Can someone confirm if Reimis Smith has moved to Canterbury please ? If so, would there be some explanation available to the fans ?
Just a guess but I would say we realised we overpaid for him and then f**ked him off.
The NYC salary cap is only $200k for the 20 highest paid players. That's an average of $10k each but in reality there will be about five
potential first graders taking up half of that (so about $20k each) with the remaining 15 or so players virtually zero chance of progressing beyond NYC. These guys divvy up the other $100k (less than $7k per man).
So the half dozen NYC players on big money need to be making a massive contribution or your team really suffers. Reimis Smith was not making that massive contribution.
Others on 'big money' (for under 20s) are likely to be Davis, Fuimaono, Aloiai, Dockar-Clay and Twal. Though with ZDC playing for Wenty, he might've been upgraded to an NRL contract (second tier). That's about $75k (almost half the NYC cap), meaning we won't see him in under 20s again, though you would think if we've done that it's because he has agreed to an extension. I guess we'll know if we see him in NYC again.
Kids like Troy Dargan will be in demand (he is an Australian Schoolboy plus now starting in the NYC in the year he turns 18), so we probably had to throw him an upgrade. That could also be why Smith is gone. Likewise, we let Lussick go while still under contract. We wouldn't have done that unless it suit us. And the NYC salary cap is very tight. To bring in one kid with potential you pretty much have to release another.
