No player must be kept at all costs.
it doesn't matter where the line is that the club is comfortable with is, just that they set boundaries and stay within them. When you start going down the "oh it's just another 2 years, or it's only about 400k per etc" then you end up in a spiral with everyone else.
Take DMac do you think other players and agents didn't look at that with interest?
I understand some posters view that we don't know the Dmac deal, because we don't. However, we can only discuss on reported figures, because fact is that almost none of us will ever see his contract signed by both parties. You could ask the man himself and whatever response he provides is still not certain.
But yeh, Reporting that Dmac has picked up $400k by 4 years woukd certainly results in every player manager comparing their client to him and asking, "where's our love?" Those that suggest it's a once-off, no problemo, you can overpay some guys, it's only $150k/year, clearly havent fully taken account of the restrictive nature of the salary cap. Further to that, apart from the COLA's, the recent behemoths of the comp have had players accept under's to remain with a team challenging for a flag. So if we burn $150k on Dmac, we need to claw back even more than that because the successful teams are paying unders. That's hard to do when a benchmark is set at players being over-paid.
It's the kind of mistake that an organisation makes when they haven't brought in any high level, fresh blood in their footy dept for a while.