AFL trade period: late deals follow usual inanity and absurdity

To abbreviate the infinite monkey theorem, a thousand monkeys given laptops and AFL media accreditation will eventually type the complete works of William Shakespeare… or at a pinch, Will Schofield.

While progress on Much Ado About Nothing would have been sluggish during the 11 days of the AFL trade period, in one corner of the room it is possible that a monkey may have blown through 600 words on the Bulldogs’ Jake Stringer, two second-round Essendon selections and pick 13 from West Coast. Although if there’s an analogy to be made about monkeys and the trade period it’s likely a scatological one given the amount of shit that gets picked up and tossed around.

Each year it seems the raison d’être of the trade period is not player movement, but content. Prior to the 2pm Thursday deadline, hundreds of pages of innuendo, guesswork and repurposed player agent media releases had been exhausted, and 136 hours of AFL Trade Radio had been broadcast, where words wear caps with tiny propellers and transactions are celebrated rather than questioned.

But now the dust has settled after a crazy 22 trades on the final day, the poetry of spit balling, speculation and clickbait is replaced with the prose of punditry – namely the winners and losers.

Perhaps the most significant player to switch clubs was Carlton’s Bryce Gibbs, who will move to Adelaide following a year of speculation. Twelve months ago, when the prospect of a trade was first raised, the Crows’ list manager Justin Reid said, “it would have been irresponsible to give two first-round draft picks” for Gibbs. On Thursday morning, he succumbed to the moment’s potential, because the response to rejecting an A-Grade midfielder after losing a grand final would have been fundamentally more hostile than it had been the year before.

In a complicated deal, Adelaide sent picks 10,16 and 73 across the border to Carlton, as well as swapping second-round picks in next year’s draft. Along with Gibbs, they get pick 77 in this year’s draft. In one of the last deals of the trade period, Adelaide bought their way back into the draft’s first round by agreeing to send Charlie Cameron to Brisbane for pick 12.

Both Adelaide and Carlton are likely to benefit from the Gibbs trade. The 2006 No1 draft pick will have an immediate impact as part of a Crows midfield that was arguably the competition’s best, right up until the point where it really mattered. Over the past three years, Gibbs has perhaps come closest to realising his potential. For much of his career at Carlton, there was always a sense of something being held in reserve, but you sense at home in Adelaide that Gibbs’s best football is perhaps yet to be played.

In return, Carlton now has three first-round draft picks to continue list manager-slash-saviour Stephen Silvagni’s extensive rebuild. Carlton also filled its midfield’s Gibbs-shaped hole with Giant Matthew Kennedy for pick 28 and Geelong’s Darcy Lang in a deal involving fourth-round picks. In perhaps its only misstep of the trade period, the club failed to understand the concept of a “salary dump” when taking on the contract of Port Adelaide’s back-up ruckman Matthew Lobbe, believed to be two years at about $500,000 a season. Usually a salary dump involves getting something in return for taking on an unfavourable contract. Instead, Carlton were like the weekenders who a buy a $12 punnet of strawberries at the farmgate, knowing neither the value of strawberries nor of $12.

In addition to no longer being burdened by Lobbe’s salary, Port Adelaide has been able to bank nearly a million dollars of salary cap space – largely due to the salaries of Paddy Ryder and Angus Monfries being paid for by Essendon – as well as create a little more salary cap room by not affording their players an automatic pay increase in line with the recent AFL collective bargaining agreement. With money to burn, they splurged on Steven Motlop, Tom Rockliff and the oft maligned (or depending on your view, oft misunderstood) Jack Watts. While fools may rush in where wise men fear to tread, radio station SEN’s in-house pundit and self-proclaimed “list manager” went out on the longest of limbs by suggesting that having picked up three players that will be in their best 22, Port Adelaide will… improve.

It is difficult to mount an argument to suggest Essendon will not improve, having also added three ready-made, best-22 players to their list without having to give away much in return. The Bombers swung Devon Smith, Adam Saad, and after an 11^th-hour backdown from the Bulldogs, former All-Australian Jake Stringer for what was effectively pick 11, picks 25 and 30 and some future second and third-rounders. Then again, regarding Stringer, rarely do you need to pay full-retail for a soiled mattress advertised on someone’s front lawn, regardless of its credentials. Still it is a relatively low-risk, high-reward play for the Bombers, largely dependent on Stringer sorting out his life off the field.

Luke Hodge found further opportunities – two years of them – in Brisbane, after what effectively was a good will gesture by Hawthorn. The benefit of having the former Hawks captain at the Gabba extends beyond his ability off a half-back-flank and to providing the young Lions with an ideal mentor as he transitions into a coaching role.

News from down the Pacific Motorway was not quite as positive. While the Gold Coast Suns did as well as they could have from the enviable situation of Gary Ablett Junior wanting to return home (trading up from 24 to 19 in this year’s draft and effectively swapping a 2018 fourth-round pick for a second-round one), they lost their mind in a two-and-a-half-minutes to midnight move, giving away pick 2 – pick 2! – for Fremantle’s Lachie Weller. It was a move that outdid all the inanity, absurdity and nonsense of the previous 10 days. It’s hard to imagine any number of monkeys coming up with something so remarkable.