Wait a sec... you're telling me they signed RTS and capewell for $400,000 combined this year? Because that was Walsh's contract.
I didn't say that Walsh's contact was equivalent to what they paid RTS and Capewell; I suspect you are being purposely obtuse, because I'm confident that you are more than capable of comprehending what I wrote.
My point is that we are in different points of the recruitment cycle. We recruited Reece last year through opportunity, and Reynolds and Capewell the year before through need, paying well for both of them - and, by your argument, they were an upgrade on what we had.
This year we clearly still have a chunk of change spare, given the TPJ links, but we choose not to make a splash because management obviously thought we had no glaring holes.
Since we got Reynolds we have let go of:
Paliasia, flegler, herbie and capewell last year, we lost Milford, Coates, isaako and literally DOZENS of overpaid players since then.
Dozens? Were Coates, Isaako, Niu and Turpin on big money? Lodge and TPJ would have been better examples here. Granted Milford freed up a good amount of cap. Still, with our subsequent signings and the upgrades - based on their improvement - of players like Staggs, Carrigan, Haas, Cobbo, Mam, Walsh, Piakura, Riki, it's not really a surprise we're not hitting the free agent market hard. And honestly I think that's a good thing.
They've lost nikorima for shaun Johnson, Sean osullivan for te maire Martin, chad townsend for metcalfe, the list goes on and on and on. They didn't just replace them with like for like, they IMPROVED each one, players who would have multiple offers from other clubs at the time. We got baker and jaiyden hunt ffs.
Baker and Hunt are depth, which is all we wanted. If we'd wanted to
improve on any of our players - which we didn't really need to - it would have cost us more than it did for the Warriors to improve on the likes of Sean O'Sullivan. Plus I imagine they got good deals on the likes of Johnson and Martin, and possibly even RTS - similar to how we ultimately made out well in the Walsh signing.
On top of that they made the preliminary last year, so your argument that we needed to upgrade players is mute when you think, um, they didn't?
Of course they would have had to, everybody does. And I'll admit that I'm not across the Warriors list in detail, but do they really have the situation of having a collection of exceptional young star players that they are trying to tie down? Did they have a Staggs-Cobbo-Farnworth situation? A Haas-Carrigan-Flegler situation? If so, I'm happy to be educated. But this was my point here - the gap in talent seemed evident in that final.
Anyway, I just think if you want to accuse a team of rorting the salary cap, there are probably better places to start than the Wahs.
