AFL trade news: Port Adelaide sends medical team to Las Vegas to test Ryan Burton

Mick Stirling

AFL trade news: Port Adelaide sends medical team to Las Vegas to test Ryan Burton image

The craziness of the AFL trade period has been highlighted with the lengths taken by Port Adelaide to give potential incoming player Ryan Burton a medical examination.

Burton has been put on the table by Hawthorn as part of a package to get Chad Wingard to Waverley, but with the defender currently on his end-of-season break the Power have needed to send a medical team to Las Vegas to conduct the tests.

"We've got five or six full-time medical staff who were fighting about going first class,” Port Adelaide list manager Jason Cripps said on AFL Trade Radio on Monday morning. 

“We're going to send the bill to Hawthorn with (the) soft (salary) cap these days."

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"The medical staff are flying first class to Las Vegas to do a medical on a guy who's probably sitting in a pool, probably having a couple of Coronas," Cripps joked.

Burton missed a full season with a broken leg in his draft year of 2015, seeing him drop from being a fancied potential number one pick to selection 19.

He managed four games in his debut season of 2016 and has missed just three matches in the past two years, was runner up in the Rising Star award in 2017 and came fourth in the club best and fairest award the same year.

Cripps confirmed Burton, a native South Australian, has been put on the trade table by the Hawks in their efforts to secure Wingard.

"Chad's requested to be traded and we need to work through whether Ryan is part of that deal," Cripps said.

"We've taken players from other clubs, Paddy Ryder and Charlie Dixon etc, over the journey, so our philosophy is it creates opportunity, but the deal needs to be right."

It was interesting to see the names Cripps listed when talking about players brought into Port Adelaide in recent years, choosing to mention Ryder and Dixon rather than last year’s relatively unsuccessful incoming batch of Jack Watts, Tom Rockliff and Steven Motlop.

The Power have already been active in the trade period, moving Jared Polec and Jasper Pittard to North Melbourne and bringing premiership ruckman Scott Lycett across from West Coast.

Mick Stirling