AFL 2025: The huge contract call awaiting Zak Butters as Matthew Pavlich weighs in
A champion who dealt with the go-home factor, a long-time list manager, the hometown club. Here’s what Zak Butters and Port Adelaide will consider in one of the club’s biggest contract calls.
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Matthew Pavlich has a reasonable idea of what will be going through Zak Butters’ head when the Port Adelaide star weighs up one of the biggest contract calls in the Power’s history.
“There’d be plenty,” Pavlich tells The Advertiser.
One of South Australia’s best players during the AFL era, Fremantle champion Pavlich was “really close” to returning to his home state to join Port Adelaide at the end of 2002 and seriously considered moving to the Crows midway through his career.
Instead, the versatile Woodville-West Torrens product remained loyal to the Dockers.
Pavlich was 20 and in the middle of his first of six All-Australian campaigns when he initially turned down what was said to be a more lucrative Power offer to stick with Fremantle.
Butters is 24, fresh off consecutive All-Australian seasons and the Power’s vice-captain.
The courageous midfielder from Bacchus Marsh has another year remaining on his contract before becoming a restricted free agent, but Victorian clubs are already circling.
Leading the pack is the club he grew up supporting, the Western Bulldogs, who Port Adelaide happens to be facing 45 minutes from his hometown – in Ballarat – on Saturday.
Butters has said he intends to honour his contract.
“It’s still 18 months away and it’s going to be a big decision, but right now it’s probably not one that’s front of mind,” Butters said after the Power’s win over North Melbourne last week.
How players handle extra scrutiny depends on their personality, according to Pavlich.
“Some players really dislike it, others it feeds their performance,” he said.
“I don’t know Zak but he strikes me as someone who feeds off that there is a bit of talk about it externally and seems to block things out pretty well.
“I was more than happy to deal with the speculation and external noise – I don’t think I ever signed a contract until the end.
“For me it was a process of getting my own head around what the pros and cons were of staying and going.
“Then I’d get the support and opinions of others around me.”
Long-time talent guru Chris Pelchen said the Power would not want to lose Butters, but would be weighing the bigger picture in case the dual best-and-fairest winner sought to leave.
“Behind closed doors they would need to be considering that the Tassie Devils are coming into the competition and from 2027 the draft will be highly compromised,” said Pelchen, who was involved in recruiting at Port, list manager at Hawthorn and St Kilda’s football boss.
“Do we consider trading him this year because potentially it gives us compensation in 2025 and 2026?
“You’ll get some in the room saying ‘we’re not even going to consider it, I don’t care what anyone comes to us with’.
“But when I ran list management meetings you’d say ‘what would it take and under what circumstance are we better off?’
“While the public message will be one of defiance, they need to be thinking about the what ifs.
“We don’t want to lose him, but what if he comes to us and says to us he wants to make a move next year.
“Yes, try to convince him, but if he’s adamant, are we better off giving consideration to that this year?
“It comes down to what is best for the club.
“I think it’s more likely they’d move him this year than next year, but I still think it’s unlikely they’d move him full stop.”
This masthead reported on Tuesday that only a head-turning offer of three first-round draft picks or a gun player, such as St Kilda half-back Nasiah Wanganeen-Milera, would prompt Port to even consider a trade this year.
Pelchen gauged Butters’ market value to be a package of two top-10 picks and one third-round selection; one inside the first 10, another between 10 and 20, then a third between 20 and 30; or getting a player like Wanganeen-Milera in return.
He rated Butters, who finished third and fourth in the Brownlow Medal the past two seasons, among the best dozen to 15 players in the competition.
That seemed lower than most rankings.
Melbourne great Garry Lyon said on AFL360 this week Butters changed the make up of a side more than any other player in the competition.
Champion Data rated him No. 6 in the league in 2023, the season he won the AFL Coaches Association Player of the Year award.
Butters has received 29 coaches votes – to sit sixth overall – from just four games this campaign.
Pelchen considered the league’s top echelon to be long-time stars with larger CVs, such as two-time Brownlow medallists Lachie Neale and Patrick Cripps, and Western Bulldogs captain Marcus Bontempelli.
“Wanganeen-Milera is a very different player than Zak but they’re both elite,” Pelchen said.
“He would be an obvious fit.”
Port Adelaide has been unwavering that it never wants to rebuild.
The Power prefers the Geelong model of challenging for the major round every year while regenerating its squad on the run, often through creative trading.
Port has made the top eight in four of the past five seasons, reaching preliminary finals in three of them.
So receiving a swag of draft picks – and no top-line player – for someone of Butters’ ilk would be a bold call, particularly ahead of Josh Carr’s debut year as senior coach.
The Power was understood to have traded its 2025 first-round selection to Gold Coast in October with a view that this November’s draft was not as strong.
Central District utility Dougie Cochrane, who the Power may eventually get draft access to via its Next Generation Academy, is an early No. 1 pick contender for 2026.
“Josh knows as well as anyone that you can’t be beholden to talent or one player,” said Pavlich, a former Fremantle teammate of Carr’s.
“He’d love to have Zak on his list next year and beyond, but footy is a weight of numbers game.
“Knowing Carry, he’ll want to compete and not want to go backwards, but Josh has been around long enough to know you can walk and chew gum at the same time.
“You can start regenerating your list with a senior player heading away and still playing finals.”
Butters could be the best player traded since GWS netted picks 13, 15 and 20 from Geelong for brilliant forward Jeremy Cameron in 2020.
