the criticism that their analysis ignores the unique impact of superstar players solely available in the first few picks.)

Again, the data was unequivocal. On average, trading down and getting two players gave a team five more starts per season and slightly more total Pro Bowls.

You could chalk this up to the simple fact that more players start more games, but it's more than that. Even if you imagined that the team trading down could only keep the better one of the two players it drafted, it'd still get slightly more total starts and the same number of Pro Bowls. The truth is that teams are imperfect talent evaluators, so having two later picks is better than a single early one. Risk diversification at work.

3) Players picked lower are cheaper

All of these reasons to trade down don't even include the fact that players picked later in the draft get paid lower salaries, because the NFL collective bargaining agreement sets wages for the first few years of players' careers based on their draft slot. Saving money matters because all teams have to abide by a hard salary cap — this year, it's $133 million — so paying less to draft picks means more is left over for veteran players.

For every single spot in the draft, the researchers compared the amount of salary paid to a player with the value a team gets from him on the field. (For this analysis, they used a more sophisticated metric for value: they looked at the average statistical production yielded by a player taken at that spot of the draft between 1994 and 2008, then converted that into dollars, based on what teams paid a player with that level of production on the free agent market on average).

In the graph below, the red line is the actual salary paid to a player picked at each spot, the green line is the average performance provided, and the blue is the difference — the money you save drafting someone at that spot instead of having to pay more for a veteran free agent who'd play at a similar level.

Screen_shot_2014-05-05_at_1.52.36_pmMassey and Thaler 2012

The blue line peaks around pick 33, the start of the second round — making it the sweet spot in the draft. If you had to make one pick, this is where you'd get the most bang for your buck, because there's a pretty good chance of getting a productive player and he won't command a particularly high salary. But since you can get multiple picks by trading a single high one, maximizing value means moving down into round two (picks 33 through 64).

One caveat is that the salary data comes from picks made under the old NFL collective bargaining agreement, which paid players picked in the top 10 considerably higher salaries then they get currently. But the salaries for picks from 10 onward have barely changed — and because trading down is so much more fruitful, Massey says the argument still applies for the first round as a whole.

4) Teams that trade down more often win more games

The most straightforward piece of proof for all this analysis is the fact that trading down and amassing more pick value — in terms of the blue line in the graph above — correlates with more wins on the field.

Massey and Thaler came to this conclusion by looking at the number of wins a team had in any given season between 1997 and 2008, and the total value of all picks they'd made in the previous four years (the amount of time, on average, a rookie is under contract for).

They found that one standard deviation in pick value translated to 1.5 more wins per season on the field. Sure, it's a small sample size, and there's a lot of chance and other factors built into the system — a coach's strategy, for instance — but trading down correlates with a significant amount of victories, given that there are only 16 games in a season.

So why don't more NFL teams follow this advice?

174364155

Baltimore Ravens GM Ozzie Newsome knows how to draft. Photo by Rob Tringali/SportsChrome/Getty Images

If all teams took note of these findings and corrected their behavior, the principles would no longer apply. Teams would be much less interested in trading up, so the lucrative market for trading down would evaporate.

Why hasn't this happened? One answer is a widely-known psychological bias called the overconfidence effect. As people are given more information, the accuracy of their analysis often hits a ceiling, but their confidence in it continues to increase.

As people are given more information, the accuracy of their analysis hits a ceiling, but their confidence in it continues to increase

This tendency has been demonstrated in all sorts of areas, from bettors picking horses to psychologists making diagnoses. It's not hard to imagine that NFL general managers — who are given scouting reports on players that cover everything from their body fat percentage to their home life — fall victim to the same sort of overconfidence and, as Massey said, "fall in love" with certain players.

There's also the fact that the sports world as a whole tends to glamorize superstars — leading many to disproportionately attribute a 53-player roster's success to one or two highly drafted players. For a struggling GM, it might seem much easier to trade up and land a guaranteed superstar than patiently fill a roster with competent players.

