WA footy fans are getting their second look this season at Melbourne dynamo Luke Jackson on Friday night.

Speculation is building across the league that the 199cm ruck/forward could move his career west at the end of the year.

It seems churlish to be talking about a future transaction the day of a season-shaping game between second and fifth on the ladder, the two teams having played a see-sawing contest in Round 11.

But such is the nature of player movement in the AFL today.

If, as reports suggest, Jackson wants to come home to WA and his choice of club is Fremantle, how can the Dockers make it work?

What will Melbourne accept? How do you put a value on a player who will enter next season just 21 years old, an age where some players are still getting drafted as complete unknowns?

It is nearly impossible to forecast what Jackson’s career arc might look like. But it’s fun to guess. Here are some markers we can point to that could help shed light on what Fremantle will have to give up.

HE IS WHAT HE IS

If Luke Jackson doesn’t get any better as a player than he is today he looms as a best 22 player in most any team in the league.

That’s according to his career average AFL Player Rating score, which at 9.1 ratings points per game puts him in the top 40 per cent of players who have played at least 30 games over the past three seasons.

Players who sit around him on this measure include Andrew Gaff, Zach Tuohy, Aliir Aliir, Peter Ladhams and, coincidentally, Rory Lobb.

These kinds of players tend to be the kinds of players who are traded pretty willingly across the league — bottom of the rotation types who can come in and create value straight away. Fortunately for us there are a bunch of recent precedents we can use to work out Jackson’s value.

Last off-season Ladhams moved to Sydney from Port Adelaide along with Pick 16 with the Swans giving up Pick 12 and a future third round pick. The slide up four spots in the draft allowed the Power to trade up two further places in a swap with the Eagles prior to the draft.

Port Adelaide and Sydney transacted for Aliir Aliir in 2020, with the Swans landing Pick 34 in 2021. If this is the floor price, we are looking at a single draft pick somewhere in the 30s.

But that’s not going to do it, because even the most pessimistic Jackson truther — a jealous West Coast fan, perhaps — would say he’s got an abundant upside.

LOOK AT HIS PEDIGREE

The other way to go on this is to point to Jackson’s perceived worth at the time he was drafted. Melbourne nabbed Jackson with the third pick in the 2019 draft after their post-2018-preliminary final drubbing swoon. It looked for a time to be the AFL’s answer to the San Antonio Spurs drafting Tim Duncan in 1997 off the back of a terrible season, with Duncan going on to win five titles.

There are precious few precedents for young, highly touted draftees moving clubs at an early stage of their career. Fremantle itself has been on the side of one of them.

Adam Cerra yielded Fremantle Pick 6 plus a pick likely to land in the 50s from Carlton in last year’s trade period, after four seasons at the club as a number five draft pick. Other deals include Pick 1 Tom Boyd’s trade from GWS to the Western Bulldogs after one season (pick six plus captain Ryan Griffen), Pick 2 Josh Schache’s move from the Brisbane Lions to Western Bulldogs (Pick 25 and Pick 40, with a combined pick value of Pick 14 even though that’s not how that’s supposed to work) … and that’s about it in modern trades.

We can learn two lessons from this: high pedigree guys moving at an early stage is rare, and more often than not the player is broadly holding their pre-draft pedigree value.

Under this paradigm Fremantle will be asked to pay up bigly. No instant on-road depreciation like a brand new European car here, unfortunately.

HE COULD BE ANYTHING

If you’ve ever experienced the unfortunate circumstance of asking me about the AFL draft around draft time you will have heard me cite a line from American cartoon Family Guy. Given a choice between a guaranteed boat or an unknown prize in a box, the Dad in the family Peter Griffin remarks: “Lois, a boat is a boat, but the mystery box could be anything. It could even be a boat. You know how much we’ve wanted one of those.”

It’s a neat way to sum up the draft. It’s a hand of blackjack at best, and a spin of the roulette wheel at worst.

This paradigm matters most for the Jackson trade: the risk premium that should be attached to any player taken this high in the draft has largely been eaten by the Dees. No matter what you think about where Jackson’s career goes from here, injury willing it’s abundantly clear he’s going to play 200 games of football at a very good standard.

There is only one draft pick where the player taken will play 200 games: No. 1. This week’s chart shows how many games on average players who have since retired and were taken at a pick inside the top 20 played. By the time we get to the 20th pick, the average games played has fallen by almost two thirds to 82 games.

In other words, if both Fremantle and Melbourne expect Jackson has a place in the league for the long term, and Melbourne had to take a punt on him at Pick 3 to find that out, he’s worth a pretty draft pick penny.

WHAT’S THE NUMBER?

In a pure market sense, it’s hard to see Melbourne parting with Jackson for anything less than a pick in the single digits.

That’s hard for the Dockers to wrangle as they’ve already dealt all but their first round pick from this season, and that’s going to fall somewhere in the teens.

But we aren’t in a pure market, and there’s plenty of other considerations that might go into this kind of deal. One would assume salary cap space is at a premium at Melbourne. With the looming departure of Jackson, the Dees might be freed up to go big game hunting themselves.

There’s also another team on this side of the continent who by virtue of its awful season has plenty of draft pick value available — pick trading restriction or not.

And for the geography aficionados out there, Shelley (where Jackson recently bought a house) is actually a little closer to Lathlain than it is to Cockburn.