BY DAN

Leo Thompson has rejected the Knights offer for an extension, and is set to head to market. Canberra are interested. Is this true love?

I don’t know who taught you what love is, but no you weirdo. More importantly like all of us who’ve been hurt one too many times, it’s important to protect yourself from disappointment (your therapist will disagree with that). The long and the short of it is that the price for Thompson is rising. Canberra is just one suitor in a flooded market (six to eight teams according to his agent, speaking through Brent Read’s reporting). This will be a long shot.

This is driven by the fact there’s not really many sexy free agents still on the market for 2025 – and Leo Thomspon is dead sexy. He’s gone from being unable to crack a starting rotation with the Milk to being an every-down starter in Newcastle, and the standard talking head ‘dark horse’ when they start inexplicably naming Origin squads when they get bored of actually talking about football after round one (FFS people he’s a Kiwi). Leo is a good prop about to enter his prime. He gets through decent minutes, can skittle a few defenders, and isn’t a liability when it comes to bear hugs.

The market isn’t dry. You could theoretically get your mitts on Selwyn Cobbo or Clint Gutherson if you want. But competition for these names will likely be restricted to a few of the top end of town (Easts. I’m talking about Easts) or the desperate (St George). Talents with more mass appeal, both due to their price and utility, will be far more scarce. That means the price will go up – something I’ve no doubt entered Leo’s mind (or at least his agents) when he rejected the Knights deal.

So where does that leave the Milk? It means it’ll take something drastic to get Leo to come to town. The Raiders’ ‘in’ is that he used to be here, so he knows the environment. But it’s not ‘home’. It’s akin to returning to an ex’s house that barely shed a tear when you walked out the door. It hardly feels appealing, especially when its reported the big Sydney clubs are keen for you to come stay.

It also means to get him Canberra would need to play full value and then some. Leo is a great player and is only getting better, so the ‘over’ one pays to get him will hopefully get eaten by his potential over the next few years. But if everyone is willing to go full value the tax the Milk would have to pay to entice him makes whatever surplus they can extract from the deal even smaller. When you’ve got a pile of middles you can turn from pretty good to great, a fair question becomes whether you might be better off spending your money elsewhere. And that’s not to mention my general vibe that you should only pay top dollar for a handful of props in the league (Joey Taps being one of them). That’s not to say it’s a bad investment, just that I’d be wary of the lengths one might need to go to get Leo in green.

And of course this could all just be a process to make sure Newcastle pays him what he’s worth. He was reportedly on a very team friendly deal before this current negotiation. That makes sense – he was barely a squad member when he joined the Knights. Now he’s good he wants to get paid. Newcastle probably wants to pay him what he’s worth, as opposed to what his market value is. These are different things. Maybe Newy comes to the party prior to 1 November. This discussion has reportedly been going since July.

But the door is open. At least a little. Canberra have a spot or two in a top 30 to fill, and while we wait (and we wait and we wait and we wait) to find out about Hep, X and Danny ‘Power’ Walker (or Corey Paix…sigh), Leo is the only name on the market where *things* appear to be happening. Unfortunately more are

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Feature image courtesy of Keegan Carroll.