The problem, though, is that there are no guaranteed superstars — and Thaler and Massey have found that, given a long enough timeframe, no teams are any better at accurately evaluating prospects than others. Sure, a GM might hit a hot streak over the course of a few drafts, but long-term, they estimate that 95 to 100 percent of the difference in teams' odds of striking gold with any one pick is driven by chance.

So the key isn't drafting better — it's just drafting more.

As Cassey noted, there are a few teams out there following his philosophy. In a recent interview, Eric DeCosta — assistant GM of the perennially-successful Baltimore Ravens — dropped a hint about the identity of one of them:

We look at the draft as, in some respects, a luck-driven process. The more picks you have, the more chances you have to get a good player. When we look at teams that draft well, it’s not necessarily that they’re drafting better than anybody else. It seems to be that they have more picks. There’s definitely a correlation between the amount of picks and drafting good players.


On iPad using BigFooty.com mobile app

There I was thinking Tolstoy was dead.

 

[Quokka]

https://www.heraldsun.com.au/sport/...ive-coverage/73f5018b71686a73038e0b20a61337aa


Pfff, trade week, trade week and a half Let's simplify this all down to one mother of a trade.


Mega deal: How Beams gets to Pies
Alistair Paton

PREPARE for the blockbuster trade of all trades.

Dayne Beams, Jesse Hogan, Lachie Neale and Steven May are all set to be part of a five-club deal that will leave Gold Coast with three of the top five picks in the draft.

Herald Sun trade experts Jay Clark and Jon Ralph said Melbourne had softened on its demand of two first-round picks from Fremantle for Hogan and an agreement between the two clubs could unlock a string of other high-profile swaps.

In the mega deal Brisbane would hand pick 5 to the Dockers for Lachie Neale, allowing them to release Dayne Beams to Collingwood.

Fremantle would pass pick 5 on to Melbourne for Hogan, which will send it to the Suns for Steven May.

Final details are still being hammered out and other draft picks will be involved, particularly to sweeten the Hogan deal although it will be short of the two first-round picks the Demons initially demanded. Melbourne will also end up with Gold Coast's Kade Kolodjashnij.

And will all happen at once.

"This will have to go as one deal because there's no way Brisbane will let go of Beams until they are absolutely certain they'll get Neale," Ralph said on today's episode of Trade TV.

"We might be in a situation where nothing happens on this whole deal until 8.24pm (tomorrow night) and then it all just goes bang and every one of those dominos falls.

"They'll all have to do this deal at the same time so they all ensure no one backs out of it and no one gets left holding the baby."

 

[Taylor]

Only the biggest trade of all time haha

 

[Square Peg]

I stopped at 'trade expert Jon Ralph said'

 

[guidodp15]

Interesting article supporting trading down for more picks , this is more a summary chase up the research if you want the full picture

How NFL teams ignore basic economics and draft players irrationally

For non-football fans: this is when NFL teams select college football players to add to their rosters, the new players awkwardly hold up jerseys with the number one on them, and football fans everywhere freak out. The worst teams are given the highest picks, and if they want to improve, they need to use them as shrewdly as possible.

Teams that succeed — like the Seattle Seahawks, winners of this past season's Super Bowl — tend to build their rosters heavily through the draft, and merely supplement their drafted talent through trades and free agency. NFL executives invest huge amounts of time and resources into scouting players and ranking them, hoping to draft stars in the first round and solid contributors later on.

it's not their imperfect player evaluation, but their refusal to follow the principle of risk diversification

But here's the thing: despite years of data, most NFL teams still have no idea how to work the draft most effectively.

It's not their imperfect player evaluation, but something more basic — their refusal to follow the principle of risk diversification. That's the conclusion economists Cade Massey and Richard Thaler came to after analyzing fifteen years of draft data in a series of papers — and it's still true, despite recent changes to the wages rookies are paid.

