Melbourne WON'T be Minor Premiers this year...and probably won't be after MNF - the best two teams are Manly and St George.
It's hard to say if the Storm would have had less success in years past without cheating the cap - many players did not have their true market value tested (loyal guys such as Hoffman, Slater), and towards the end we were carrying a lot of dead weight on huge money (White, Turner, Finch, Lima, et al).
I am very confident that our current top three would have remained during this time regardless. If you were CEO, who would have you kept - Quinn (~$250k) + Hoffman (~$250k) + White ($250k) or Smith (~$600) + two nuffies (2 x $55k) - simple equation to me. And we could have promote had many cheap juniors to make up that top 25 for the cap and attracted many journeymen as well (already attracted Newton, Norrie, etc). And let's not forget the success Maloney has had this year at the Warriors - we could have had him at 5-8 instead of Inglis (thus having Inglis at centre and not paying ~$250k for Quinn)...or even Finch. Choices pertaining to player retentions are easier than outside signings - the contracts ball is essentially in their court. Making smarter retention decisions and the subsequent roster possibilities are indeed endless.
And why did the Storm continue to cheat over many years? Cheating the cap is like Pringles - once you start you can't stop...you can't pay overs for players and then change the policy, it would mean you'd have a weak squad getting paid hugely over market value...and so some salaries were heavily inflated by the skill around them. Furthermore, whether it was the culture, the rorting or luck that produced our success was no concern to Waldron - we were winning and at the time it was impossible to tell what exactly was doing it, so why f*ck the formula and why raise suspicions with lots of sudden player releases? From his point of view, if it ain't broke why fix it?
The main benefits of cheating are increased experience, greater self-belief, and throwing the footy around in 2010...and if you can quantify this, you deserve a medal. My personal opinion (perhaps biased?) is that if Melbourne had not cheated the cap, 2006-2009 would have not yielded the success it did...but surely we would have been close (i.e. akin to Brisbane's successes in 2006-2009 and Manly's successes 2006-2009). We would have been almost as successful with a smarter recruitment policy, the culture developed and instilled by Craig Bellamy and the team, and reinforced by the retention of our top three...and so I reckon those cheating years would have turned out similar to 2011 so far.
