This year's OA's are the 2004 players drafted in 2020. With COVID, they were part of a double cohort that arrived in 2021-22 after 2020-21 was cancelled. Downstream that means more players clogging up the development pipeline. The teams that will do the best are those that work the hardest with their rookie crop, this year and next.
You made a comment about Ottawa being in tough trying to manage 9 rookies (both real and red-shirt) into their lineup. It is a situation of their own making. Rookies make mistakes and that's just part of their learning process. It's hard to make those mistakes collecting splinters on the bench.
Opportunity cost. If you piece together a deep lineup and try to make a run at a Championship two seasons in a row, there is no room to develop the non-elite rookies. Players that jump out right away, usually the players picked in the first two rounds, tend to contribute organically without the need to invest a lot of time and effort into. The deeper picks don’t.
The 67’s also didn’t benefit from the scheduled retool year cancelled because of Covid. The inability to shuffle assets that season did hurt the 67’s. That led to, as you mentioned, the double cohort. With a double cohort, the 67’s introduced Stonehouse, Sirman, Mayich, MacK, Gerrior, and Smyth from the 2020 draft. Then they added Barlas, Pinelli, Foster, and Gardiner from the 2021 draft. That’s 10 players. On top of that, there were the 18 year old “sort of” rookies that lost their 17 year old deeper draft pick rookie season to Covid. Add Laforme, Donoso, Sirizzotti and Gill-Shane to that mix. That is effectively 14 rookies or close to rookies coming out of Covid.
So, going into the 2022-23 season (Covid +1), they also had the new rookie class plus the deeper picked players from the 2021 class (Quick, Dever, Ewles, and Horner) on top of the 2022 class with Mews, Marrelli, and Kelly. So, over two seasons, the 67’s effectively introduced 21 rookies.
How hard is that?
Then they enter into what turned out to be a 2-year run. But, year one of that two year run we had a lot of young players that outperformed the typical growth curve. That means we had very little turnover going into the 2023-24 season. 17 returning players. How do you then insert the new rookies and 2 Imports into that roster and expect development while trying to make a deep run? Alas, you can’t. So much time and effort spent developing those other 21 players over that two year span, you have to let those players loose. You cannot expend all that energy into all those guys and then hold them back while trying to develop the newest rookies from last seasons draft, especially when your 1st rounder was a defected player.
I’m not going to point fingers because I think what I have detailed here was a pretty huge task that I think, overall, they did an outstanding job with. I could argue that Boyd was a victim of his own making hoarding players at the deadline in the 2022-23 season which created that backlog in 2023-24. In fact, I have made that argument a few times. Mistake for sure. But, at the end of the day, I think the positives have far outweighed the negatives.
If our main complaint is we suffer now from not playing Whitehead enough last seaosn then so be it. I’ll take that negative.
The OA market is saturated, and it is likely only the top OAs return real value.
But Bryant is a #2 centre for most teams I think, a #1 for at least a few; and 55 point 19 yr olds become 75+ point players as OAs, often.
I don’t think you see Bryant as the 2C on a Championship roster, hence why he went to Peterborough.