Draft picks can be traded, and the success of any one player picked is highly uncertain. Because of that, their data says that in the current trade market, teams are always better off trading down — that is, trading one high pick for multiple lower ones — but many teams become overconfident in their evaluation of one particular player and do the exact opposite: package several low picks for the right to take one player very early.

"There are one or two teams out there that philosophically follow this idea," says Massey, who serves as a draft consultant with several NFL teams that he can't disclose. "But in my experience, teams always say they're on board with it in January. Then when April rolls around, and they've been preparing for the draft for a long time, they fall in love with players, get more and more confident in their analysis, and fall back into the same patterns."

3464206

A babyfaced Eli Manning: not worth what the Giants gave up to get the first pick. Photo by Chris Trotman/Getty Images

1) It's just not worth it to trade up

The first analysis Massey and Thaler did was to compare what teams are willing to pay to pick higher (in terms of extra draft picks packaged as part of a trade) with the value they ultimately get out of doing so, in terms of player production.

To calculate how much teams pay to trade up, they looked at 1,078 trades made between 1990 and 2008. The trades work something like this: a team will trade the 16th and 32nd overall picks, say, for the 5th overall pick. They might also include picks from next year's draft.

Massey and Thaler graphed all trades, which let them assign a relative value to each pick in the first five rounds of the draft:

Screen_shot_2014-05-05_at_12.55.38_pm


Massey and Thaler 2012

The most important thing about this graph: the curve is very, very sharp in the first round (picks 1 through 32). That means teams think the very top picks are extremely valuable: the value of the 10th pick is only about half that of the first pick.

Now, it's worth pointing out that for years, most teams followed something called "The Chart," which assigned theoretically fair point values to each pick in the draft for trade purposes. Since 2008, many teams have smartly stopped treating "The Chart" as gospel, and the curve has become slightly less steep.

But Massey says it still hasn't flattened out to anything near where it should be, in terms of the actual value derived from the players picked.

He and Thaler figured this out by calculating the odds that the first player picked at any given position will perform better — in terms of the number of games he starts in his first five seasons — than the second player drafted at that position. This is relevant because a team will often trade up when they identify a player they prefer at a needed position: they need a wide receiver, and a few highly-rated ones are available, but they trade up because they're certain one is much better.

But the data says that teams just aren't very good at figuring out when this is true. On average, the chance that first player will start more games than the second one picked at his position: 52 percent. Compared to the third, it's still only 55 percent, and compared to the fourth, it's merely 56 percent.

the chance that the first player picked at a position will start more games than the second is just 52 percent

These numbers suggest that moving up eight picks (the average distance between the first and second players at the same position) should cost a small amount, since you're only increasing the odds of a getting a more productive player by four percent or so. But as the steep curve shows, teams pay a ton to move up, especially at the top of the draft.

"It's basically a coin flip," Massey says, "but teams are paying a great deal for the right to call which side of the coin."

One recent trade epitomizes this point — and shows that even in the post-"Chart" era, teams still overvalue the highest picks. In 2012, the Washington football team traded the 6th pick, the 39th pick, and their first round picks in 2013 and 2014 to the St. Louis Rams so they could move up four spots and take Robert Griffin III — a player they were certain was a once-in-a-lifetime quarterback — with the second overall pick.

Just two years later, the trade already looks pretty shortsighted. That's not because Griffin is a bad player (he's almost one of the few that might make a crazy trade like this seem worthwhile), but because the odds of getting a great player with one high pick are so much lower than getting one with four high picks.

The team would've been better served sitting tight and just drafting the next-best quarterback (Ryan Tannehill) and using the other three picks on much-needed players. Or they could have waited and drafted a quarterback this year — say, Johnny Manziel — when they would've had the 2nd overall pick themselves if they hadn't made the trade.

2) It really pays off to trade down


470194287

Philip Rivers: just part of the valuable package the Giants gave up to take Eli Manning. Photo by Christian Petersen/Getty Images

Given that teams, on the whole, are irrationally willing to pay a lot to trade up, smart teams can reap huge benefits by trading down. Even staying put and drafting from your original spot, the researchers' analysis shows, is not a good strategy.

For each pick in the first round, they calculated all of the different two-pick packages a team could've gotten by trading down, based on the historical data (a team with the first pick, for instance, could get the 2nd and 181st picks, or the 14th and 15th picks, or any combination of picks in between that provide the same sum value).

teams are imperfect talent evaluators, so having two later picks is better than a single early one

Then they calculated what teams get out of these picks on average, in terms of the number of starts a player provides in his first five years and the number of Pro Bowls he's voted to. (They included Pro Bowls to counter the criticism that their analysis ignores the unique impact of superstar players solely available in the first few picks.)

Again, the data was unequivocal. On average, trading down and getting two players gave a team five more starts per season and slightly more total Pro Bowls.

You could chalk this up to the simple fact that more players start more games, but it's more than that. Even if you imagined that the team trading down could only keep the better one of the two players it drafted, it'd still get slightly more total starts and the same number of Pro Bowls. The truth is that teams are imperfect talent evaluators, so having two later picks is better than a single early one. Risk diversification at work.

3) Players picked lower are cheaper

All of these reasons to trade down don't even include the fact that players picked later in the draft get paid lower salaries, because the NFL collective bargaining agreement sets wages for the first few years of players' careers based on their draft slot. Saving money matters because all teams have to abide by a hard salary cap — this year, it's $133 million — so paying less to draft picks means more is left over for veteran players.

For every single spot in the draft, the researchers compared the amount of salary paid to a player with the value a team gets from him on the field. (For this analysis, they used a more sophisticated metric for value: they looked at the average statistical production yielded by a player taken at that spot of the draft between 1994 and 2008, then converted that into dollars, based on what teams paid a player with that level of production on the free agent market on average).

In the graph below, the red line is the actual salary paid to a player picked at each spot, the green line is the average performance provided, and the blue is the difference — the money you save drafting someone at that spot instead of having to pay more for a veteran free agent who'd play at a similar level.

Screen_shot_2014-05-05_at_1.52.36_pmMassey and Thaler 2012

The blue line peaks around pick 33, the start of the second round — making it the sweet spot in the draft. If you had to make one pick, this is where you'd get the most bang for your buck, because there's a pretty good chance of getting a productive player and he won't command a particularly high salary. But since you can get multiple picks by trading a single high one, maximizing value means moving down into round two (picks 33 through 64).

One caveat is that the salary data comes from picks made under the old NFL collective bargaining agreement, which paid players picked in the top 10 considerably higher salaries then they get currently. But the salaries for picks from 10 onward have barely changed — and because trading down is so much more fruitful, Massey says the argument still applies for the first round as a whole.

4) Teams that trade down more often win more games

The most straightforward piece of proof for all this analysis is the fact that trading down and amassing more pick value — in terms of the blue line in the graph above — correlates with more wins on the field.

Massey and Thaler came to this conclusion by looking at the number of wins a team had in any given season between 1997 and 2008, and the total value of all picks they'd made in the previous four years (the amount of time, on average, a rookie is under contract for).

They found that one standard deviation in pick value translated to 1.5 more wins per season on the field. Sure, it's a small sample size, and there's a lot of chance and other factors built into the system — a coach's strategy, for instance — but trading down correlates with a significant amount of victories, given that there are only 16 games in a season.

So why don't more NFL teams follow this advice?

174364155

Baltimore Ravens GM Ozzie Newsome knows how to draft. Photo by Rob Tringali/SportsChrome/Getty Images

If all teams took note of these findings and corrected their behavior, the principles would no longer apply. Teams would be much less interested in trading up, so the lucrative market for trading down would evaporate.

Why hasn't this happened? One answer is a widely-known psychological bias called the overconfidence effect. As people are given more information, the accuracy of their analysis often hits a ceiling, but their confidence in it continues to increase.

As people are given more information, the accuracy of their analysis hits a ceiling, but their confidence in it continues to increase

This tendency has been demonstrated in all sorts of areas, from bettors picking horses to psychologists making diagnoses. It's not hard to imagine that NFL general managers — who are given scouting reports on players that cover everything from their body fat percentage to their home life — fall victim to the same sort of overconfidence and, as Massey said, "fall in love" with certain players.

There's also the fact that the sports world as a whole tends to glamorize superstars — leading many to disproportionately attribute a 53-player roster's success to one or two highly drafted players. For a struggling GM, it might seem much easier to trade up and land a guaranteed superstar than patiently fill a roster with competent players.

The problem, though, is that there are no guaranteed superstars — and Thaler and Massey have found that, given a long enough timeframe, no teams are any better at accurately evaluating prospects than others. Sure, a GM might hit a hot streak over the course of a few drafts, but long-term, they estimate that 95 to 100 percent of the difference in teams' odds of striking gold with any one pick is driven by chance.

So the key isn't drafting better — it's just drafting more.

As Cassey noted, there are a few teams out there following his philosophy. In a recent interview, Eric DeCosta — assistant GM of the perennially-successful Baltimore Ravens — dropped a hint about the identity of one of them:

We look at the draft as, in some respects, a luck-driven process. The more picks you have, the more chances you have to get a good player. When we look at teams that draft well, it’s not necessarily that they’re drafting better than anybody else. It seems to be that they have more picks. There’s definitely a correlation between the amount of picks and drafting good players.


On iPad using BigFooty.com mobile app

watch the documentary of Philadelphia 76eres re building through the draft.

 

[wayToGo_]

I stopped at 'trade expert Jon Ralph said'

You got further than me... I saw Herald Sun and... gone.

 

[Galapagoose]

https://www.heraldsun.com.au/sport/...ive-coverage/73f5018b71686a73038e0b20a61337aa


Pfff, trade week, trade week and a half Let's simplify this all down to one mother of a trade.


Mega deal: How Beams gets to Pies
Alistair Paton

PREPARE for the blockbuster trade of all trades.

Dayne Beams, Jesse Hogan, Lachie Neale and Steven May are all set to be part of a five-club deal that will leave Gold Coast with three of the top five picks in the draft.

Herald Sun trade experts Jay Clark and Jon Ralph said Melbourne had softened on its demand of two first-round picks from Fremantle for Hogan and an agreement between the two clubs could unlock a string of other high-profile swaps.

In the mega deal Brisbane would hand pick 5 to the Dockers for Lachie Neale, allowing them to release Dayne Beams to Collingwood.

Fremantle would pass pick 5 on to Melbourne for Hogan, which will send it to the Suns for Steven May.

Final details are still being hammered out and other draft picks will be involved, particularly to sweeten the Hogan deal although it will be short of the two first-round picks the Demons initially demanded. Melbourne will also end up with Gold Coast's Kade Kolodjashnij.

And will all happen at once.

"This will have to go as one deal because there's no way Brisbane will let go of Beams until they are absolutely certain they'll get Neale," Ralph said on today's episode of Trade TV.

"We might be in a situation where nothing happens on this whole deal until 8.24pm (tomorrow night) and then it all just goes bang and every one of those dominos falls.

"They'll all have to do this deal at the same time so they all ensure no one backs out of it and no one gets left holding the baby."

Freo: In Hogan and pick 19 Out Neale
Brisbane: In Neale, Collingwood's 2019 first Out Beams and pick 5
Pies: In Beams Out pick 18 and 2019 first
Suns: In Pick 5 Out May and pick 19
Dees: In May and pick 18 Out Hogan

 

[purplerunsdeep]

watch the documentary of Philadelphia 76eres re building through the draft.

