The Soaring

Saturday November 26th the 2005 AFL draft will be held and for a Eagles’ fans it will be a chance to acquaint ourselves with 3 more potential superstars of the Blue and Gold.

In honour of what it probably the high mark of the off-season, I thought I’d rate my top 5 West Coast Eagles drafts of all time.

It’s a tricky exercise given the fluky nature of the early drafts and the concessions and limitations that those drafts had on them. I will also consider only selections in the national draft, excluding trades and pre-season or rookie selections. So taking all that into considerations, and starting today, I give you the best 5 Novembers the mighty Eagles have had in reverse order.

5. National Draft of 1996

#1 Michael S. Gardiner
#24 Josh Wooden
#39 Nicholas Stone
#53 Michael Braun
#57 Trent Cummings

When I started looking closely at our draft history for this post series I realised just how many complete duffer drafts we’ve really had. There’s a prevailing thought that we are generally good at the drafting and associated list management game(s), and relatively speaking that may be true. But that doesn’t account for the total dud drafting sandwiching this draft in 1995 and, 1997 and 1998. Truly terrible.

So maybe I have over estimated this draft, or maybe not.

Overall, for a draft 9 seasons past to have 3 of your 5 selections still on your list and playing good football is a mark of quality drafting. I am unsure of the success rate of drafting (how many players make it to 20 games) but I’d assume safely it is much much less than the 80% success rate seen here.

Selection no.1 overall in this draft was young ruckman Michael Gardiner. Aside from injury concerns and rumoured “Northbridge identity connections”, Gardiner has been a premier AFL player for the Eagles since debuting in 1997.

I suspect if we had this pick over again, we’d take the same player and there are not many selections about which you could say that. Gardiner has been an All Australian and dominant player injury permitting, whether he can extend that with another injury free run could be the difference between Gardy being in the top 50 Eagles of all time and the top 22.

Josh Wooden at No. 24 is an interesting one. The perennial fringe player he has managed to rack up over 90 games in the blue and gold without ever asserting himself as a first 22 player. He debuted in round 1 1997 and played 18 games that season but only once since then has he played more than 13 games in a season.

He’s polarised Eagle’s fans over the years due to his unfashionable style of play, however, his barnstorming finish to the 2004 season when he averaged 18 possessions per game during 2004’s last 9 games, and the fact he has endured 9 seasons on our list is reason enough to rank his drafting as successful in my book.

In 2005, Michael Braun became the first non-West Australian born player to get life membership of the West Coast Eagles when he reached his 150 game milestone. This is a significant milestone for a player taken #53 in the draft, and adds credence to the quality of this draft in WCE history.

I am a big Michael Braun fan. He is not a superstar in a what is a star studded midfield but rarely will you find a player who works harder, busting his gut when lesser players will not. Disco, gets huge respect from me in this regard. In fact the the Brauny spirit is nicely summed up in a Ch 10 stat from 2005 that showed Braun was one of the leading possession winners in the red-time, or last 5 minutes, of each quarter. A fragile player mid career Braun has been a consistent contributer in recent seasons, missing the 2005 GF and breaking a run of 63 games.

Nick Stone was a mature aged recruit and was a useful stop gap measure in a number of defensive posts. He became symbolic of the downfall of the Malthouse era with too stop-gap measures and not enough long term recruiting. Played 33 games with the club.

Trent Cummings is an interesting footnote. Drafted from Fitzroy, he played 2 games for the Eagles before a chronic knee injury curtailed his career. Is now more infamous for suing the club for negligence in regards to his injury than anything he did on the football field.

Overall, this was a successful draft for the Eagles. The high pick, Gardiner, has been a long term success, the mid-range and late picks (Braun, Wooden, Stone and Cummings) have provided the club with almost 300 games (to end 2005) which is outstanding. Add to this the selection of David Wirrpunda with a compensation selection for Tony Godden going to the Dockers (don’t laugh) and it was a highly profitable off-season for the club, thus making 1996 the No. 5 all-time best draft for the Eagles.

No 4. to 1. coming soon…