In fairness, I think other than the plastic clubs or outright top draft picks, this is the case for many teams, key midfielders are often imported rather than grown from scratch. It just shows that there's no guarantees even with relatively high picks.
That is pretty wrong, most of the success of the past decade was built on teams where their midfield was built via the draft - using higher end picks. Your comment would be 100& with rucks - a very high number of flags are won with either traded rucks or 10+ year veteran rucks.
Even our own midfield is mainly built on our own high end draft picks outside Prestia, with the unusual thing being those picks were with us a decade before winning even a single final. Prestia would be the only high end trade-chipped mid to win a flag this century IMO
The thing that makes us unique is we won multiple grand finals with with a midfield we mostly drafted a decade ago &/or traded for. The only team that perhaps did this would be the 2018 Eagles, With Yeo being a lot lesser expense trade
Essendon in 99-2000, -
Misit, Blumfield, J.Johnson, Heffernan
Lions 3-peat - Voss,
Black, Scott bros, Power
Port in 2004
-Carr, Burger Bros, James
Swans 2005 & 2012 -
Goodes, Kirk, L.Ablett, J.Bolton, Jack, Kennedy*
Eagles 2006 -
Cousins, Judd, Kerr, Fletcher
Cats 2007, 2009-2011, -
Bartlet, Corey, Ablett, Enright, J.Kelly, Ling
Hawks - 2008 -2013
Mitchell, Hodge, Sewell, Lewis, I.Smith, Shiels, Langford
Collingwood 2010 -
Pendles, Thomas, Swan, Beams
Dogs 2016,
Bont, Dahlhaus, Libba, McLean, Hunter, Boyd
Eagles 2018 - Shuey, Gaff, Sheed, Hurn, Yeo*, Masten
90% of them (in red) won their 1st flags => 6 years of being drafted - with a high chance that pick was a 1st or 2nd rounder - or the luxury of a F/S selection.
Our midfield on the other hand shows that yes, you require a high amount of 1st/2nd rounder midfielder - but we are unique based on their age for first flag.
Cotchin - first rounder, Year 10
Edwards - 2nd rounder, Year 11
Martin - 1st rounder, Year 8
Prestia - 1st Rounder TRADED, Year 8
Lambert - Rookie draft, Year 3
Grigg - 2nd Rounder, TRADED, Year 11
Basically, our success in that way is very unique and goes to show the value of risk taking when going for gold, despite our midfield getting older, we continued to build around them with the belief they would come good as a unit. The flip side tho is, our team is kinda young, but our midfield is bloody old. We are fast approaching a cliff & the COVID situation almost certainly brings us to that edge closer as i can almost certainly say that - Salary caps are gonna drop & free agency will get much much harder. This is again something the NBA is fast approaching and retaining players will be easier in a sense as, most player are happy to stay for the same money.
This is all not a "*smile* on us when we are down" thing - its just analysis that leads me to a conclusion that we should really be trying to get games into those prospective midfielder Ross, RCD etc - as midfielders, not back/fwd flanks. The team we have running out over the past month will quite literally be the team we have in 2 years IMO - As you can see above, no team has won a flag without high end draft pick mids working out, generally within 5 or 6 years of being drafted. For that to happen, we need to actually draft some mids & get games into the few, untried ones we already have ASAP.