Former Carlton list boss Stephen Silvagni has broken down the Jack Martin trade chaos from 2019.
The Blues ended up acquiring Martin via the Pre-Season Draft, after a trade between Carlton and Gold Coast could not be reached.
For whatever reason, the Suns opted to take nothing rather than two second round draft picks, allowing the Blues to front-end their offer to the talented forward and secure him without giving anything up.
Silvagni reveals Gold Coast was desperate for Carlton’s first round pick (selection nine) in the trade, and, after seeing how Martin performed in 2020, feels that may have been an accurate valuation.
“He was a really difficult one to gauge in terms of his value because he was injured throughout the year in his last year there, but also he got dropped as well,” Silvagni told AFL Trade Radio.
“From the process, we were always going to deal with future picks and another pick in there and through the negotiation process the Suns ended up getting these concessions where basically they didn’t really need points for any of their academy kids coming through.
“It made negotiations really difficult and we wanted to keep our first round pick.
“Would we have given up that first round pick had we known that we wouldn’t be able to get him through the Pre-Season Draft? It was a really difficult situation because we had Tom Papley in play.
“We had to work out the scenarios and how we were going to get it done, so we always knew pick nine was going to be part of the Papley deal if that was going to happen – we always wanted something back.
“That wasn’t going to happen, then we pretty much gave nine outright for Papley and that wasn’t going to happen because the Joe Daniher deal was never going through.
“Gold Coast was saying ‘we want pick nine’. We didn’t think he was worth nine at the time. In all seriousness, in terms of what Jack did this year, probably (Gold Coast) was right, but we were just going off the form that was previously done.
“We’d offered two picks that were equated to about pick nine on points. It might’ve been earlier. It might’ve been like pick six or seven. They rejected that.”
Silvagni said the Blues were a little nervous about the Suns re-drafting Martin, given they had the first selection in the Pre-Season Draft.
“Our fallback was the Pre-Season Draft. We had pick three in the Pre-Season Draft. There was Gold Coast, Melbourne, then ourselves,” he said.
“We always thought that Melbourne was never going to be a chance (to match the Martin deal) because of the salary cap.
“And (Martin) didn’t want to speak to Melbourne and didn’t do a medical, which helps Carlton. We had money in our cap that we could front-end.
“What probably helped really is at the National Draft where we did a pick swap with Gold Coast where pick nine came into play. They got what they wanted on draft night. It just fell that way and it helped them and fortunately for us they didn’t take Jack in the Pre-Season Draft and he got through to us.
“To Jack’s credit, he was really strong and staunch.”
Martin played 15 games for Carlton in 2020 and was one of their main threats as a ball user going inside 50 and excelled in stretches both on-ball and as a contested marking target.