choconmientay
22-10-2016, 10:17 AM
Old news but seeing the draft is ahead of us, this article is worth a visit.
LINK (http://www.theage.com.au/afl/western-bulldogs-draft-strategy-a-recipe-for-success-20161009-gry8hm.html)
Trade period, free agency, the draft. Over the next month all AFL clubs will shape the lists they hope will carry them to success. How do you do it?
The premier team sets the standard and becomes the touchstone for the competition. So, how did the Bulldogs do it?
Hawthorn built a premiership dynasty on a list philosophy that, to oversimplify, put a primacy on kicking. At the draft and trade tables they chased players who could better their team but firstly they needed to be able to kick well.Their game plan was founded on elite kicking. So their players needed to be elite kicks. It worked. They won flags by moving the ball with better kicks than any other team.
Graham Wright used all tools available to build that list – the draft, trades and free agency. He cannily cherry-picked talent – Brian Lake, David Hale, Josh Gibson, Jack Gunston Shaun Burgoyne, James Frawley, Ben McEvoy – through trades or free agency to target holes in the list and complement their drafted talent.
They did not require elite kicking to the exclusion of everything else: being able to win your own ball; speed; taking a mark; X factor; leadership or running all day, but certain kicking standards needed to be met.
The Western Bulldogs did not do that. The Dogs had players this year whose kicking meant they would not have caught the eye at Hawthorn or many other clubs. Josh Dunkley's kicking was a significant reason Sydney opted against taking the father-son discounted offering.
Clay Smith too was such a ragged kick few felt his doughty hardness sufficiently compensated for. Of course Collingwood saw flaws in Liam Picken's game years earlier and chose not to take him as the son of a loved son.
Jake Stringer's broken leg at 17 dissuaded some at the very top end of the draft. Some clubs were wary that the teenage Marcus Bontempelli's best play tended to come in games which his teams won heavily and would not have used a pick as valuable as the Bulldogs used in 2013(No.4).
http://www.theage.com.au/content/dam/images/g/r/i/i/i/3/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gry8hm.png/1476052791640.jpg
Bulldog Josh Dunkley made up for his poor kicking in other ways. Photo: AFL Media
Caleb Daniel's size put other teams off taking him at the pointy end of the draft. Some would not have taken him at all because of his size but others would have looked at him late in the draft. The Dogs took him at pick No.46.
Bulldogs recruiter Simon Dalrymple was prepared to overlook warts if there was beauty beneath. He took a view that one deficient skill or attribute could be offset by elite skills in other areas – but players had to be elite at something.
"We took a philosophy of looking at what the player could do rather than what they couldn't," Dalrymple said.
So the poor kicking of Smith and Dunkley would be compensated for with their hardness, , the ability to win their own ball or mark overhead. The decision making, clever kicking and, more importantly, the role that Daniel was wanted for, meant his diminutive size was incidental.
"Jason Johannisen was never going to be an inside player but like Luke Dahlhaus, who we took in the same rookie draft, the way JJ ran in transition was a standout quality," Dalrymple said.
"And they were in the same year that we acquired Mitch Wallis and Tom Liberatore as father sons so we knew we had good inside players and we wanted players who could cover the ground."
It's a glass half-full recruiting approach. You can almost always mount an argument for why not to take a player, but mounting arguments to take them can be more persuasive.
The wealthy Tom Boyd trade paid its biggest dividend on grand final day and attracted attention for helping to elevate the Dogs to an elusive flag, but the Bulldogs' premiership team was more rooted in the draft than in its traded players.
Only three Bulldogs premiership players were trades (Boyd, Joel Hamling and Shane Biggs). Fourteen of them were recruited by Dalrymple and five by Scott Clayton who preceded him in the role before moving to Gold Coast.
The contributions this year of five Clayton-recruited players also reflects something that Emma Quayle pointed out last week: the Dogs retained mature talent and enjoyed the quickest draft-led bounce or rebuild of any team - from preliminary finalists to finals five years later and premiers in the sixth. All while the new expansion teams were diluting the drafts.
Perhaps equally remarkable was the fact that the Bulldogs achieved their success paying less than the full salary cap and with a recruiting department budget in the bottom quartile of AFL spends.
"We started to have some early picks so it was about not being afraid to be bold in the decision making but it needed to be based on sound fundamentals so a lot of work was done on their character, their athletic qualities, psych profile and their ability to play. That was Stringer, Macrae, Bont.
"Macrae what he is doing is consistent with his behaviour as an 18 year old – resilient with enormous self-belief but not in a smart-arse way.
"Then there was the father-son stuff and our timing was good for those players coming in but there was also a lot of work done on those players before the draft working with them."
Hunter fell through to pick 49 because he is a bit messy and has a funny running gait but he is one of the Dogs' best endurance runners and has a cunningness in finding the ball.
"The 2014 draft when we had all those guys walk out we had five picks between 26 and 46 it was not a time to experiment," Dalrymple said.
There is no one path to success, the Bulldogs won with that approach this year, others will take a slightly different approach and win next year. Coaches have different game plans which require players with different attributes. Different recruiters take different approaches but most are underpinned by similar fundamentals and it is only in the shades of grey at which there is dispute.
