Kooly87
NRL Captain
- Jun 2, 2017
- 4,197
- 7,275
If you only buy players once they have reached their peak, then you always pay absolute peak money. In a salary cap setting like the NRL, you really need to be squeezing more than the cap limit's worth of talent, into the cap limit, and they only way to do that practically and without cheating is to buy guys for less money than they're actually worth, which of course requires the club to speculate and occasionally take calculated risks.I agree with the concept of the club keeping strong tabs on Ponga; may be a blessing in disguise that we have let Knights take this gamble early on for him, if he inst the franchise player they thought he was then we have dodged a bullet...
Having said that...
Broncos "should" start looking at long term franchise potential players now, its worked very well in the past when we chased and attracted these types of players like Kev Walters, Lazarus, Tallis...not coincidentally they are associated with the most sustained period of success in the clubs history.
I say we need to adapt this long term lenses again because if done right it can accelerate the championship window for us. A bit of addition by subtraction if you will. We are at St George levels of overflowing with forward talent and quite frankly some of that needs to be moved on to allow us space under the cap to achieve better balance
What im "not" saying is that Ponga is the answer, he might be when he reaches his peak but...he represents exactly the type of franchise changing talent the club needs to be seriously looking at going forward..
My 2 cents...
People can baulk at Ponga at $1.125 million a season right now because he isn't at his absolute peak, but if that's the kind of offer he can attract already just based on his potential, then picking him up in a few years time at his absolute peak is going probably to cost a number that is truly astronomical and probably out of reach for all but his incumbent club at the time. It's the reason why no one was ever able to buy Smith or JT etc. Even Cronk was out of reach until he was ready to wind his career up and needed to move interstate.
If people are adverse to the club taking risks I can accept that, but you need to then accept that we probably aren't going to pick up the next Locky or the next JT unless we find and develop them ourselves, or we only pay an absolute premium for them once they've already made it as an elite level star, which is an expensive and unsustainable way to run a footy club that's limited by the salary cap.
Last edited: