The real issue was never us paying the money to keep him, it was not messing with other players salaries to push the guy who is coming into free agency out of the clubs 10 most highly paid players. It’s fine for us to have decided we were happy for him to go, but it was inexcusable to not maximise our leverage over Brisbane and/or the AFL to ensure that if he did we would get maximum value.
He has absolutely left massive hole in our list, and we needed to ensure we leveraged hisove to our advantage. Especially if we knew it was coming. But everything that has been reported suggests that adjusting other contracts to set up future cap space has the unintended consequence of pushing Draper out of the region where we had some control of the situation.