THE POTENTIAL reward of future trading outweighs the threat to the AFL's successful equalisation model, two of the game's most innovative thinkers say.
The AFL empowered clubs to trade future draft picks in 2015, albeit with restrictions, including being able to trade only one year ahead and having to make at least two first-round selections every four years.
Another complexity is if a club swaps a future round-one pick it cannot also offload later selections in that draft unless it trades back in, and vice versa.
The rule change has given more scope for clubs to make bolder decisions, but with that comes greater risk.
Hawthorn last year traded its 2017 first-round pick to St Kilda – which may cost the Hawks the chance to pick inside the top three for the first time in 12 years – in what is the system's first major test.
That deal helped Hawthorn net Jaeger O'Meara from Gold Coast, with the brown and gold securing St Kilda's pick 10 in the 2016 draft for what is provisionally the No.2 selection in this year's edition.
The Hawks – in second-last position with a 4-8 record – forwarded that 2016 pick onto the Suns, as well as a 2017 second-round selection they received from Carlton, to snare O'Meara.
Sydney's 2005 premiership coach Paul Roos, who more recently oversaw Melbourne's list overhaul via free agency, inventive trading and a future draft pick swap, does not want the AFL to add further protection to safeguard clubs from themselves.
"It's hard to legislate against poor administration – there are other ways you can bugger your footy club up than just trading," Roos told AFL.com.au.
"I like the fact they have opened up and given you the opportunity to trade future picks, because it means you have more to trade and can get more players quickly into your footy club.
"The Hawthorn deal is the one people are talking about, but it's still yet to be seen if the players taken at those picks are any better than what Jaeger O'Meara or Tom Mitchell are, anyway.
"I think free agency hurts the competition more than what trading future draft picks does."
Chris Pelchen, who was Hawthorn's list manager and the Saints' head of football, was part of the AFL's first draft committee in the 1980s. Future trading was discussed as far back as then.
Pelchen, like Roos, is a fan of clubs being able to trade future draft picks, but would like them to be able to trade two years in advance rather than one.
An AFL spokesman told AFL.com.au there were no recent discussions about increasing future trading to multiple years.
The NBA enables its franchises to trade up to seven years into the future, and operates a protected future draft pick system – something that could have prevented the potential peril of the Hawks' deal with St Kilda.
A future draft pick involved in an NBA deal can be top-three protected (clubs agree on a protection range), meaning it won't change hands if the club that dealt it lands in that territory in the coinciding draft.
The pick in that case would then move to the following year, assuming the club does not have a top-three selection again.
"I understand the need to provide an introductory phase for clubs to get more familiar with the machinations of the draft, trading, free agency and now future trading," Pelchen said.
"But I think those training wheels, for want of a better word, need to be released rather than firmed.
"We're talking about clubs professionally managed and until the end of the time, clubs will make good and bad decisions. We can’t protect people from making good and bad decisions, otherwise you have a very sterile competition."
The AFL Players' Association is yet to establish a position on whether clubs should be able to trade future picks more than a year ahead.
