Hinkley said he spoke to Richardson late on Tuesday night and told him that he would not get in the way of his coaching director's plan to land a top job as Richardson was unveiled as St Kilda's new senior coach on Thursday.
Hinkley said it would be wrong of him to tell Richardson not to join the Saints, especially seeing as he did a similar thing last year when he moved from his assistant coach position at Gold Coast to his current role.
"We had a chat and I said (to Richardson) the last thing I could sit here and say to you right now is to not chase that dream of what you want to do," Hinkley told SEN on Friday morning.
"I've done the same thing so it would be just wrong.
"It's almost a mirror image of 12 months ago."
Hinkley conceded while the timing was inconvenient for his team there was not much he could do about it.
"There's no doubt it will become a little disruptive for us as far as what Richo has done for us and how good he was at his job," he said.
"Ideally it wouldn't happen, but what can you do in this situation?"
Hinkley's attention will now move to Port Adelaide's pre-season training program which starts in Dubai on November 24 with the coach hoping to make up for a later start time compared to last year.
"Dubai Sports Centre... is a world class facility, there's tracks, grounds an indoor gym, an indoor stadium that we can train on there's also an athletics track which we are really excited by," Hinkley said.
"We know we're three weeks behind, we're actually going to miss out on something like 23 sessions from last pre-season that we have to catch up and Burgo (high performance coach Darren Burgess) wants to push them harder.
"We think that Dubai gives us a real intense eight or nine days where we can catch up on that little bit of ground."
Ken Hinkley: I would not hold Alan Richardson back
