Gus Gould has it right. You don’t/shouldn’t win competitions by trying to buy players. You should develop juniors, have a strong feeder system and then as the great Joey Johns says, there should be cash breaks to ensure you can hold onto the talent developed.
The last decade has been about buying players
When a team has a culture that develops and nurtures winners, like the Storm, they don’t have to pay overs when the rare time comes that they need to buy coverage in a position. I heard something the other day where the last time the Storm purchased a ‘marquee’ player before Xavier Coates, it was Michael Crocker.
We can talk about the ‘war chest’ all day long but that’s not going to deliver us a premiership. It might slip us into the finals but it won’t beat the top 6 teams running around right now. If we buy Brandon Smith, and don’t get me wrong - he’s a great player - but we will pay him $900K per season and he simply not worth that. If we go for Finucane, and let’s not forget we got rid of him to the Storm when he was mediocre and they turned him into a force of nature - we will offer him $2m for 3 seasons.
Offloading DWZ was the right move. Not because it’s smart to throw $400K in the bin to watch him play for another team, but because he’s not worth $800K per season and should never have been signed for that in the first place.
Once we develop a culture of winning and bringing through juniors as we did when Chris Anderson and Bullfrog Moore were around, we will have to either work with what we have or wait for the right players at the right price.
