GOLD Coast is determined to sign want-away Adelaide forward Kurt Tippett, but won't entertain giving up highly-rated South Australian Suns Sam Day or Daniel Gorringe to get a deal done.
That position could make finding the right deal for Victoria-bound Sun Josh Caddy pivotal to any trade for Tippett, but Gold Coast football manager Marcus Ashcroft maintains Caddy, who quit the club after two years last month, is yet to settle on a preferred destination.
Tippett, who had long expressed a desire to eventually return to his native Gold Coast, quit the Crows on Tuesday, but shocked the club he played 104 games for when it became known he would consider offers from clubs outside his home state.
In addition to the Queensland-based clubs, Collingwood, Carlton and the Sydney Swans all expressed varying levels of interest, but the race is believed to have narrowed to the Suns, Swans and - to a lesser extent - the Lions.
Ashcroft maintains his club is yet to receive any indication from Tippett's management on which club he favours.
He said that the Suns are "very interested" in securing the 202cm forward, but would not deviate from their policy of protecting the young talent on their fledgling list.
"We know he'd be a great fit for our forward line and can play in the ruck, so with where our young list is at he'd be a fantastic acquisition," Ashcroft said on Wednesday.
"The big picture is we know that we want him and the next part is to work out the detail.
"[Sam and Daniel] are both contracted … for next year - Sam even beyond that - so as far as we're concerned they're part of our club for that period of time.
"We've always spoken about not wanting to compromise the growth of our young list. We want to make sure that we keep our young players together for as long as we can and we don't want to compromise that.
"We'll look at options to make sure that we get a good player like Kurt into the side, but not to the detriment of breaking up our young talent."
With young players out of bounds as the Suns, who own the No.2 selection at the NAB AFL Draft, consider their options to get Tippett, finding the right deal for Caddy becomes crucial as the club seeks to gather trade ammunition in the form of draft picks.
But with the Gillette AFL Trade Period set to start on Monday, Ashcroft said that Caddy's management was still in talks with several unspecified Melbourne-based clubs.
"I'm not totally sure which clubs those are, so until we get to a point where he has a bit of an idea of where he wants to go - and those clubs come to us with an option to deal - then we can't really speculate on the detail as to what that trade may look like," he said.
"But I'm confident we'll be able to find a suitable trade. We just need to make sure that it's in the best interests of our football club."
Ashcroft is keen to keep things as simple as possible in relation to the two trade scenarios, but admitted "until we go through it, it may well get complicated - I'm not sure yet".
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Jason Phelan is a reporter for AFL.com.au. Follow him on Twitter @AFL_JasonPhelan.
