Drafting players to manage a list depends very much on having a strategy that allows for all aspects of a teams needs to be covered in a limited number of draft picks. Its no secret that most of the quality players will be selected in the first round, while other good players can be found in the second and third rounds. After that, finding good players is a pretty rare event.
Given that, most teams have 2 or 3 good picks avialbale to them. You can add the Rookie List players that you can develop over a period of time then upgrade with late picks. If that is managed well, a team can have somewhere between 2 - 5 picks ina year to extract good quality players, sometimes more if you can identify good players deep into a draft or if you can develop players that initially don't appear to be great quality.
In 2015 we had 3 retirements (Sylvia, McPharlin, Duffield) and 7 delistings (Ballard, Crowley, Deluca (rookied), Duffy, Moller Morabito (rookied), Vandeleur)
In 2016 we 1 retirement (Pavlich) and 11 delistings (De Boer, Barlow, Mzungu, Pearce C, Silvagni, Hannath, Grey (rookied), Morabito, Smith, Deluca (rookied), Hurley)
In 2017, we had 3 retirements (Yarran, Dawson, Ibbotson) and 6 delistings (Clarke, Collins, Ubergang, Griffin, Suban, Deluca)
In 3 off seasons that has resulted in 7 retirements and 24 delistings. Even redrafting some onto the Rookie List, that is unsustainable to have that many delistings in such a short time. The result for us now is we cannot shift any more dead wood. We have to carry what we have for at least one season and maybe two seasons because we didn't manage our list all that well. Drafting and delisting Deluca every year is a case in point. Delisting blokes that were still useful didn't help much as well.
Isd all this the fault of the List Manager? In my view, a lot of this falls on his shoulders but not all of it. How much is a failure by the coaches to develop identified talent and how much is a failure to correctly identify that talent. Its almost impossible to point to any player and say bad choice or bad development but it is fair to say that as a club, we have been doing things rather badly for some time. That all falls under the Bond, Chris Bond in particular but Lloyd doesn't get a pass and neither does the coaching panel.
It beggars belief that we can review our progress each off season and have those blokes all getting a pass mark.
* Traded players were not included as they tend to be pick neutral ie player out for a pick to get a player in
