Kerre Woodham: Salary cap stupidities hurt Storm

Rob Moodie. Photo / Getty Images

The Melbourne Storm have taken a hammering over their salary cap rort and maybe that's fair.

Other teams have been punished for breaching the rules, including the Warriors, although none have been dealt with quite as harshly as the Storm.

It appears the Storm's crime, or the crime of their executives, was to try to weasel their way around existing salary cap rules with hair-splitting legalese, contracts within contracts and a sort of money-go-round between different companies that ultimately came under the same ownership.

Isn't that what good corporate tax lawyers do? Don't they squeeze existing rules until the pips squeak? Make legal statutes jump through hoops and bend and twist until the desired outcome is reached?

Still, the NRL says the laws are quite clear and the Storm bosses have mea culpa-ed and now the Storm's season is all over, even though they have to front up and play.

It'll be a season to be remembered for all the wrong reasons.