The words "best available" get used a lot at this time of year, and always come with an asterisk attached. Best can only ever be in the eye of each invididual recruiter when you're talking about teenage footballers, and if you asked all 18 recruiters to rank the best players in this year's draft none of their lists would come back looking the same.

This year's group looks good, and reasonably big. It's incredibly even, once you get past the first handful of names, and filled with some very different types. It's easy to look back on past drafts and see who should have been picked where, but at this time of year, the future isn't easy to predict.

This is the eighth time I have put together my own rankings, and narrowing the list to just 30 players was tough. In fact, it was expanded from the usual 25 in order to squeeze a few more in. The players always feel hard to split - at this point in time any of them could be anything, that's the best bit about any draft - but this year it felt like pushing one up the order nudged another too far down.

To me, Isaac Heeney is the most outstanding prospect, the best kid in it. He's the hardest to find any flaws in. Playing for NSW meant he didn't get to play against division one opposition this year, but he looked completely comfortable playing for Sydney's reserves side. A Swans Academy graduate, he'll start training on Monday and be called at pick 18 in the draft. He's one of the biggest bargains I can think of, but at the same time he grew up near Newcastle, played soccer until he was 12, and would probably not be the player he is without what the academy has exposed him to.

After Heeney, it gets harder. Any one of Christian Petracca, Paddy McCartin, Darcy Moore or Angus Brayshaw could have come next on my list, they're so difficult to separate. I flipped Petracca and McCartin around so many times, I don't envy St Kilda's need to settle on one over the other. But pitching ahead to where they could all be in three, four or five years, I went for Peter Wright.