Brisbane Heat

Last year: 5th (3 wins, 5 losses)

Overview

9 re-signed, 6 added, 1 lost, 9 not signed

Big gets

Shane Watson, Kemar Roach

Big losses

Brendon McCullum

Possible limited availability

Dan Vettori, Peter Forrest, Ryan Harris, Shane Watson

Thoughts

Perhaps the least ‘devious’ of all the teams, the only player they’ve poached from interstate is Watson – and technically he’s just returning home. They also only lost one player to a rival team, Michael Neser, but with the return of Ben Cutting and the addition of Kemar Roach the loss means very little. Kemar Roach makes up the fourth member of a strong pace foursome, joining Cutting, Alister McDermott and Ryan Harris.

Vettori also re-signed long term as one of the team’s international players. Fellow New Zealander Brendon McCullum hasn’t been signed due to international commitments that would see him miss around 6 weeks of the 8 week tournament – however I assume that Vettori will be impacted in a similar way, so the heat might still end up signing a replacement international player for the second half of the tournament. It’s not looking likely that Matthew Hayden will be back, as I haven’t heard his name mentioned at all.

Grade

A They didn’t leak players to rivals teams, and picked up Roach as their second international, they’ll want to place higher than 5th this year.