There has been a debate early in preliminary final week about whether the Hawks would consider leaving out either Lake or Frawley against the Dockers, under the scenario that one key position defender would take Dockers star Matthew Pavlich while the other could be left without a match-up.

However the team's defensive general Josh Gibson said he believed Frawley was actually well suited to a player like Chris Mayne, the medium-sized Dockers forward who roams up the ground as a "lead-up" marking option.

That match-up would then allow Lake to play on Pavlich and stay close to the last line, while Gibson covered whichever other marking targets the Dockers might go with for the blockbuster at Domain Stadium.

"He has got fantastic leg speed," Gibson said of Frawley on Monday night.

"That's the thing that impressed me the most, was his engine and his ability to go with forwards on the lead," he said.

"So he does like those lead-up [forwards] and it's a long ground there, so maybe he will play on Mayne."

It's the Dockers small forwards, Hayden Ballantyne and Michael Walters, who loom large after combining for 60 per cent of the Dockers score in the qualifying final against Sydney, while there is pressure on Zac Clarke to start providing a "return on the investment" the club has put into him - as Ross Lyon said last week - by having an impact forward or by holding his own in the ruck so Aaron Sandilands can slide closer to goals for periods.

Regardless of the Dockers' set-up, Gibson indicated the more important aspect for the Hawks was to maintain the predictability of their defensive unit so they could implement the multi-faceted way the whole team defends and counter-attacks.

"There are days you play more of the deep, mid and high-tier [in the backline], so you've got to be adaptable and play on a lot of different opponents," the two-time premiership Hawk said, in an interview on Fox Footy's On The Couch program.

"It's more of a team defence, working together rather than the standard one v ones."

Fellow Hawks star Sam Mitchell, who like Gibson could be named in the All-Australian team on Tuesday night, gave an insight into the intricate nature of the Hawks defence, and how Lake and now Frawley had adapted to it coming from other clubs over the past few seasons.

"It's a really difficult system to learn," Mitchell said, in an interview on Channel Seven's Talking Footy on Monday night.

"When you have a coach for a long time, it's like an onion, there is just more and more layers," he said.

"We have had Clarko for 10 years now, so there are so many layers to our defence.

"Lakey, by his own admission, his first two good games for Hawthorn were probably the preliminary final and the grand final in 2013 … his first year. It took him that long to figure it out," he said.

"Chipper [Frawley] has done well to pick it up as quickly as he has."