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Sport Nation
Buckley: The player I’d take 10 times over Harley Reid
Nathan Buckley • July 23rd, 2025 5:46 pm
I think Harley Reid is a good player and he's going to be a very good player.
But my natural instinct to this situation is: Is he the player you want to sell the farm for?
Because the position that West Coast are in and the position Harley Reid and his management are putting the club in is pretty interesting.
It’s: ‘if you want me to stay, this is the price that you have to pay’.
West Coast need far more than just the best of Harley Reid to become what they want to become. So, my question is, what would Geelong do? Because I look at Geelong’s list management and their ability, over a long period of time to roll their players in and out, to cycle through their list and to regenerate continually.
They’re the poster boy of being able to beat the cycle and to be able to manage a list well. They’ve been able to pay unders for a lot of their talent because of the quality of life they’ve sold down there away from the big smoke.
That's the utopia.
If West Coast pay Harley Reid what he wants, they won't be able to offer that same model.
So, I think that that's the decision they need to make first - ‘How do we want to run our club? How do we want to build this team over the next four or five years?’
With Harley Reid they must think about ‘what's he going to bring to the table as one unit of 23 week in week out and across seasons? Will he give us a chance to contend and win, win finals and win flags?’
He’s going to be a very good player, but the two I'd compare him to are Dustin Martin and Dane Swan.
They're the two stockier body, big-bodied insiders that have got the ability to get the ball inside and burst out. I've seen Harley Reid do it periodically, but I still see that he has development to go, as you'd expect.
Dusty does it with a ‘don't argue’, and Dane Swan could back out of a contest. He had about five or six ways of getting out of pressure and finding time or space.
So those two blokes became elite players over a long period of time, because they could use their attributes to find time and space.
Harley Reid still struggles to find time and space from the inside, because I think he goes into a contest already deciding how he's going to come out of it and he's been pinged in tackles quite consistently because I think he's quite arrogant around the way that he approaches the ball and the way he's going to exit it.
But there's no guarantee that he's going to turn into a Dusty or a Swan, so that would cap what I would value him at right now.
Line him up Nasiah Wanganeen-Milera; it's $2 million for Harley Reid for two years and it's $1.4m for Wanganeen-Milera for two years. That’s what the supposition is.
If I've got them lined up on the wall, I'm taking Wanganeen-Milera 10 times out of 10 in front of Harley Reid.
There’s also an option for West Coast which is to say ‘hey we love you, we want you to be a part of this club, and this is what we can afford’.
Then Harley Reid makes the decision.
West Coast cannot just be Harley Reid. This is 12 per cent of the cap that you have got across a group of 45 players.
If one eighth or around that is going to one player, it hampers your capacity to build a list around that person.
What West Coast need to decide is; is Harley Reid the character, the type of leader we want to build our club around? If that answer is yes, then maybe it’s worth it.
If it’s just a talent piece, then you’re chewing up too much of your cap and your options on one player. I wouldn’t be making that decision.
