NRL SuperCoach 2017 ‘It’s a Trap Series: Canberra Raiders

EVERY NRL side is filled with SuperCoach traps and this could spell a point scoring disaster! We take a look at the players from each club that come with a risk.

The Raiders provided a plethora of SuperCoach options in 2016, including the triple threat of Croker, BJ and Rapana in the CTW position. I believe it’s unheard of for half of the top six CTW options to be from the same team.

The ‘Raider 3’ are now priced absurdly high (especially Croker and BJ), but for very good reasons. Croker just broke the all-time scoring record for the club, Rapana is now the club’s tryscoring record holder and Leilua finally unlocked his potential and racked up some incredible numbers all across the stat sheet (a closer look at that another day, perhaps).

The Raiders go into 2017 as equal second premiership favourites (current as of the date of this article) which will no doubt encourage many SuperCoaches to look closely at value options at the club; especially any formerly relevant SuperCoach options.

STUDY GUIDE: Every club’s study guide here

For me, the two options that stick out like sore thumbs are Aidan Sezer ($236,500) and Blake Austin ($293,300) — both quality footballers who had quiet years in 2016. Let’s start with Aidan Sezer. He’s priced almost unbelievably cheap, coming off a 35.38 season average from 21 games. Considering previous season averages of 60, 48 and 60, I can understand the interest in him. However, those three seasons were when he was at the Titans, where he was the dominant playmaker and their extremely accurate goalkicker.

Blake Austin was coming off a career SuperCoach year that coincided with a move to the Raiders and being handed a guaranteed role at 5/8. For this reason, I can’t place any relevance on his previous 2014 season given he was coming off the bench, or inserted all over the backline as necessitated by injuries at the Tigers.

Looking at 2015, despite his form on the field translating to ‘Origin bolter’ status, from a SuperCoach perspective he was only able to muster up a season average of 55, although arguably a few outlier games ruined his average where he inexplicably scored extremely poorly compared to his usual work rate.

In any case, injuries disrupted Austin’s 2016, and he only averaged 43.88 from 17 games. A big reason for this was a drop in his attacking output from 14 tries and nine try assists to only seven tries and four try assists in 2016. This is despite the Raiders scoring 125 tries in 2016 compared to only 97 in 2015.

On the surface, there may be some SuperCoaches keen to take a risk on these seemingly undervalued players. However, I see both players as traps for the following reasons:

1. Sezer was one of the best sharpshooters in the NRL when he kicked at the Titans (twice averaging around 85 per cent for the season). However, barring an injury to Jarrod Croker, there’s no way that Sezer will be lining up for shots at goal at the Raiders.

Removing his goalkicking points from his previous averages, they drop significantly down to 48, 41, and 50 for those corresponding years. Not so tempting now is it?

2. The Raiders attacking structure also has a lot to do with the decline in the attacking stats of the halves. Sezer wasn’t exactly bad in terms of his NRL output — he steered his team around as the halfback and kicked effectively. Unfortunately, there are no SuperCoach points awarded for doing either of those things.

Raiders Aidan Sezer and Blake Austin celebrate at fulltime after beating the Bunnies. Picture: Gregg Porteous

3. Austin was a focal point of the Raiders attack in 2015; however, the emergence of ‘Leipana’, Hodgson’s dominance at hooker (and also often at first receiver when Baptiste came on) and most teams figuring out Austin’s big right-foot step greatly reduced the team’s reliance on him.

Basically, unless the Raiders go away from what worked really well for them in 2016, it is hard to see how either of these two will improve their scores, and thus I declare both to be traps!