This time last year Tom Boyd was wearing orange and charcoal, first player up on stage, having his photograph taken on the beach and being celebrated as the No. 1 draft pick. Today he will be at the Whitten Oval, training with his second team.
Something changed when the Western Bulldogs lost their captain, pick six and a lot of money in order to get the key forward they have been craving for so long. Boyd isn't the only reason that St Kilda used the No. 1 pick in this year's draft to choose a big, marking forward, Paddy McCartin. But he is certainly one of them.
The Saints were not the only intriguing story to emerge from Thursday night's draft, of course. Carlton took a 21-year-old WAFL player, Blaine Boekhorst, at pick 19. Effectively the Blues traded pick 7 – and a shot at 203-centimetre forward Peter Wright – for Kristian Jaksch, Mark Whiley and the Swan Districts midfielder.
The Giants used pick 23 on Pat McKenna, who is not only a captain of the Australian under-19 cricket team, but the current captain, who played local football at Gisborne this year.
Melbourne toughened up its midfield, drafting Christian Petracca and Angus Brayshaw. Three indigenous players – Jarrod Pickett, Paul Ahern and Nakia Cockatoo – were chosen in the top 10. Cockatoo missed all but one game this year with a foot injury but it was no shock that Geelong was the club to take the "risk": the Cats have never shied away from injured players, last year choosing Darcy Lang after his year was cut short with a broken leg.
But back to the beginning, and McCartin was not a surprising selection at pick one, let alone a shocking one. He didn't push past Petracca in the last little bit. He's the one the club has settled on in the past few weeks, having done huge amounts of work for many months now.
They Saints knew, when they put pick one on the trade table in the first week of October, that they rated McCartin and Petracca ahead of the rest, and that they wouldn't be able to get either player for the pick four or seven briefly offered up by the Giants. But they didn't need to decide which one they most wanted until it really was time to make their mind up.
McCartin and Petracca would have been incredibly hard to split, and this has been an unusual draft year in that no player really separated himself from the pack. Not emphatically, anyway.
Petracca had a brilliant season, moving into the midfield and playing in the same bold, dynamic way he had as a half-forward. He had a No. 1-worthy season, no doubt. But were it not for the couple of minor injuries that interrupted his season, McCartin might have kicked 40 or more goals for the year and demanded a lot more external attention.
There were others the Saints did plenty of work on, too. Brayshaw is hard, tough, reliable and couldn't have been too far behind the top two. In time, the player McCartin might become compared to is Wright, given they both play as key forwards. At Gold Coast, he will develop under far less scrutiny than the laid-back McCartin will get used to.
That brings us to position. McCartin was the logical choice for the Saints, and a good one. They have high hopes for Spencer White, they'll persist with Tom Lee given his season was affected by two shoulder surgeries, and have just re-contracted Riewoldt until the end of 2016. But beyond that, they really don't have any tall forwards in the works, and at this stage, no 17-year-old has made it known he'll be a top pick in next year's draft, as McCartin, Wright, Hugh Goddard and a few others had already done by this time last year.
Look around the competition and it becomes obvious: the very best key forwards were taken, much more often than not, with high draft picks or as father-son selections. There's Riewoldt, Tom Hawkins, Travis Cloke, Lance Franklin, Jarryd Roughead, Matthew Pavlich and the up-and-comers: Joe Daniher, Jon Patton and Boyd. Of course, there are some exceptions, but the fact remains they are extremely hard to find unless you draft them or are in a position to do what the Bulldogs did, and throw an extraordinary amount of money at one.
McCartin will be a great fit for where St Kilda is at, three years into its rebuild. He will fit into the group easily. He'll endear himself to Riewoldt because he is so easy to get along with and will want to work, learn and help out. He's the sort of player other players want to be around, on and off the ground.
On it, allowed time to develop, he will look after the players around him and protect them. He is an extroverted player who likes to clunk marks and throw himself around. He competes, overtly. He knows instinctively how to get to the ball and time his marks and he knows how to get players to kick the ball to the right spots. Off the ground he is laid-back, relaxed and everybody's friend. He loves being part of a team, and of something bigger and more important than just him.
That wasn't it for the Saints, of course. They had three top 22 picks – pick 41 made it four – after three top 20 selections last year, and they did well. Goddard will play in defence or attack for them; 12 years after drafting Brendon, they have his cousin on board. Daniel McKenzie will add some dash to their midfield, and Jack Lonie was the best small forward in the draft: small but confident, creative and just a little bit chatty.
St Kilda still have some way to go, but they have the start of something good, and plenty of top-end talent to work with. Time will tell how their team comes together, but in McCartin they might just have found the hardest piece in the puzzle.
