Agreed, Macrae over Smith. ACL are difficult to come back from, i am sure one of the member has some stats on this.??
Geelong have a lot of potential players that can run through the midfield, Saints less. Currently i am preferring Holmes over Smith as i believe Holmes is a lock for a full time mid role this year, and can line up in DEF?MID status for SC.
F1 JFH or Rankine leaning JFH as Rankine finds ways to get injured with his all or nothing approach.
F2 Macrae is a must have, as i cannot see anything else but full time on ball.
F3 Daniels if confirmed HB role. Early mail is yes. But also a risky option as he is moving into a new team and the ROOS have several options at HB. Pre Season will tell us more.
Now not much talk on Riley Sanders from WB. Could be one to keep a eye on during pre-season Games.
Would note on Smith that by the season start he's closer to being in the 2nd season back from the ACL than the first. He'll be at 15 months which is a solid 6 months past the normal optimal return timeframe and still a solid 3 months from a bad return. From the talk he was a chance to play finals last year so I would assume he was much closer to optimal than bad time frame.
My bigger question for Smith will actually be how the Cats plan on using him. He's actually probably last on my list of the main names because of those concerns. He's an awful ball user so he really needs a lot of ball and he tends to be better suited to the wing where he can run and carry and then bomb it long to a contest as that's the only way he really gets effective disposals. The Cats have a few spots he could slot but the wing would be where I want to see him and can score pretty well.
Lot of questions with the Cats in general on personnel.
Throw in the bye and for me that makes him more in the potential than must have category.
Agree that I like Holmes more, albeit I think there's more genuine premium plays in the backs and his injury history is becoming a bit of a concern, is it "luck" that they keep happening in finals or are the soft tissue problems going to become more widespread across the year. If Holmes didn't have the r0 he'd be right up there for me but that's a huge hit given the quality of a couple of the options that don't have that around the same price range and also that don't have his injury history.
Macrae on ball is a lock, he's proven he's not much good anywhere else and the Saints desperately need another midfielder to go with Steele and Phillipou so it's a great fit, this is a team that was giving Dow, Clark, Windhager, Jones, Stocker and Seb Ross genuine midfield minutes across the entire season last year. Sinclair so much better at HB being forced into there is also a blow for them that Macrae can fix. It's hard to understate how awful their midfield options were last year.
Phillipou for mine is also a lock if he looks set to continue the midfield role, he's got the ability level to at least contend for a Brownlow, imo. I assume they didn't think he was physically ready which is why they held him back for so long but he showed what he can do last year.
Daniels is too cheap to resist if playing HB. He's put up ~100 before in that role and the Kangas have a lot more supply and history of huge HB scoring that could make that even juicier. It's not like they've shown any care factor whether their defenders can defend in recent times either.
JHF will depend a lot on preseason. If Drew and Wines are still in their main mix, then JHF needs to look much improved for mine. He's a talent but he's also been his own worst enemy by playing well as a forward and can definitely see him copping the Heeney treatment so that Wines/Drew can have a role in the team as they can't really play anywhere else. Lot of moving parts here, I also kind of hate his bye as there's so many other options at other positions and he feels by far the most replaceable of the players in that bye.
Rankine is hard. They recruited a few guys that could hurt his role. Peatling as a mid and ANB as another HF with much better workrate to be an option around the ground. I find it hard to find a huge amount of upside on the pick because of that. Feels like they need him forward more than anywhere else which limits him a bit in a team that on paper still looks one of the weaker albeit I liked their recruiting this o***eason. His bye is also fantastic which is a nice bonus. Durability and suspension risk are both high here which doesn't help. He was surprisingly consistent last year but also relied on some pretty extreme ratios which are driven from some absurd goal kicking accuracy, if that reverted to the mean then his ratio would probably largely go with it. Definitely one to watch in the preseason though, his bye alone has value if he's worth picking despite it.
Definitely for me though the premium forwards matter far less than the rookies, I could definitely see myself easily rolling with Macrae at F1 because the rookie options look sensational in the forwards and so do the midprice guys. The rookies are mostly all pure FWD as well so you have to pick them there so might see a couple of the midprice options leak into the mids, heck Daniel might even leak to DEF where I've struggled a lot more to find cheap options so far.
As always, the rookies dictate structure to me but the midpricers might also. Definitely a high chance we're playing the "pick two rucks" game that is always so interestingly hard to do.
Worth noting that WR in the NFL might be the hardest spot in all of sports on the ACL, CB where you've got the mimic aspect might be worse but they're both right up there. If there's a spot that exposes being even a quarter step slow in/out of breaks it's that.
The ACL return will definitely depend on the person to a large extent. It's mostly mental for AFL, especially one like Smith's where he's almost certainly had too much time rather than not enough.
