While the forced exclusions of young stars Luke Davies-Uniacke and Tarryn Thomas are, on paper, troubling for North Melbourne, David Noble believes his side has been presented with a unique opportunity to experiment with its midfield core.

Both players failed to see out the Round 2 clash with West Coast last week. Davies-Uniacke has entered the AFL's 12-day concussion protocols after suffering a head knock in the first term, while Thomas will be sidelined for up to two months with internal bruising after copping an accidental boot to the ribs.

A key pillar of Noble's reign as senior coach of the Kangaroos has been desire to build out his midfield core, and he says he has a number of options to cover for the loss of the pair.

"We rolled Cam Zurhaar in the middle a bit last week, Curtis Taylor's played a little bit through there. Jaidyn (Stephenson) went back [to the VFL] and played really well. Eddie Ford has been in some good form, Paul Curtis has shown some good signs," Noble said.

"We feel like we've got some options to roll some different people through that midfield.

"That's the thing with 'Taz' (Thomas) and Luke out. We take it as an opportunity to see what we can actually do, and see how flexible we can actually be with our midfield structure."

After his 41-disposal effort against Essendon last week, Brisbane's star midfielder Lachie Neale will be looking to repeat his performance this weekend.

Performances like Neale's continue to raise the question of the validity of teams employing a tagger to take star opposition players out of the game.

Noble says North has a number of plans to try and curb the influence of the 2020 Brownlow medallist.

"We've gone more system based at the moment, there's a bit more midfield accountability with everyone sharing that role," Noble said.

"That's what we've probably done over the past 12-14 months, we've tried to build our midfield if we end up in trouble where someone is generating too much ball or generating too much offensive movement then we'll go to someone and say they might need to sit on them for a bit.

"Jy (Simpkin) has been our go-to player and I would suspect that's probably what we'll do again this week."