iceshack149

What do you think? Sell all our valuable assets? (How much would it suck to see Cam Jordan on another NFL team?)
Who should the Saints trade and get something respectable in return?

AsylumGuido

Nope. Nope. Yes. Nobody.

papz

Well that all depends. Are we rebuilding or not? Our past off season suggest we aren't.

neugey

Fire sales don't often work in the NFL like they do in MLB. The trade deadline comes too early in the season. Especially this year where is a lot more parity than normal. There are not enough teams that feel they are a few pieces away from contending and willing to go all in. Trades like the CMC/49ers are a rarity. Painful as it might be, rebuilds in this league are more gradual and occur with teams slashing payroll in offseason due to non-guaranteed contracts. Teams won't want Michael Thomas because he's injured; Kamara because of the legal situation.

leilung

Less than year 2 AD (After Drew). Do you really believe that this team is that dismal that we need to sell off 'all our valuable assets' to right the ship?

A few issues with that philosophy:
- You still have GM and management in place who are playing 'kick-the-can' with the salary cap. If you want a reset and retool, it doesn't make sense to pawn off players when our front office, as well as the coaches
need to be flushed too.
- Will the fans support gutting the team for a rebuild knowing we have so much talent to replace? How much time will it take to be competitive? Currently, butts are still in the seats. That would most likely change with a sell off. Folks are NOT going to pay their hard earned bucks to watch 2nd and 3rd tier talent. Ultimately, Ms. Benson isn't going to be happy with stadium revenues dropping off.

Just my two cents.

A wise man once said, "Poo-poo smells just as bad as s#!%. One just SOUNDS cuter!"

BakoSaint

We should rebuild. This is not our year. Could we sneak into the playoffs? It's not impossible. But on the off chance we did, we are not winning 4 straight games against winning teams like the Eagles, Cowboys, KC, or Buffalo and getting a ring for Dennis Allen, its not happening.

Having said that, the Cleveland Browns - Hue Jackson model does not work. It's not worth getting a top draft pick to establish a gutter reputation and low standards that you can't shake even when you have the assets to win. At the same time, the Mickey Loomis model of maxing out the salary cap ever year and forcing yourself to extend players you would rather cut in order to kick the can down the road does not work either. Tampa Bay won a ring by savings up some salary cap space for a couple of years by not going all in on winning now with Jameis, then spending their powder when they had the QB in Brady to go all the way. The Patriots won for many years and sure Brady helped, but undeniably another part of their formula was being willing to trade expensive vets, let some walk, avoid overspending on most aging players, and avoid overspending at the RB and WR positions in particular while relying instead on affordable ensemble casts. Even the Rams, who I view as an anomaly in other ways with their strategies, did take the cap medicine to get rid of their bad contracts with Goff and Gurley before they won their ring. I think the ideal rebuild scenario is to have great coaches and a great GM so that even when you purge expensive veterans you still hope to go about .500, maybe 6-10 at worst, and to be a contender mid season, even with a team stripped of most high prices veterans and relying on some up and comers with a chip on their shoulder making a name for themselves. If you say go out and lose, you can't easily unsay that when you think you have your franchise QB.

So I would say that we need to rebuild and to do that, its valuable to trade aging vets or injury prone players for value and/or to straight up cut bad contracts with no value. We are about equal with the Falcons and Panthers in our team quality this year. If they reload for the future and we try to win now when its not realistic, they will dominate us for years to come.

Here would be my list:

Keep:
Werner
Olave
Ramczyk
CGJ (should have, he was part of our core for the future)
McCoy
Other young healthy players with value.

Consider trading for the right value (they are good but expensive and injury/suspension prone and there are high odds they will not be good in 2-3 years when we are contending better):
Kamara
Lattimore

Trade these vets if they want a shot at a ring this year, keep them if they want to stay, important to do the right thing to be a class organization as long as they don't want a cap busting record deal:
Cam Jordan
Demario Davis

Fire Sale or Cut if No Value, in approximate order of possible value:
Michael Thomas
Marcus Maye
Jarvis Landry
Taysom Hill
Molasses Badger
Jameis Winston/Andy Dalton
Payton Turner/Tearer/Sprainer/Twister/Strainer/Fracture
Andrus Peat
Trequane Smith
Dennis Allen
Mickey Loomis

Don't resign unless very little guaranteed money, consider trading if there is an offer:
Marcus Davenport
David Onyemata

voodooido

I wouldn’t pull a fire sale but there is a few I’d be willing to part with. JW, AK, ML, and MT. Then start TH for the rest of the season to see what we really have.

dizzle88

I think rather than a fire sale, I think behaviours have to change.

Loomis keeps us in cap hell every year, which was manageable when Brees and Payton led the team, but they don't anymore.

Loomis has to change his behaviour and stop mortgaging our future. If that results in some veterans walking or being traded, then we probably saved some money.

Next, DA needs to get the team an identity, all this BS he spouted in his first press conference is laughable now. He said teams would be unable to match our intensity, The only thing we are doing that's "unmatched" by another team, is the rate we are turning the ball over.

Finally, if Pete C isn't strong enough to call the offense out for being awful, then we need someone who will.
Payton demanded a level of play, players were scared to disappoint him.

Your bonehead creator picked a fine chapter to omit from your memory bank....let me ask you, does a machine like yourself ever experience fear? - Vegeta, DBZ

AsylumGuido

Honestly I don't see the issue being lack of talent or playcalling. I see it as execution and discipline. As diz here points out it is behaviors that need adjusted. It doesn't matter if the perfect play is called every time if the execution sucks. It doesn't matter if the player has all of the talent in the world if the discipline and fire isn't there to use it.

The roster is full of very talented players. Trying to get rid of good players makes no sense whatsoever. As someone else pointed out here the NFL isn't like MLB. You can't wipe the slate clean and start anew with a fresh roster. MLB has a deep farm system. The NFL has only what you have on the roster and whatever is available in free agency and the draft. There's no promise of collecting a talent pool as good as we have right now for years, if at all.

First I want to see what we look like once we start getting back some of the key pieces that have been missing. Word is that Thomas could be back as early as this coming week. Penning could be a couple of weeks away. Winston, Landy, and Lattimore have ten days to rejoin the active roster.

I read that Kamara addressed the team after the game and made it clear the effort was not there and everyone need to start playing like the Saints he knows. I am coming around to the idea that the problem (aside from the rash of injuries) is with the motivation from the top.

“The pessimist sees difficulty in every opportunity. The optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.” — Winston Churchill

Boston Saint

Here is a link and screengrab from spotrac.com regarding the team’s status for 2023 contracts:

https://www.spotrac.com/nfl/new-orleans-saints/cap/

I’m no cap expert. But it seems there are 8 players with Dead Cap hits in the 50-20 million range. Another 8 are in the 10-19 range. It goes from there. This money (to my understanding) is going to count against the cap next year weather or not these guys are on the team. So, it seems kinda hard to see these guys getting traded. Lattimore is over 50 million!

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