Maynard - Not sure what happened to him last year, just seemed lost. Probably fair to say last year and the year before are basically the range he's in as a player. Not quite good enough with the ball or intercepting to take the leap. Lot of competition also. Durability a plus.
Sorry for digging up the old quote here but I've only just started going through this thread. Bruz is a fan fave of mine so I can shed some light on what happened
Maynard landed awkwardly and hurt his ankle early on - thinking it was round 3 since it was at Marvel IIRC. Could have been round 2 as he only dished up a 49 that night. Took him a while to get over it and into the season and like most at the club, seemed to be caught up in the malaise we had going on there on field. Seriously, it is hard to overstate how bad the morale was through the army at that stage and you could see from the players' efforts that it was pretty bad within the walls too. We were a rabble onfield and off, with only an ultra defensive gameplan saving us from 100 point smashings. Our loss to Gold Coast at the G in round 7 was probably the most dispirited I'd seen them play since the dying days of the Shaw era 22 years ago.
Moore went down for the season during the Melbourne game in Sydney at half year. With Howe also missing and Kelly in the medical room again, Maynard was asked often to play 2nd tall as we had nobody else who was AFL level to do the job. Still averaged 95.3, over 9 games including the 47 in round 23 when we fielded half a VFL team and an AFL contingent that wanted to be anywhere but.
2021 was a putrid year for the whole club.
Now: Roughead/Moore/Howe isn't a very durable trio of tall backs at the moment but the acquisition of Dean and Krueger should help smooth that out. And you never know, Kelly might start getting through games. He's been training forward but if our talls start falling, he could still be switched back. I doubt Maynard will be asked to do a job on Jeremy Cameron again. The danger, as always, is that he's the only one on our list with a hope of standing Toby Greene or Liam Ryan. He's bound to get those jobs again.
If Maynard spends quality time in the mids, then he is bound to get more ball. He will lose some of his scoring that he can rack up off half back though so let's say it cancels out. The big improvement will be in that he can swing through the mids when he is having a shocker (less than 80 points), of which he had 7 last year. If, on those days, he picks up just 3 contested possessions in the midfield and bangs it over 40 metres forward, as is his wont, he gains around 20 points. That doesn't count the extra tackles he would lay or any points for centre clearance. But a 20 point improvement just on those bad days alone averages out to 6.5PPG over the course of the year and he's back up around the 100 mark.
So he's in my team, then out, then back in again. I'll admit that it's doing my head in a bit. If I didn't have such a man-crush on him, I think the call might be easier