Port might match a free agency bid for Butters next year and force a trade at the end of 2026 involving multiple early picks.
Pelchen said while Hinkley would have an opinion about list decisions, his was no longer as important as Carr’s.
“The likelihood is Josh will say ‘I don’t want him going anywhere’, but the club can balance it by saying we’ve got to look beyond 2025, 2026 and what’s best for us,” he said.
“The conversation might be ‘all right Josh, we don’t want to weaken the side, we understand you have expectations as a coach and we’re backing you in’.
“We know we’re at least in the competitive group that’s competing for finals and don’t want to make life more difficult for you in your first season.
“But we do have to consider, be proactive and prepared, that if he comes to us and says he wants to go home, what are we prepared to do it for?
“I’d be surprised if they’re not having those conversations now or soon.”
Pelchen was part of the Power’s recruiting team that drafted Carr from Western Australia at pick 7 in 1998.
“Josh would see a lot of himself in Zak Butters the player,” Pelchen said.
“They’re not that dissimilar in style – both really strong, determined characters.”
Butters said his contract “doesn’t really get spoken about at the club”.
Pelchen believed the Power would be keeping conversations with its charge “as normal as ever, treating him the same as it would any other player”.
“But it would be having conversations with his management intermittently, trying to get a temperature check,” he said.
The potential for two years of draft compensation is an upside of trading Butters this season if he wants to leave, rather than holding him for the last 12 months of his deal.
Having him see out his contract buys time to convince him to stay.
Boosting Port Adelaide’s re-signing hopes is that although a new senior coach is coming, it is someone with whom Butters already has a very strong relationship.
“Another 12 months gives Zak more time to see how the club performs under Josh Carr, for Josh to foster an even stronger relationship with Zak and, if he’s happy at the club, that’s likely the position they’ll take,” Pelchen said.
An added layer with Butters’ contract call is Dan Houston’s departure to Collingwood last October.
Port Adelaide has publicly expressed confidence that Butters will stay.
“I see the way he plays, the way he acts, his connection to this footy club is really, really strong,” Hinkley said last month.
Close mate and Port captain Connor Rozee said on AFL captains day in February: “I am sure they’ll get something done, but it is still a little while away.”
But the club’s language was similar with Houston last season.
And the dual All-Australian defender had been staunch that he was staying.
All the while, he had actually made his call mid-year and the Power had agreed it would help him return to Victoria at season’s end.
It is further evidence that anything Butters and Port says about him likely re-signing needs to be taken with a grain of salt or as early positioning.
Houston was dealt, along with picks 39, 58 and the 2025 first-rounder, for Gold Coast swingman Jack Lukosius, Collingwood small forward Joe Richards, Suns half-back Rory Atkins and selections 13, 29 and 36 last year.
The full result is yet to bear fruit, but Pelchen reckons Port could have done better out of the trade.
“I think they backed themselves into a corner,” he said.
Butters’ looming contract decision is mentioned every so often around Darley, his junior footy club in Bacchus Marsh.
“You might hear different snippets at different times,” the club’s former president Mark Shelly said.
“I think the milkman would have an opinion on where Zak will play.”
Few AFL players would give back to their junior clubs as much as Butters, who was a runner for its A grade in a game last season and often helped at junior trainings when he visited.
He was understood to have popped in to the club on Thursday night.
His hometown pride and tight bonds back in Darley, where his family still lives, are cited externally as reasons why he may eventually leave the Power.
Shelly looked at things differently.
“He’s a pretty loyal sort of bloke,” he said.
“I don’t have any read or inkling on what he’ll do, but my personal view is it’d need to take some massively significant for him to change tack.
“I’ve got no doubt at some point he relocates – that may be during his career, it may not.”
Coincidentally, Darley is playing in Ballarat on Saturday – at CE Brown Reserve, out the back of Mars Stadium, where the Power is taking on the Bulldogs.
“I’d say our guys may go somewhere for a meal after the game and I’d bet Zak would tag along with them,” Shelly said.
The Bulldogs’ talks with Butters’ management were expected to pitch the club’s geography, as the closest AFL team to his hometown.
Not unlike Port and Darley, their working-class roots would align with the humble, blue-collar Butters.
“It’s a pretty natural fit,” Pelchen said.
Geelong’s lifestyle and geography also seemed well suited as an option if he chose to leave.
“I couldn’t see him playing at Hawthorn, particularly with the spat they had recently,” Shelly laughed.
Pavlich remembered how when he played in Adelaide during contract years, there would be banners in the crowd with his name saying ‘come home Pav’.
“Or you’d have fans at Freo oval hand me a pen and say ‘you’re looking for one of these, aren’t you’,” he said.
Pavlich believed retiring as a one-club player was less important for modern footballers, but “honesty is appreciated, respect is earned and loyalty is returned”.
“I certainly felt that and still feel it,” said the 43-year-old, who won six best-and-fairests at the Dockers, held the club’s goals record, was second for games played and their longest-serving captain, and was now an expert with Fox Footy.
“The opportunity it allows you during and post your career by staying at one club is pretty powerful.
“I wanted to stay here and be part of sustained success.
“We had five out of six years of finals, we made a grand final and kicked 8.14 with five out on the full … what may have been.
“(The decision to stay) was vindicated in many ways.
“Seeing through the hard times and then being part of the build then a leader as part of it, and what it can give you from a personal satisfaction level, but also perhaps commercially and emotionally post-career as well.
“The sense of pride with the fans and player remains forever, but the club would have a laser-focus, business approach.”
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