MELBOURNE will definitely take picks No.3 and No.10 to this year’s NAB AFL Draft and not use them in any deals before Thursday's trade period deadline.
General manager of football operations Josh Mahoney was posed the question on NAB AFL Trade Radio and said adamantly that the club would use the selections in the draft on November 24.
“Yes, we will,” he said on Wednesday.
“We think right now, this is where our A-grade players are going to come from – they’re going to come from the draft.
“In the mix with the other guys we’ve got [at the club], we’ll back those young guys in at this stage.”
Mahoney said the club had planned on securing two top 10 picks in this year’s draft.
“We’ve had a strategy in the last few years where we wanted to add two players in the top 10,” he said.
“We want to make the most of this time that we’re at the bottom of the ladder and we don’t plan on being here forever, so we want to maximise that.
“In the last couple of years, we’ve been able to add [Dom] Tyson and [Christian] Salem [in 2013] and [Jack] Viney and [Jesse] Hogan, the year before that [in 2012]. Last year, we added [Angus] Brayshaw and [Christian] Petracca and then we’ll add two more quality A-grade players this year.
“We think that’s a really strong mix of young players coming through.”
Mahoney said a deal to secure Greater Western Sydney utility Tomas Bugg was now likely to happen on Thursday.
“Maybe not today (Wednesday) – we’re still in discussions with Greater Western Sydney and we’d like to add him to the mix of players we’ve got in with Jake Melksham and Ben Kennedy,” he said.
“We’re still talking at the moment, but we’re reasonably confident that’ll get done before the trade period finishes.”
Mahoney said the acquisition of midfielder/half-forward Ben Kennedy earlier in the week was an added plus for the club.
“At the start of the week, if we’d just done the Howe deal [with Gold Coast Suns], we couldn’t see any way of getting Ben Kennedy to our club, so we see that as the bonus of the way it’s played out in the last few days,” he said.
“We rated Ben very highly in the draft three years ago and in a lot of ways, it’s probably similar to Jimmy Toumpas, who has left the club. He’s highly rated, but for different reasons, they haven’t got going in their AFL career as yet.
“We’ve seen enough in Ben that we think he can come and add a lot to our group. He’s a very competitive player and it’s been a real focus of the players that we want to bring in – [we want] competitors.
“That’s what Jake Melksham brings and that’s what Tom Bugg brings, so that’s really going to help us going forward.”
