Hawthorn coach Sam Mitchell has provided a candid update on how he will handle his first post-season at the helm.
The Hawks have 13 players currently out of contract, including the retiring Ben McEvoy, veterans Jack Gunston and Liam Shiels, and others in limbo like Tyler Brockman, Kyle Hartigan, Harry Morrison, Tom Phillips, Jackson Callow, Connor Downie, Jack Saunders and Emerson Jeka.
Mitchell revealed that he and the club have already begun the exit interview process and have kept players in the loop all season.
“We’ve actually done all the exit interviews already, we’ve been knocking those over the last few weeks,” the Hawks coach told SEN Breakfast.
“The days of having one interview at the end of your season to assess everything, certainly for me that’s not how I operate, you want no surprises in those interviews from my point of view.
“It’s a really interesting time, we’ve got 20-odd players who are super excited just for this week and know the season is over, we’ve got another 15 who are going to go to Box Hill and they’re excited for a finals campaign, we’ve got Ben McEvoy in his final game, and we’ve got a bunch of guys who don’t know where they’re at.
“It’s a really interesting week and all of those conversations happen after this week around list management all that sort of thing.”
Mitchell was asked whether this meant some players already knew they would be delisted following Round 23 and the VFL finals.
The Hawthorn coach said there was always still time to turn things around, even citing a recent example, while admitting veteran forward Gunston is still mulling over his future.
“It’s up to their own self-awareness. We’ve got 13 guys who are out of contract, so there’s 13 who are thinking something, but some of those are Jack Gunston and Ben McEvoy, so they probably know what they’re doing,” Mitchell said.
“In Ben’s case he knows it’s his last game and in Jack Gunston’s case he knows he’s going to be playing again he’s just got some decisions to make on what that looks like.
“Then there’s a bunch of guys who are unsure and the way things fall. We try to be pretty transparent with them, there’s no decisions that have been made yet, so they continue to play it out.
“We have a great example at our club where Dylan Moore was pretty much delisted going into the last game of 2020 and had a really strong game against Gold Coast and polled a Brownlow vote and ended up being the last player contracted and now he’s one of our prime movers.”
The Hawks made a curious positional change during their Round 22 loss to Richmond, pushing likely All-Australian key defender James Sicily on the ball.
Mitchell explained the thinking behind the move.
“We’ve got three key defenders – James Blanck, he’s going along really well in his first handful of games, Emerson Jeka has just moved down back and then we’ve got Denver Grainger-Barras as that third tall who has been going along really nicely for us,” he said.
“So to play all three of those plus James Sicily, it was just going to be a bit cumbersome in the back-end so we decided to try something different.
“Because Sicily gets sat on so often, having another string to his bow we thought was going to be important for the future, hence the change last week.
“Some of it worked, some of it didn’t.
“We got a bit of a touch-up in the second half against the Bulldogs last time, so it’s all going to be around our midfield potency and being able to keep up with their prime movers.”
The Hawks will be looking to finish the year on a high when they host the Western Bulldogs in Launceston on Sunday.
A win for Hawthorn wound sink the Dogs’ hopes of playing finals.