I don't think we necessarily saw it that way at all, we just wanted a quick turnaround, a la Sydney after 2009 and elected to target those who are young and very talented, but who have been in the system for at least a couple of years and will be ready to come straight in and make an impact for us next year, like we did with Saad and Milera last year, who A: came in and made a difference straight away and B: Look like they could play a lot of good footy for years to come.You mean the list in such dire need of 20-24 year olds that they felt the need to trade a first rounder for a once delisted, WAFL player, and another for GC's 3rd ruck (I'm a fan of Hickey btw)? Your current list is a shadow of it's past one. But lets not reduce this argument to a shit fight over our lists.
There is no rule that says you can only rebuild by targeting only those who are 18 years old, who BTW, are more of a a gamble, due to the fact they are generally unproven at any sort of senior level footy. Doing it this way just enables us to skip most of the development years and takes a lot of the guesswork out of whether they are going to be able to handle the step up, professionalism required and so on. That is also why they have cost a fair bit. They are more of a "known quantity", as Cripps is for you.
It also means they get to learn on the job with the likes of Riewoldt, Hayes, Dal Santo, Fisher and so on, in a team that is highly competitive (even this year, despite having such big holes at FB and back-up ruck, where we got most of our injuries, we were still only 6 goals off finishing top 4 (we lost 4 games by 12 points or less and had we won those games, we would have finished 4th, all other things being equal).
As for Lee being a "WAFL player", how many teams have someone on their list who is a 195cm "jumping jack" and at 21yo is capable of having a 60 goal season (in fact less than a season, as he started down back) in one of the major state leagues? The fact is that if he'd been on an AFL list this year and been doing what he'd been doing in the state league, the board of the team who's list he was on would have been jizzing themselves about the prospect of him playing senior footy for them this year. After he kicked a bag of goals on Zac Dawson in a Freo intra-club game this year, he might have even started the season in the senior team if he'd been on a senior list this year.
Unless he's peaked at 21, despite reportedly only starting to take his footy and training and so on really seriously in the past 2 years (and also only stopping growing in around that time- 4cm since he arrived at Adelaide) then you'd think there's no telling how much more improvement there is in him, especially once he starts training with the likes of Nick Riewoldt and Lenny Hayes, who will show him what working hard to be the best you can be is all about. Athletically he's extremely gifted, footy wise he has the skills and talent, it was just about whether he would be someone who just tried to coast and get by on natural ability alone and he has now shown that he is not going to do that and we saw the results of that this year.
It might have cost us a lot to get the likes of Lee and Hickey (although we got picks back in the mid 20's for both of them, which is hardly bad), but we only had to give up that much to get them because other clubs were going hard for them as well. We didn't just pick those offers out of nowhere and go to GWS and GC right from the start and say "hey, how about Lee and Hickey for our first rounders!"
Paying that much for them was a last resort, but because we rated them that highly and they filled major needs we had on our list, with the likes of Riewoldt and Kosi hitting 30 this year and us having a major shortage of ruck support, we were willing to pay it.
