HAWTHORN has become the first club since the inception of the equalising forces of the draft and the salary cap to use the system as it was intended and triumph. This was the first draft-led premiership.

No club prior to Hawthorn has bottomed out, taken their picks and risen again to the pinnacle.

Geelong never hit the bottom before finding the top, nor West Coast before them. Sydney, on the other hand, adopted the Moneyball path.

The Moneyball strategy derives its name from the book chronicling the Oakland A's successful method of assembling a baseball team of proven players of lower perceived ability and eschewing the seduction of drafts and untried potentials. Oakland relied on a statistical analysis of the needs for a team to achieve success and worked backwards to find players of proven capacity to deliver on those needs.

Sydney applied elements of the philosophy and thus traded picks for players. Like taking a Ted Richards for a first round pick which most clubs considered an inflated price. But Sydney held little store in the currency of picks for potentials. And it worked for them.

Hawthorn, however, took the bold step of trading their players of currency and seeking only draft picks in return. It governed the rationale of exchanges that now seem tremendously wise — moving on variously Peter Everitt, Nathan Thompson and Jonathan Hay for draft picks.

It was a brave strategy for while the system might structurally encourage this, no one — as Sydney coach Paul Roos has observed in recent years — had successfully bounced with draft picks to win a flag.

"We had given it a fair go the other way," said former club president Ian Dicker, who presided over the board which endorsed the plan. "Peter Schwab went a fair way with the people he had, we got David Parkin in to help but that didn't work.We were going to either keep drifting or have a fresh start and when you have a fresh start, you don't now that it is going to work. Alastair and his team are entitled to great credit and I am absolutely delighted for Jason Dunstall.

"We thought that was the only way we had a chance to succeed. We did have deep in our mind the thought that our members would support us in difficult times because they did in 1997 … we knew they would hang on while we went in another direction."

The most significant moment for the plan came under then recruiting manager Gary Buckenara, who, in 2004, had three draft picks in the top 10 and took two prospective key long-term, quality key-position players in Jarryd Roughead and Lance Franklin and a midfield workhorse in Jordan Lewis.

The appointment of Clarkson in 2004 was fundamental to the embrace of the youth route and the preparedness for short-term pain. He encouraged the recruitment of his former Port Adelaide colleague Chris Pelchen to manage an aggressive list strategy.

"We firmly believed that if we attacked the draft but also the trade period aggressively — not be reactive, be proactive in both the draft and the trade periods — then we could hopefully build a team from the ground up," Pelchen said.

"It's got to be recognised that there were some very good players here when we arrived at the club. Eleven new players have come since then in 2004 and there were 11 existing ones (on Saturday) so it shows there has been a large turnover."

While chasing youth, the club still applied elements of Moneyball in that they did not wish to simply select the most talented players but rather target only players of pre-determined style.

"A lot of people have questioned why we have so many left-footers in our side but we deliberately tried to bring in more left-footers to almost artificially lift our kicking efficiency because in '05 we were 16th in kicking efficiency and this year we are first," Pelchen said. "There is no doubt if you analyse right across the competition left-footers versus right-footers, left-footers are more efficient kicks, it is quite clear."

The club, like Collingwood, traded into the 2005 draft, a draft which other clubs figured to be thin for talent and consequently derided Hawthorn's tactic. The Hawks had five picks in the first 22 that year, two of them have since required knee reconstructions but two became premiership players on Saturday (Xavier Ellis and Grant Birchall) a third player (Clinton Young) made it after being fished from the rookie list.

"We kept saying to ourselves, you have to continue to go deep into the draft and take kids at a time when others saw value in other parts of our list," club chief executive Ian Robson said.

Every year, the premier, by virtue of victory, reveals a new page in the road map for success. Just as Geelong rescued the game from the flood, Hawthorn has vindicated the notion that bottoming-out can produce a cup.

The cruellest irony in this is that this draft-led premiership has come at a time when clubs will be denied the opportunity to follow Hawthorn's lead, for the league is about to dilute the three drafts after the next one by taking out the best available young talent to form two new teams.

Hawthorn is the first draft-led premier. The Gold Coast might be the next.