WESTERN Bulldogs coach Brendan McCartney says the Dogs are unlikely to be aggressive participants in this year's trade period but they will remain on the lookout for young, team-first players from rival clubs.
The 15th-placed Bulldogs are well positioned to trade, given they will have five picks inside the top 50 in this year's NAB AFL Draft, but McCartney confirmed the club's preference was to introduce more young talent and develop from within.
"We've got to be really diligent through the trade and draft period and bolster our list," he said at Whitten Oval on Tuesday.
Watch Brendan McCartney's press conference in full on the media player above.
"Our number one philosophy is to train our own people up," he said.
"That doesn't preclude (trading for) a person (who is) still quite young in their career from another club. I'm not saying it will include that. We'll look at those avenues, but (it's) highly likely we'll continue to bring young people to this club and give them the best education we can."
Asked what the Bulldogs would look for in a potential trade, McCartney said it was as much about mental make-up as physical attributes.
"The best players we can get our hands on with a proven capacity to want to work and be better players, and a proven capacity to fit a team and work within a team structure," he said.
"They might be tall, they might be medium, they might be small, but they’re the habits we're looking for."
McCartney said he was also looking for a win against the Brisbane Lions in their final-round clash at the Gabba to take some momentum into the pre-season campaign.
He was buoyed by the Dogs' performance against his former club Geelong at Simonds Stadium.
"That was the one thing we spoke about straight after the game on Sunday - we started to look the way we want to look," he said.
"We hadn’t been able to do that for more than 40 or 50 minutes.
"We saw people coming off their opponents and helping each other in the air, we were stronger around the ball and a bit of belief came back in with people prepared to take the game on."
McCartney said he would have given the Dogs a pass mark for the first half of the season and felt they could have won another two games.
He gave "a tick" to his team's contested-ball efforts, but admitted it still had "a long way to go defensively to be serious about taking on the game's best teams". However, he said that when both areas were functioning well they scored 'OK'.
A number of youngsters had "clearly shown that they’re going to be good players at this level because they've matched it against really accomplished players who are much more experienced".
Such development of their young players had also proved they were being coached the right way, McCartney said.
"We firmly believe that we have enough young talent here and we have the right type of people in our young group that are learning a lot off our experienced players," he said.
"We just need to continue to work hard through another summer of conditioning and training and game education."
