Hawthorn coach Alastair Clarkson has joined Essendon's Kevin Sheedy in shelving flooding tactics for the sake of club development.

Sheedy shared his dislike for negative football after his side got thumped by the Crows in Round 10 and Clarkson echoed those sentiments on Sunday after the Power thrashed the Hawks by 96 points.

"If you put numbers behind the ball you get savaged in the press for trying to kill the game," he said.

"If you don't do it you get savaged because the coaching staff has been re-active and haven't had a crack to slow the game down.

"We don't want to teach our players to have a negative brand of footy, we want to go out and play productive, attacking footy.

"We know at different stages, because of our inexperience and perhaps our poor execution at times, that's going to hurt us."

It was that poor execution that prompted Clarkson to describe his players' skills against the Power as 'deplorable'.

"No matter who pulls on the guernsey to play you expect a more competitive effort than we showed," he said.

"Full credit to Port Adelaide. They beat us in an area of the game that we've been quite good at for some time and that's the inside ball."

But Clarkson was happier with the second half.

Brad Sewell, Campbell Brown and Robbie Campbell showed they're players of the future while the team was only outscored five goals to seven when the opposition was looking to boost its percentage.

With these positives in mind, Clarkson said Hawthorn was slowly but surely moving forward.

"The natural reaction to it (the result) is that we are going backwards but we're not, we're moving forwards and we know that internally," he said.

"If we've got our good players up and going we can be very, very competitive, we know that.

"We are a contender if we get our good players out there but if we don't we are vulnerable."