A couple of “fun” things I’ve been dealing with in my AFLW draft dataset.
I’ve got the trades loaded in, but I’m wanting to also be able to show who a pick eventually was spent on. This means going through the draft and making sense of where a pick ended up given between compensation and clubs exiting the draft in earlier rounds the nominal pick order and the actual pick order may end up different.
2019 Melbourne just…didn’t get a second round pick in the draft? They didn’t trade one away, and they didn’t use one, they were just never allocated one to begin with. Now 2019 was an enormously complex draft to begin with because of the raft of priority and compensation picks associated with the establishment of expansion sides. But this appear separate to that – all other clubs got a pick in the second round just not Melbourne.
I can’t find any articles or anything explaining this, Sarah Black (absolute legend) suggested on twitter it might have been connected to Daisy Pearce returning from pregnancy. The timing matches, but I can’t find anything in writing about it (at least not yet).
Another weird one was 2018. Collingwood was before GWS in the natural pick order. Round 9 consists of GWS picking, then Collingwood, then GWS picking again?
These are pretty trivial in the broader scheme of things, but they make it really challenging to do what I want to do – have each pick tracked by round, club tied to, nominal pick order, and actual pick order.
At this stage I might end up just referring to picks by their actual order rather than the order they were traded as. Even that is starting to be complex towards later rounds clarifying exactly which pick went were.
I’m increasingly noticing some inconsistencies in the wikipedia data too, which has been my main source so far. I’m potentially at the stage where I start over with primary sources to get a clean and confident source of truth.