I liked what I saw of Stimson at Melbourne. He was slowly getting more game time there through last year. Another year down there and he may have jumped higher in the pecking order. He's a solid defender and he runs pretty hard too. I didn't see a lot of flashy play from him. But I don't think you need to be a flashy player to be a good forward.
There are going to be some people that are still critical of this signing. He's not an established talent with just 17 NRL games in two seasons. But I've got hopes that he's going to wind up being another player that goes on to big things here. Some of our favourite players in our most recent glory era were signed when they were on the cusp of making themselves household names. There was no guarantee that they'd be great. But they'd done just enough to get noticed. It's still a point of pride to me that we used to recruit players that we're still not established that wound up in the rep arena shortly after joining us. A few teams thrive by recruiting stars regularly. But it's not how we traditionally built our strongest teams.
The naysayers will say that you can't be successful without signing marquee players. But the storm have used our old operating model to continually keep a strong roster together. I like that we're trying to get back to running the club that way. If Stimson doesn't go on to big things it's ok by me. He's probably not on a massive wage. But if he does establish himself as a quality player, it should be an indication that we've got some recruitment staff with the ability to see talent before the commentators start fapping over them.