Where can I find this?


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

[Admiral Byng]

I hope something happens to break the deadlock before time expires.

 

[FreoGirl]

What’s holding up Lobb? Are we hoping to use some ‘small change’ from the Lachie deal?

 

[Dale147]

From a Freo perspective, the drafts from 2008-11 had comfortably the highest net of draft picks than any other four year period in their history (including the innagural four years) and netted players of the calibre of Fyfe, Hill, Ballantyne, Walters, Suban, Morabito, Roberton, Barlow, de Boer, Neale.

On the other hand here's a list of the picks by number selected (up to 2016):

1
Clive Waterhouse
Jeff White
2
Justin Longmuir
Paul Hasleby
3
Stephen Hill
4
Anthony Morabito
Graham Polak
Matthew Pavlich
5
Leigh Brown
6
James Walker
7
Ben Edwards
Rhys Palmer
8
Griffin Logue
10
Marcus Drum
Ryley Dunn
12
Heath Black
Ryan Murphy
13
Brad Rowe
Byron Schammer
Lachie Weller
16
Tom Sheridan
17
Josh Simpson
Michael Apeness
18
Daniel Schell
19
David Mundy
20
Hayden Crozier
Jayden Pitt
Nat Fyfe
21
Clem Michael
Hayden Ballantyne
22
Winston Abraham
23
Jay Burton
24
Clayton Hinkley
Nick Suban
26
Brodie Holland
Garrick Ibbotson
27
Adam Campbell
Darcy Tucker
29
Alex Forster
31
Clayton Collard
Jess Sinclair
32
Troy Johnson
34
Connor Blakely
36
Joel Houghton
Tanner Smith
37
Alex Pearce
Zac Clarke
38
Harley Balic
Sean Darcy
39
Adam McPhee
Max Duffy
40
Chris Mayne
41
Brennan Cox
42
Doug Headland
Robert Warnock
43
Brett Peake
44
Viv Michie
46
Adam Butler
Matthew Clucas
48
Greg Edgcumbe
Jesse Crichton
49
Ben Cunningham
Dylan Roberton
Garth Taylor
51
Dion Woods
52
Andrew R. Browne
Brock O'Brien
Justin Bollenhagen
53
Michael Walters
54
Ed Langdon
55
Mark Johnson
Ryan Crowley
Samuel Collins
56
Ben Bucovaz
Josh Mellington
Paul Medhurst
Ryan Smith
58
Brady Grey
Lachie Neale
59
Benet Copping
61
Shane Yarran
63
Brett Doswell
64
Andrew Shipp
66
Luke Ryan
Scott Thornton
67
Toby Stribling
68
Josh Deluca-Cardillo
Tim Ruffles
69
Daniel Haines
Kepler Bradley
70
Matt Taberner*
71
Cameron Sutcliffe
72
Dean Grainger
73
Sam McFarlane
77
Calib Mourish
Chris R. Hall
78
Clancee Pearce*
79
Greg Broughton*
83
Nick Lower*
87
Michael Barlow*
93
Lee Spurr*
100
Matt de Boer*
109
Alex Silvagni*
112
Jay van Berlo*

Gee, we struck out a bit.

 

[mike91]

What’s holding up Lobb? Are we hoping to use some ‘small change’ from the Lachie deal?

Hope so. Keep #11 ffs!

 

[Mr Fonebone]

Freo: In Hogan and pick 19 Out Neale
Brisbane: In Neale, Collingwood's 2019 first Out Beams
Pies: In Beams Out pick 18 and 2019 first
Suns: In Pick 5 Out May and pick 19
Dees: In May and pick 18 Out Hogan

So how does Brisbane pay for Neale?

 

[Cayman Docker]

What’s holding up Lobb? Are we hoping to use some ‘small change’ from the Lachie deal?

Lobb for 11 plus a return pick in the teens.... apparently.