Hawthorn coach Sam Mitchell has flagged his club's list management group will be ready to flick the switch and place a focus on free agency, but the move won't come this year.
The Hawks are in the early phases of their list rebuild under their club champion, having entered the 2023 season with the youngest and least experienced lists after several off-seasons of list trimming.
The end of 2022 saw the Hawks bid farewell to the likes of Tom Mitchell (Collingwood), Jaeger O'Meara (Fremantle), Jack Gunston (Brisbane), Ben McEvoy (retirement) and Liam Shiels (retirement/North Melbourne) to ensure they could acquire further draft selections and help boost the demographic of their list for the future.
The club acquired Cam Mackenzie (Pick 7) and Josh Weddle (Pick 18) through the first round of the draft, with the pair of selections adding to early draft selections from the 2020 and 2021 drafts in Denver Grainger-Barras and Josh Ward respectively.
The list revamp is likely to see the Hawks sit among the bottom third of the competition for a third straight season, however 2023 has provided glimpses of promise for what's in store for the long haul after recording four wins prior to their mid-season bye.
The likes of Mackenzie, Weddle and Ward, among others, have proven their value to the Hawks already, with the club set to rely on the draft pool again in 2023 before a more aggressive pursuit of the free agency mechanism.
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Speaking to SEN on Friday, Mitchell detailed that Hawthorn will likely prioritise the National Draft this off-season while keeping their options in mind for other player movement levers before targeting free agency from 2024.
"Our list strategy has been quite transparent, probably unorthodox in the way that we've sort of told the world ‘this is what we're trying to do here',” the Hawks coach said.
"This year is the last year really where we'll be mostly with a draft focus with a bit of free agency. Certainly this time next year we'll be much more heavily involved in the free agency market.
"We're really pleased with the squad that we've got and the building blocks that we're putting together with our current group.
"You're always adjusting your strategic thinking and how you want the list to be built and what the trends of the game are likely to be in a year or two.
"For the most part we're quite pleased with the list, but there are some holes that need to be filled either in the short term or medium term, and that will continue to happen with a bit of a focus on free agency increasing over the next two to three years."
After a long reign as a powerhouse club in the AFL from the late 2000s to the mid-2010s, the plans to rebuild at Waverley will heavily contrast the days that saw Mitchell help lead the brown and gold to four premierships.
After taking on the coaching role from his successful mentor Alastair Clarkson, Mitchell and the club found the best avenue to return to the dais would be through revamping the Hawks' list.
"It depends on your list management strategy. I think saying that a club will never (rebuild) is guessing what the future of the rules might look like," Mitchell said.
"The position that we've found ourselves in, it's been the only viable choice. If what we view and what our supporters view is premiership success and the top four being what we're after, then with the position we were in we had no other choice but to rebuild.
"Then the argument is how deep do you do it? If your aim is to get into the eight, or be a consistently viable club financially, or there's a lot of other variables for other clubs in different situations, each one of those has its own lever that you have to pull. For us, it means we're going through a rebuilding phase."
The top echelon of free agents for 2024 include Brisbane's Hugh McCluagge, Bomber Andrew McGrath, Dockers ruckman Sean Darcy, Geelong's Jack Henry and Port Adelaide's Todd Marshall.
