Trade period review: Why the Hawks should be worried, Tigers and Saints big winners

DID your team nail the 2016 trade period? Jon Ralph takes a look at who the big winners and losers were in the off-season deals.

Bradley Hill has made a great start to his time as a Docker. Picture: AAP Images

TERRY Wallace’s concern at Jaeger O’Meara’s troublesome knee is that Hawthorn “gave up the farm” for the Gold Coast onballer.

Wallace is right, but only if it is one of those vast cattle stations Gina Rinehart is snapping up for $300 million a pop.

Seven weeks into the AFL season clubs are already assessing whether they have nailed their trades and free agency acquisitions.

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And while it is too early to make definitive calls we have seen enough to be worried by O’Meara.

As Wallace said this week, the concern is not that O’Meara is missing matches but what it forecasts about his long-term future.

The concern is that this might be O’Meara’s lot from now on — playing a vastly different role, with regular breaks to deal with knee soreness and its associated side effects.

Toby Nankervis has enjoyed a brilliant start to his time at Richmond. Picture: AAP Images

In so many of the 37 deals involving players swapping clubs in the off-season what has been lost is as important as what was gained.

Collingwood were so determined to hang onto Marley Williams they made North Melbourne hand over ... pick 105.

And yet he is playing the best footy of his career as a dogged lockdown defender who has picked up his intercept game.

To acquire O’Meara, Hawthorn gave up this year’s first two picks, with pick 23 (from Fremantle in exchange for Bradley Hill) and pick 36 thrown in to hand Gold Coast a first-rounder last year.

Don’t look now, but Hill’s 37 possessions against Essendon put another brick in the wall of a year that is turning into one to remember.

Richmond, meanwhile, has assembled footy’s version of Licorice Allsorts.

Toby Nankervis might be the recruit of the year given the Tigers snapped him from Sydney at the price of 46 to lead their ruck department.

Dion Prestia and Josh Caddy, recruited with first and second-round picks, are just paddling given injury and form issues respectively.

But the first and third-round picks they were handed for Brett Deledio in this year’s draft have looked better every week he has missed with a calf complaint.

If you want to complicate the scenario even more, they took Caddy with a second-round pick after receiving that compensation pick for Tyrone Vickery.

He is languishing in the VFL on $500,000 a year, having failed to take a contested mark and just a single mark inside 50 in three games.

His teammate Tom Mitchell is doing exactly what he should be as a highly paid player taken with pick 14.

He is leading the competition in possessions — 237 so far — and is averaging seven tackles a game.

Down the Nepean Highway at Seaford, St Kilda couldn’t be happier with its lot.

It has Hawthorn’s first-round pick but also got defender Nathan Brown as a free agent and secured Jack Steele and Koby Stevens.

The Hawks should be worried about Jaeger O’Meara. Picture: Michael Klein

Stevens has been worth the 2017 second-round pick they jettisoned, and Stevens was basically a freebie.

St Kilda got him, pick 61 and a 2017 fourth-round pick and gave up pick 50 and a 2017 fifth-round pick — as close to nothing as you could imagine.

Brown is a defensive rock, Steele is the inside grunt they need, Stevens was in slashing form pre-suspension and that Hawks first-round pick looms enticingly.