Ok, now this is interesting. Have just reviewed the top 20 teams ruck divisions. All 20 have Cox (no surprise), but 18 still have Sandi including all of the top 10. The 2 without have Petrie and Goldstein as R2 and no Smith. Not sure if this changes thoughts in making ground on the leaders, especially if you can use the Sandi cash quickly and effectively. The top teams might be hamstrung by trades especially if they gave gone hard early as you would suspect. Full results as follows: Cox - 20 Sandilands - 18 Smith - 15 McCauley - 8 Tippett - 4 Petrie, Keefe - 3 McCulloch, Campbell, Spencer, M Curnow, Vickery, Bailey, Goldstein, Derickx - 1
very interesting and definetly shows that ground can be made up for those bold enough to trade out sandilands. and as you say they may be starting to run a bit short of trades and cant afford to waste another one by trading out a premium
Part of that I reckon is because teams had downgrade targets that they wanted to get into. I know personally, I want to trade out Sandi- but thought it more important to get Lynch in last week, and Mzungu this week- the cash made through those guys is enough to work the upgrades that i wanted, so the Sandi cash wasn't all that important. It'll certainly be an interesting decision next week though as to whether I trade him out as superfluous to needs or not though...
I'm the one that made the Sandi - Goldstein trade, based on the fact that I don't have Smith and I saw an opportunity to catch up some points on the leaders. The "downgrade" still gave me a chance to make an upgrade as I had some cash already in the bank. I plan on bringing Sandi back in Rd 17 (after the Freo bye) depending on form etc.
Smith or the Petrie/Tippett combo obviously came into consideration as backup. And as Walesy said, it came at the peak Upgrade/Downgrade time. I've got Leuenberger and Smith at the moment (got lucky last week) but didn't want to miss Lynch/Jacobs and Mzungu/Hodge this week. ExPres - Good luck with Goldy and it worked well being able to make another upgrade.