Devils Tax? Tassie preparing to pay “unbelievable overs” for McCreery

Collingwood’s Beau McCreery is believed to be firmly on the radar of the Tasmania Devils.

AFL Media’s Cal Twomey is reporting that the Devils have identified McCreery as a “serious target” and are prepared to pay around $1 million for seven years.

The 25-year-old McCreery is contracted with the Magpies until 2027 and would be able to head to Tassie as a free agent under the AFL’s rules to aid their list build ahead of 2028.

Given McCreery is not necessarily considered a star of the game, just yet, and could soon be on fairly significant money, it prompted both Tim Watson and Garry Lyon to wonder where the game is heading in this space.

Watson is concerned that the salaries of the players will start to balloon uncontrollably.

“Now I don't want to discredit him in any way, I don't want to talk him down because he's made some valuable contributions to Collingwood, he's an impact player, he's a premiership player,” Watson said on SEN Breakfast.

“But when you look at those numbers and then you understand what's going on in the marketplace - and I'm going to call it the Devils Tax - that is going to create this inflationary effect in the game, there are some major concerns for clubs out there.

“Without doing him a disservice, if we are starting to pay role players in the game a million dollars a year and giving them a seven-million dollar contract, what is that saying about the direction the game's headed in?”

While Lyon doesn’t believe the numbers being bandied around match McCreery’s output, he isn’t as concerned around Watson’s so-called Devils Tax.

“It says that this is the exceptional circumstance surrounding the expansion of our competition,” said Lyon.

“That's not his real worth but the exaggerated figure is going to be there to try and get this team up and going. They need to identify who think they can get because they need to attract players.

“I think it's unbelievable overs if in fact it's true. But it doesn't concern me.

“I think your concern is that then the inflationary pressure that it’s going to have across the competition.

“But players of Beau McCreery's calibre aren't going to now walk into their club and go, ‘Hey, I'm on $450k, this bloke that’s no better than me is on a million’.

“The club is going to turn around say, ‘Well, that's ok, but five hundred (thousand) of that is to get him to Tasmania’. I don't see it like that, maybe I'm wrong, but I'm not that concerned about it.”

Lyon continued: “Beau McCreery, he's a good player, I thought he was a strange name to have thrown up at this stage.

“I don't begrudge him in any way, I hope he gets the best deal he possibly can and I thought a player of that ilk might come into the discussion after you’re established.

“But to have him as one of the primary targets is a very interesting take.”

Watson floated a theory as to why perhaps the Devils would be showing interest in McCreery who was once coached by Nathan Buckley at the Magpies.

“I don't know that he's a primary target but he's a target because they've got to look at players that come out of contract at that time and also that may be free agents or restricted free agents at that time,” he said further.

“So they're the players they're targeting. But if you also take a look at it from this perspective and that is that if Nathan Buckley is their number one target, now Nathan would be talking to the Tassie people behind the scenes and saying, ‘Look, this is the type of player I would like’.

“He could say is completely underrated at Collingwood but he would be a great player. ‘I know him personally, I know him really well. This is what he can give the team. He's got great outside speed, he's got great power, he can put pressure on as a forward’, all those sorts of things.”

Lyon concluded: “I don't begrudge Beau McCreery getting the best possible deal he possibly can.

“I don't know Beau at all, maybe he's got establishment club qualities about him that haven't been revealed to anyone outside of Collingwood. He might be the bloke that can hold this together like a Callan Ward was and James McDonald and those sorts of players who went and helped establish the GWS Giants.”