Stop making sense.
For some reason people believe paying one of our least impactful forwards like he was in our top 3 was good business. Letting Offa go was the best thing we could do. Other players would be going "I am dominating week in week out, I'm in contention for rep footy. I should be getting paid more than this bloke who is barely holding his spot in the team."
In 2019 we signed Matterson, our best player at around 400k. He saw his output, he looked around and saw people making half the effort for twice the money and he wanted out. His replacement Luciano followed the same trajectory. It is why Aloiai left, it is why Marty left, it is why any time we finally get a breakout forward they immediately want to leave. hell it is probably why Ice wanted out of his contract. The best second rower in the league signed for the wooden spooners on 600k a year and then a few weeks later all the other second rowers like Kikau started getting thrown 800k at them as the market started to dry up.
Someone like Stefano would weigh himself against Offa's salary and expect at least somewhere around 700k considering he is in line for rep footy. Yes I am aware they still weigh their salary against other players in the league, however a player is more likely to stay at their team for a little under if they believe an offer is fair and in line with where they view their position in a team.
The core of our pack for the next few years is now on
8. Stefano 500k
9. Api 700k
10. Klemmer 400k this year, my guess is around 700k from next year on
11. Papali'i 600k
12. Bateman 700 - 800k
15. Twal 450k (I would expect him to stay for around the same money too)
16. Pole 250k
If Offa was here I wouldn't see Stefano taking less than 700k. However, he has recently come out talking about how he wants to captain this club in the future and he has also had a horrid experience at another club (Eels). We have also obviously developed him into being in SOO contention. Now I could see him extending for 2 years for around 650k each in good faith. In this case we could front end 75k from each year and just pay him 575k flat over the next 4 years, which would be really good business.
I have Pole on the bench here as I believe he should take Klemmer's starting prop spot in a couple years when he starts to drop off. If Pole extended for another 2 years I could see it being around 500k. Again if we do a bit of moving around on the payments we can take 100k off each of those 2 years and apply it to his current contract. Meaning 350k over the next 2 years and 400k the 2 years after. Again another really good bit of business.
Twal is honestly probably the first picked every week. Would pretty much make most top 17s in the league, every team needs an Alex Twal. Was in the Blues squad a few years ago but hasn't bounced back since his sternum injury. Next year is his final contracted year. I can see him staying for around the same money as he seems to love the club and it is honestly a pretty fair contract. Seems to be adding another dimension to his game now as well, has probably passed and offloaded more this year than his last 4 years. It is also said a forwards best few years are usually 26-29, he is now 26 with a ton of experience so expect further improvement.
Lock these 3 up for around the prices I said and that is the core of our pack for 3 years on really good money for us. Sheens and Benji seem to be really proud of the fact that they have already been able to front end some contracts already while still having a stack of cash in the bank for this year. I could honestly see the 2 that we front end the most being Klemmer and Bateman, If we haven't already. If we gave Klemmer an extra 400k this year to be paying him 800k and Bateman the same taking him to 1.2 for this year then we could take their contracts down to 600k each going forward. We could have a full representative starting pack without paying 1 of them more than 600k and the best hooker in the game on 700k.
This is 100% the reason we are looking to move on Blore as well. He is still on quite a solid contract as Panthers had him on stupid money before he even debuted and we have been paying him on potential since. Why would Twal and Pole extend on that kind of money when someone like Blore is being paid similar for 1/100th of the output (I do rate Blore, however Pole will play more games this year than Blore has in 3-4. Pole taking on the whole raiders pack is also much more impressive than Blore taking on Nathan Brown)
Our 8-17 honestly just needs a 13 and a 17 at this point. We can definitely fill these 2 from within as we already have quite a bit of experience and leadership(Matamua being the most likely to fill one of these spots). I do not believe we can bring 2 people up at the same time. If we bring up Da Silva as our 14, Matamua as our 13 and bring up another 17 from reserve grade then that will add quite a bit of inexperience to our pack. This won't be too bad if we can get an experienced half like hunt, however, if we can't then I can't see us capitalising on our advantage from when our starters are on.
It does not look like we can land an experienced half at the moment which means the best solutions for us atm is to target a starting centre and a starting creative 13. There are plenty of centres out there and I do not doubt that we can land someone decent. I am not sure if we are targeting Best or not, but if we aren't then I am sure it is because we have something else up our sleeve as I am sure we could benefit from him.
This leaves an experienced forward and well... Frizzell fits the bill. If it is longer than 2 years then absolutely not (We can't afford to become a retirement village again), however he is on 600k and I am sure we could once again get that subsidized by the Knights for next year. Put him on an edge and one of our backrowers at lock and we suddenly have a top 4 pack being paid on average like a 9-12th pack.
We already seem to have found the core backs that we will be building around. Brooks seems keen to take a heavily reduced contract (2 years 500k). Nof and brooks are the only players in our club that are eligible for the 200k cap allowance, which means if Brooks signs for cheap then we can throw it all at Nof taking his contract from 500k back down to around 300k a year on the cap.
All of this is just to say with the way we are doing business we could quite easily fit in at least 2 marquee backs. The best news is these numbers were also before the salary got approved to go up by another 2.5 million. I do not understand how we have gone from probably the worst managed cap in the league to one of the best in such a short space of time. Was it luck? Did Lee and Pascoe step back and stop getting involved? Alternatively have they accrued enough experience to be benefiting us in these areas? Did we bring someone in from the outside that made an immediate impact? (Sheens? Doubt it is Benji as the tide seemed to turn in late 2021 after the docuseries on fox. I know 2022 was horrid on field however we definitely seemed to clear up our act behind the scenes)
