The Raiders’ Jaiyden Hunt?

The Canberra Raiders have offered Jaiyden Hunt a two-year deal, as reported by the Canberra Times.

As any avid reader of these pages, or consumer of any other Raiders related content will know, this is not surprising nor new. It has been in the works for some time. Hunt is part, hopefully a small one, of building up a depth chart of middles that has been surprisingly decimated (not literally, nerds) both on the field and on the roster over this season.

Hunt is hardly going to knock your socks off. He’s not a big metre eater in the middle (he averages 59 metres a game), nor a brilliant line-runner on the edge. He’s made as many line-breaks this year as me and I’m still sore from walking to the fridge this morning. His six metres a run would have been dead last for forwards used by the Raiders this year, and that includes Jayden Brailey.

He does make a heap of tackles, which the Raiders need, and is his chief appeal. With Corey Horsburgh and Morgan Smithies leaving, the Raiders are losing two key prongs of their middle defence over the last few years. Hunt, should he sign and should he play, would be tasked with being a defensive workhorse in the middle. He can do that role. Whether Canberra want him doing that every week is another question.

You might say they’re trying to remake Corey Horsburgh in the aggregate. We’ll get one dude who can do the tackling, one who can do the passing and one who can do the running. Hunt is the first of these.

This is not an upside bet, like that made with Lipoi Hopoi. Certainty is the bet here. Hunt is 28, and has played 38 NRL games over a six-year career at the Dragons and the Broncos. He’s a known quantity. Evidently the Raiders have looked at their pipeline of talent, the market volatility, and looked to grab an assurance of first grade quality at a likely team-favourable level, likely close to the minimum.

If you squint, you might say Canberra have taken players before that other clubs haven’t been willing to give minutes to and turned them into stars. Zac Hosking is a recent example. But Hosking had shown more upside at better teams than Hunt at a younger age.

Rather it’s more likely a ‘squad’ decision. These deals, at their base, aren’t about the on-field product, or at least not *just* about it. Six years of NRL is not an accident. Being a professional is a skill learned and displayed. It will keep you on rosters, both because of a certainty of performance, but also because of the approach off the field which can help others reach higher ceilings.

In a perfect world Hunt would spend all the two years of his contract mostly playing cup, only coming into first grade when injury or suspension demands. But we wrote similar things about the signatures of Jayden Brailey and Danny Levi. Stick does get enamoured with professionals to a detrimental extent. If Hunt is playing a heap of games next year, then things are not going well for the Raiders.

I can’t say this is the deal I was hoping they’d seek to make. Hunt is a prototypical ‘guy’. If you numbered the middle depth chart 1-8, Tapine, Mariota, and Hosking would be at the top, with a Gen X double-space after. Hunt would be down at the other end. That they’re hunting for options at this end of the market prior to solving more pressing issues is concerning. Who is the first prop off the bench? Hunt? Hopoi? Jesse Milin? Will Vena Patuki-Case be at the club next year? It feels backwards.

Maybe there’s stuff already happening that we don’t know about. We are just people with keyboards and hope. Maybe, as we flagged here, the Raiders are hoping for the Chiefs ‘official’ entry to the market on November 1 to shake up a bunch of rosters and hoping to take advantage of the fallout. Maybe they’ve got a complete revamp of how they’re going to play.

Maybe they won’t actually get him. The Canberra Times reported that the Broncos were considering making an offer to Hunt as well, so this might not yet work out. It’s hard to tell how true that is. Brisbane only signed him to a one-year extension last year. He’s been at the club for three seasons now. They know what they have, and they haven’t exactly been knocking down his door. And when negotiations like this have been so public, invariably it means the Raiders are pretty confident they’ll get their man.

Whatever happens, this isn’t enough. Bigger fish must be caught, ones that can provide both the defensive support and metres that the Raiders are sending out the door. Because if Canberra don’t find more than Hopoi and Hunt, 2026 could look good compared to 2027.

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