How winless Adelaide’s sanctions for shonky Kurt Tippett deal led to dearth of top-end draft talent
The 2012 Kurt Tippet deal was a disaster for Adelaide in more ways than one. Draft penalties cost the Crows the chance to recruit stars who would be the core of the team today. Who could they have picked?
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Winless Adelaide is experiencing the continued fallout of the Kurt Tippett saga – the price of missing out on prized picks, including possibly superstar Patrick Cripps, in three consecutive national drafts from 2011-13.
Eight years ago, the AFL hit the Crows with a series of off-field penalties for salary cap violations and draft tampering over irregularities in key forward Tippett’s contract, costing the club pick 20 and 54 in 2012 then selections eight and 30 in 2013.
Concerned about supporter backlash if the emerging star left, Adelaide officials in 2009 convinced the homesick Queenslander – then 22 and coming off a 55-goal season – to re-sign on a deal that made him its highest-paid player but included an illegal clause to trade him to a club of his choice when it expired in 2012, and third-party agreements against league rules.
Tippett ultimately left without the Crows getting anything in return, heading to Sydney via the 2012 pre-season draft after the scandal was revealed and sanctions were announced.
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It was a double-whammy for Adelaide, which only a year earlier rejected an offer from Brisbane of pick 12 and an end-of-first-round compensation selection (No. 30) for the Southport product.
If Adelaide had accepted the Lions’ proposal, Tippett’s dodgy contract would have been off its books, the club’s biggest ever transgression might never have come to light and the Crows could have recruited players over the next three drafts who would now be in the prime of their careers.
In 2011, Adelaide would have eyed Essendon’s 2018 best and fairest Devon Smith at pick 12, while Sam Docherty, Taylor Adams and Brandon Ellis were also available.
Premiership stars Elliot Yeo and Brad Hill were still on the board 18 spots later, when the Crows would have had their second choice that year.
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Twelve months on, Adelaide had wanted to snare Hawthorn tall forward Tim O’Brien with the 20th selection, but relinquished its top two picks as a “goodwill gesture” the night before the draft, prior to the AFL handing down its punishment.
Losing their top-10 call in 2013 might hurt most because the Crows would have had a shot at the likes of Carlton co-captain Cripps (taken at 13) and West Coast grand final hero Dom Sheed (11).
They then could have grabbed South Aussies Trent Dumont or George Hewett at pick 30.
Smith, Docherty, Adams, Ellis, Yeo, Hill, O’Brien, Cripps, Sheed, Dumont, Hewett – drafting any combination of three to five of those players would have significantly boosted the depth of the Crows’ list and helped to ensure sustained on-field success.
Instead, Adelaide is 0-11 and without a victory in 377 days, suffering from the three-year dearth of top-end draftees it missed out on during that 2011-13 period.
And it is all of the club’s own doing because of the Tippett affair.
The Crows helped mask the loss of picks by making the finals from 2015-17, including a grand final in that latter season.
Driving that run of major-round appearances were shrewd recruiting decisions, such as signing Eddie Betts from Carlton as a free agent, rookie-listing Rory Laird, Charlie Cameron, Kyle Hartigan, Jake Kelly and Hugh Greenwood, swapping pick 10 and the compensation selection the club received from losing Phil Davis to GWS for Luke Brown and the No. 2 choice in the 17-year-olds’ mini-draft (Brad Crouch), and trading back into the 2013 second round to take Matt Crouch by sending 2009 best and fairest Bernie Vince to Melbourne.
Matt Crouch, who went on to become an All-Australian and win his own club champion award in 2017, was, at pick 23, Adelaide’s earliest selection at a national draft from 2011-13, and one of only two inside the top 30.
The Crows’ other national draft choices from that era were: Sam Kerridge (pick 27, 2011), Mitch Grigg (41, 2011), Nick Joyce (46, 2011), Cam Ellis-Yolmen (64, 2011), Sam Siggins (62, 2012), Rory Atkins (81, 2012) and Riley Knight (46, 2013).
Only Atkins, who has played 101 games, and Knight, who has featured in 55, remain on the list.
Both are out of contract at season’s end.
The AFL learnt about the shifty Tippett deal after the Crows’ plan to send him to Sydney for fringe player Jesse White and the Swans’ pick 23 raised eyebrows at league headquarters, and Adelaide confessed during trade week.
AFL salary cap investigators only approve trades if they represent commercial value for all parties.
The league fined the Crows $300,000 in November 2012 and Adelaide chief executive Steven Trigg and football manager John Reid, who retired in 2009, not long after completing the Tippett contract, were penalised $50,000.
Trigg and Reid were also banned from all AFL functions, including matches and training, for 12 months (six months suspended for five years).
Reid’s successor, Phil Harper, was banned from football for six months (four months suspended).
Tippett, who considered himself a victim of the saga, saying at the time that his trust in the Crows had been to his “substantial detriment”, copped an 11-game sanction.
The loss of picks was the AFL’s biggest draft penalty since Carlton was stripped of the first, second, 31st and 34th selections in 2002, and its first and second-round choices in 2003 for salary cap breaches.
After the 2013 draft, then Adelaide list manager David Noble said the Crows were “relieved” the penalties were over and “pleased with how we’ve come out of it”.
“It was an awkward, difficult situation that we had to cope with, but I think from what we’ve done in the past couple of years, it’s a tick for us as a club as to what we’ve had to work through,” Noble said.
In reality, the implications of losing those picks were always going to be felt most years later, not on draft night in 2012 and 2013, when Noble and the Crows’ recruiting team had to work with one arm tied behind their backs, or even the following few seasons.
Although there are other reasons behind why Adelaide today finds itself in its worst-ever on-field position, the shonky deal with Tippett is undoubtedly a major factor.
Trigg said when the sanctions were released that the Crows had paid “a very high price for an error of judgment”.
He was not to know just how much it would cost the club in years to come.
Adelaide was coming off a preliminary final at the time.
Now, six years after Trigg’s departure, it is heading towards its first wooden spoon.
Reid, the Crows and Tippett’s manager did not want to comment for this story, while Trigg did not respond for comment.
But during an interview on FIVEaa in 2018, Reid said he thought the penalties were harsh.
“If you had your time again, we wouldn’t have done what we did,” Reid said.
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Originally published as How winless Adelaide’s sanctions for shonky Kurt Tippett deal led to dearth of top-end draft talent