Former North Melbourne senior coach David Noble is urging the Kangaroos to trade the first overall pick this year, splitting it in order to bolster their future draft hand.
After finishing bottom of the table in the home-and-away season, North Melbourne have prime position in the 2022 national draft, owning the number one pick for the second year in a row.
With Noble at the helm last year, the Kangaroos selected the country’s top prospect Jason Horne-Francis first.
However, with this year’s presumed number one pick Will Ashcroft set to go off the board early if the Brisbane Lions - as expected - match a bid for the father-son prospect, Noble believes North Melbourne should go in a different direction for the draft.
“I’ve always been an advocate for the split, I think that the picks are a bit overvalued to be honest at times, the North pick this year, I would absolutely split it, 100 per cent,” he said on AFL Trade Radio’s The Late Trade.
“The reason being, you’re not going to get the best kid in the country, Ashcroft, you’re not getting number one.”
“The way I look at it, you’ve got pick two, so split pick two and take as many picks as you can.”
With the Kangaroos having already traded away their second round pick this year as part of the deal for Callum Coleman-Jones, and more of their draft capital potentially heading to Fremantle as compensation for Griffin Logue, Noble believes it is vital for the club to “stock up.”
“North don’t have a second round (pick) this year, if they get Griffin Logue and it’s a future second… therefore you’ve got a bit of dearth in there in regards to picks going forward,” he said.
“They need to stock up, so I would grab that (first) pick and try and split it as many ways as I can to get as much talent coming through.
“North had the first pick last year as well, so therefore if you get a third pick and then you get a future pick five, or you get pick ten and pick three.
“So in the last two years you have pick one, pick three, pick ten, that’s actually pretty good going.”
Former Carlton list manager Stephen Silvagni agrees that the first pick could be traded this year, however stressed that North Melbourne should be careful in doing so.
“I think if you’ve got the number one pick, you’re looking for two early first round picks, whether that’s in this year’s draft or one in this year’s draft, one in next year,” he said.
“Definitely one of them needs to be in that top five, top six and then the next one still in the top 10.”
“With the information I’ve got on the actual draft at the moment and the talent at the top end… I’d be certainly looking at trying to get best value for that pick.
“That’s where you’ve got to be careful because whoever you’re trading with, if you’ve gone for a future pick, you want to make sure that it’s relatively a certainty that it’s going to be in that top ten, that it doesn’t sort of float out to 16, 17.”
“History will tell you that there’s been plenty of kids that have been taken further down that end up being the stars of the competition, it’s just about knowing where the talent is and how deep it goes.”
During his time at the Blues, Carlton had possession of the first pick multiple times, however Silvagni stated it was only in 2018 that the club gave serious consideration to trading it.
“When I was at Carlton, we had the number one pick several times, there was a year where we were certainly considering trading that first pick,” he said.
“That was the (Sam) Walsh year, and we obviously rated Walshy… we wanted two picks inside five, six, so if we could get two in there, we were really going to consider doing that trade.
“We had conversations but there was a reluctancy from clubs, and one of the clubs at the time, I think it was Gold Coast, had a couple of picks in there, I think they ended up getting (Izak) Rankine, (Jack) Lukosius and Ben King.
“You see the quality of players there, Max King was in that draft, (Connor) Rozee was in that draft, so you knew the depth was in that draft.
“So if you could trade one pick for a couple of picks knowing you were right in that slot of quality players, you’d certainly look at it.
“It was just more to see what else is out there, you just never know, someone might have thrown three first round picks in there and you go ‘well, we’ve got to do this deal’.
It was just more to know what value does it hold and can we do something, you’ve got to look at all the options and then come back and go ‘what makes sense’?
“You’ve got to look at what talent pool is there, because it can fall away or it can be quite deep, so it’s about knowing.”
The AFL trade period will get underway on October 3, with the national draft set to take place on November 28.