This year it was the Bulldogs' shades of grey that delivered.
LINK (http://www.theage.com.au/afl/western-bulldogs-draft-strategy-a-recipe-for-success-20161009-gry8hm.html)
Trade period, free agency, the draft. Over the next month all AFL clubs will shape the lists they hope will carry them to success. How do you do it?
The premier team sets the standard and becomes the touchstone for the competition. So, how did the Bulldogs do it?
Hawthorn built a premiership dynasty on a list philosophy that, to oversimplify, put a primacy on kicking. At the draft and trade tables they chased players who could better their team but firstly they needed to be able to kick well.Their game plan was founded on elite kicking. So their players needed to be elite kicks. It worked. They won flags by moving the ball with better kicks than any other team.
Graham Wright used all tools available to build that list – the draft, trades and free agency. He cannily cherry-picked talent – Brian Lake, David Hale, Josh Gibson, Jack Gunston Shaun Burgoyne, James Frawley, Ben McEvoy – through trades or free agency to target holes in the list and complement their drafted talent.
They did not require elite kicking to the exclusion of everything else: being able to win your own ball; speed; taking a mark; X factor; leadership or running all day, but certain kicking standards needed to be met.
The Western Bulldogs did not do that. The Dogs had players this year whose kicking meant they would not have caught the eye at Hawthorn or many other clubs. Josh Dunkley's kicking was a significant reason Sydney opted against taking the father-son discounted offering.
Clay Smith too was such a ragged kick few felt his doughty hardness sufficiently compensated for. Of course Collingwood saw flaws in Liam Picken's game years earlier and chose not to take him as the son of a loved son.
Jake Stringer's broken leg at 17 dissuaded some at the very top end of the draft. Some clubs were wary that the teenage Marcus Bontempelli's best play tended to come in games which his teams won heavily and would not have used a pick as valuable as the Bulldogs used in 2013(No.4).
http://www.theage.com.au/content/dam/images/g/r/i/i/i/3/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gry8hm.png/1476052791640.jpg
Bulldog Josh Dunkley made up for his poor kicking in other ways. Photo: AFL Media
Caleb Daniel's size put other teams off taking him at the pointy end of the draft. Some would not have taken him at all because of his size but others would have looked at him late in the draft. The Dogs took him at pick No.46.
Bulldogs recruiter Simon Dalrymple was prepared to overlook warts if there was beauty beneath. He took a view that one deficient skill or attribute could be offset by elite skills in other areas – but players had to be elite at something.
"We took a philosophy of looking at what the player could do rather than what they couldn't," Dalrymple said.
So the poor kicking of Smith and Dunkley would be compensated for with their hardness, , the ability to win their own ball or mark overhead. The decision making, clever kicking and, more importantly, the role that Daniel was wanted for, meant his diminutive size was incidental.
"Jason Johannisen was never going to be an inside player but like Luke Dahlhaus, who we took in the same rookie draft, the way JJ ran in transition was a standout quality," Dalrymple said.
"And they were in the same year that we acquired Mitch Wallis and Tom Liberatore as father sons so we knew we had good inside players and we wanted players who could cover the ground."
It's a glass half-full recruiting approach. You can almost always mount an argument for why not to take a player, but mounting arguments to take them can be more persuasive.
The wealthy Tom Boyd trade paid its biggest dividend on grand final day and attracted attention for helping to elevate the Dogs to an elusive flag, but the Bulldogs' premiership team was more rooted in the draft than in its traded players.
Only three Bulldogs premiership players were trades (Boyd, Joel Hamling and Shane Biggs). Fourteen of them were recruited by Dalrymple and five by Scott Clayton who preceded him in the role before moving to Gold Coast.
The contributions this year of five Clayton-recruited players also reflects something that Emma Quayle pointed out last week: the Dogs retained mature talent and enjoyed the quickest draft-led bounce or rebuild of any team - from preliminary finalists to finals five years later and premiers in the sixth. All while the new expansion teams were diluting the drafts.
Perhaps equally remarkable was the fact that the Bulldogs achieved their success paying less than the full salary cap and with a recruiting department budget in the bottom quartile of AFL spends.
"We started to have some early picks so it was about not being afraid to be bold in the decision making but it needed to be based on sound fundamentals so a lot of work was done on their character, their athletic qualities, psych profile and their ability to play. That was Stringer, Macrae, Bont.
"Macrae what he is doing is consistent with his behaviour as an 18 year old – resilient with enormous self-belief but not in a smart-arse way.
"Then there was the father-son stuff and our timing was good for those players coming in but there was also a lot of work done on those players before the draft working with them."
Hunter fell through to pick 49 because he is a bit messy and has a funny running gait but he is one of the Dogs' best endurance runners and has a cunningness in finding the ball.
"The 2014 draft when we had all those guys walk out we had five picks between 26 and 46 it was not a time to experiment," Dalrymple said.
There is no one path to success, the Bulldogs won with that approach this year, others will take a slightly different approach and win next year. Coaches have different game plans which require players with different attributes. Different recruiters take different approaches but most are underpinned by similar fundamentals and it is only in the shades of grey at which there is dispute.
This year it was the Bulldogs' shades of grey that delivered.