electricbluecats

Specifically on Watson, this is missing a couple things. You have to take out the signing bonus money from his current cap figures--since Houston already paid those amounts at singing they will eat them as dead cap this year once he's traded. So for 2022, the percentage would be 16.8% (35m/208.2m). Additionally, one of the benefits of trading for a QB and having the original team eat the singing bonuses is that you now have room to easily restructure, accelerate base salary into new bonuses, and get immediate cap relief and flatten out the cap hits each year. Honestly his contract is a benefit of any deal when weighed against the level of QB play you should be getting.

Voidable years were already there when he signed the contract for spreading out the signing bonus money he already received. Either way, it's the cap hit we care about and they could have cut him last off season but the restructure resulted in an additional $10m in cap hit between last year and this year. Yes they needed a center last year, but an additional $10m for a year of Paradis? Everyone could see that was a bad idea. Just completely bungled that situation.

In a rising cap environment it always makes sense to defer cap hits as much as possible so the $$$ takes up a lower % of the cap, it makes the deals cheaper. The catch is you have to make the base salary money guaranteed so you're sacrificing the ability to easily cut/trade a player in return for cap flexibility. A restructure doesn't mean the contract was bad or there's some mistake being correct. All big money contracts are signed knowing you will eventually restructure if you want to keep the player or cut before you hit the large cap hits on the back end on the deal. Restructuring is perfectly fine as long as you're selective. Shaq is one of the only players that 100% be on the roster this year and won't be cut or traded, so it makes sense. Where you get into trouble is the mess with Paradis last year where he clearly should have been cut but now we're incurring a large cap charge because they thought it was really worth hanging on to him last year and decided to restructure.

Simplest way to look at the trade is we save $3m compared to the cost of cutting him and pick up a 6th round pick. Breer just added that the restructure kept his base salary at $1.5m, so Broncos get him at $4.5m this season with $3m guaranteed. Since the alternative was him being released, Teddy got that extra $1.5m in base salary as the incentive to agree to the restructure and facilitate the trade.

Yeah basically any situation where we let the contract void accelerates the $4m to 2022, while any extension reached before the void date leaves the $1m for each of the next 4 years.

Small thing (I had to look this up for my own clarity), but the $1m hit for 2023-2025 seasons does get accelerated into 2022 once the contract voids so the current situation is: 2021: ~$2m 2022: ~$4m (+$2m in incentives, potentially) And like you laid out, a potential extension would change how that money is allocated.

Deshaun's cap hit for this season would only have been $10.4m after a trade, which moving Teddy alone would have more than covered. I don't see any reason to think any of this is/was tied to a specific player acquisition. It's just the reality of having a down cap this year where flexibility is more important than ever. Having the ability to react when other teams inevitably can't afford certain players is a very valuable asset.

I think it just shows we are willing and able to spend a good bit more in free agency if the opportunity arises. It gives increased flexibility in a tough year and worst case you can roll forward the cap hit you don't use this year. It especially makes sense in the case of Reddick and Paradis. There's no downside to voidable years when you're already working with a fully-guaranteed 1-year deal, or a restructure of the final year in the case of Paradis. You know you're taking that full hit regardless, might as well open up flexibility for the current year and defer some hit to the next season when the hit will be smaller based on % of total cap.

It's a 1-year deal. Those voidable years do not mean "we have him under contract" if he plays well, it's all paper years that automatically go away after this year is over. You are allowed to pro-rate signing bonus money up to 5 years, so purely for cap flexibility purposes, they tack on the voidable years to push 4/5 of the singing bonus amount beyond this year. So we have a cap hit on a 1-year deal of $1.992m ($990k vet min base salary + $1.002m of prorated signing bonus) while he still gets his full $6m in cash. The voidable years let us defer the rest of the $4.008m in signing bonus as a dead cap hit after this year. It's just a timing difference. The team will have the full $6m count against the cap eventually, this just allows for immediate flexibility in a down cap year.

Oh are you looking at the potential out on Spotrac? That doesn't mean anything in terms of a contract automatically voiding or the team having a deadline to make a decision before the league year starts. Spotrac just adds that in as a visual for no more base salary guarantees for a contract and it's much cheaper to move on. But yeah either way that third year of his deal is definitely not getting played out.

Looks like Miller and Melvin are the main signings not included yet, so that may be another $4-5m or so. Add in $13m for the draft picks/in-season moves and that leaves around $8m of space. But it wouldn't be hard to clear up another $20m or so in space for next year. Trading Teddy alone is $13m more of space and getting extensions for Moton and maybe Robby would knock a few million off each of those 2021 cap hits.

Right on. Way too much revisionist history going on with some people here...it's not hard to understand the process of making the move while also agreeing the results didn't work out. Where do you see the voidable year though? The third year of the contract isn't voidable, but like you were saying we can get out of it with minimal ($5m) penalty, so this could always be a 2-year contract if we wanted it to be. Didn't want other people seeing "voidable year" and trying to make the contract out to be worse than it really is since it's become such a buzz phrase this year.

Teddy has to be at the top... Donte is probably the only person on that list that would actually return a pick though. I'm not a big Donte fan, but (as always) our corner situation is pretty bad so doesn't really help to move on. And Shaq can't realistically be traded after that restructure, he'll be here for 2021.

I was definitely all-in before, but you can't touch him now and there's no way this gets cleared up before the draft. Time to move on.

Oh I'm not forgetting. I was advocating for that as a trade benefit before the restructures. The point is that ship has sailed for 2021, unless you think the team is really about to carry $43m of additional dead cap charge for moving those two.

Seeing some people still listing CMC or Shaq as potential trade pieces this year, and to be clear yesterday's restructures made it 100% certain they will be on the roster for next season. All of the salary converted to signing bonus became guaranteed yesterday, meaning it would have to be added on top of the already large potential dead cap charges resulting from a cut or trade.

It's shifting non-guaranteed money to signing bonus, which means more dead money. This accelerates the actual cash paid for the current year, but it's the cap hit that matters and this move spreads the newly-converted $9m bonus amount out over the remaining life of the contract. So it's a much lower cap hit this year, but it increases the cap hit for every future year of the contract. This increase is reflected in the signing bonus portion of the future cap hits, which is your dead money amount if/when you do trade or cut the player. So it's all a timing difference. Any amount of money you pay to a player, whether it's salary for games previously paid or signing bonus money, it has to count against the cap eventually. So you're allowed to save in the current year, but still have to incur the cap charge eventually.

I agree in general, that thought process isn't wrong and was definitely the case before the restructure. Today's move made it $9m more expensive to cut or trade so the team has decided not to go in that direction.

Nah I'm not sure why people are saying it makes it more tradeable, it's the actually opposite. This signifies they will 100% be here for this season. Since we know they'll be here for 2021, we've agreed to lock in all of their 2021 money to count against the cap ahead of time. This creates more potentially dead money, so you are giving up the flexibility to cut or trade the player in exchange for the ability to spread that cap charge out over the life of the contract. And given this is the first time the cap has ever dropped, it's a smart move. Every $1 saved this year is worth more than a $1 paid in the future as you're saving a higher percentage of the cap today than what it'll end up being in 2022, 2023, etc. Bonus money is how rich owners can get a leg up on the less financially powerful franchises. Not everyone can afford to pay out massive percentages of the contract value at signing. The league balances this is by saying "every penny that you give a player in signing bonus must count against your cap eventually." Otherwise the cash-rich teams would massively front-load huge bonuses and then trade these players to poorer teams who wouldn't have to pay the actual cash to the players, effectively circumventing the salary cap. That's the reasoning for "dead money" existing, it's all a competitive balance measure.