HAWTHORN planned to fit marquee recruits Tom Mitchell and Jaeger O'Meara into the club's salary cap while Sam Mitchell and Jordan Lewis were still there.
"We would have been pretty tight, but we would have been able to," Clarkson told SEN on Tuesday.
"We were hoping that the actual recruiting of Tom and Jaeger was along the lines of learning from (Luke) Hodge, Mitchell and Lewis for 12 months or two years.
"They (the deals) were all independent of one another.
"There's no point trying to trick anyone that our salary cap would have been really tight had we squeezed them all in, but we would have got there.
"We had already gone to several of our players – we would have had to have done some manipulating of contracts, not in an illegal way, (but) go to some of the players and say can you not take so much this year and take it later on?
"That process had already begun whether Sam and Jordan were at the club or not."
The Hawks brought in Swans star Tom Mitchell and O'Meara from Gold Coast during last year's NAB AFL Trade Period.
But the biggest bombshells were the departures of long-time servants Sam Mitchell to West Coast and Lewis to Melbourne.
"What's been missed along the way is I was really, really comfortable that I was able to sit down with both those guys and the club was too, and talk about what was best for their futures and the footy club," Clarkson said.
"That doesn't happen very often and it can only happen when you have very decorated servants who have got pretty strong trust between the coaching staff and the player and we tried to work out what was best for both parties.
"We couldn't guarantee either of those players a significant tenure beyond 2017 and there was some significant opportunities out there for both of those boys and they wanted to explore them.
"We went through the process of exploring them. It didn't take a couple of hours, it took a couple of weeks in both their cases.
"When they weighed everything up, they had the choice of if they wanted to stay at the Hawthorn footy club and play for a minimum of 12 months at our club, but it might have been a maximum for 12 months at our club, too."
Mitchell, 34, will play for at least one year with the Eagles before moving into a coaching role, but hasn't ruled out playing on in 2018.
Lewis, 30, signed a three-year deal with the Demons.
"Sam was more receptive because we had discussions 12 months earlier when West Coast made an approach to the club to see whether they could mentor him as a potential assistant coach in the future," Clarkson said.
"With Jordan, we had some discussions, but we didn't really know if he was going to go down the coaching path.
"In actual fact, he had a much greater opportunity at another club if he had chosen to go down the coaching path."
