BakoSaint

Scroll down for answer, I don't want to ruin it...
data from: https://overthecap.com/salary-cap/new-orleans-saints










































1. Carl Granderson - $3.78 Million
2. James Hurst - $3.5 Million
3. Bradley Roby - $3.0 Million
4. Trequan Smith - $2.7 Million
5. Cesar Ruiz - $2.25 Million

Who would have thought those were the 5 highest paid Saints? But those are the guys with our biggest 2023 base salaries, the guys who stand to lose the most in game checks if they get suspended or who we would have to cut/trade if we wanted to shave more than $2 million off the salary cap.

Everyone else on our roster have base salaries under $2 million. ALL our stars contracts were re/structured to convert most of their salaries to prorated bonuses so we will be making payments on their 2023 salaries for the upcoming 5 or so years. Basically in 2023 we are buying on credit: Thomas, Peat, Kamara, Hill, Maye, Winston, Carr, Jordan, Lattimore, Ramczyk, Davis, Mathieu, McCoy, Johnson, Williams, and essentially every other player making an above minimum salary on our roster.

It's also interesting to look at how close we got to being completely mortgaged. Take those 5 salaries and reduce each to about $1-$1.5 million. That would free up an additional $9 million, but if you prorate that $9 million over 4-5 years about $2 million is due now, so about $7 million could be freed up restructuring those last 5 contracts. That is the maximum amount more we could have freed up with restructuring with our current methods. Had the economy crashed or covid got worse and the cap came in $20 million lower, we might not have been able to get under the cap at all.

Looking at this, there is actually risk of a sort of salary cap default. If one of our stars carrying big prorated dollars had unexpectedly been forced to retire by a medical condition, we could have taken a $20 million cap hit and ended up over the cap. There are scenarios where if/when most of Carr's $30 million base salaries in 2024 and/or 2025 are converted to long term prorated bonuses, Carr could carry a cap hit of upwards of $60 million dead cap hit if he suddenly had a medical issue and retired or a dispute with the coach and refused to restructure in 2026. The fact that Curtis Granderson was the biggest salary we didn't put on the credit card just shows how close to the edge we are, and its close.

There is one thing we could do to get further under the cap if something like this happened. That would be prorating money in these restructures even father out, like adding 10 or 15 years of void years to the end of Carr and Lattimore's deals. For obvious reasons, that would be bad. We can't go back and do that now, but when we are restructuring 2024 base salaries in the next offseason thats one of the last tricks in the book. For example Carr's 2024 salary is $30 million. We could reduce that to $2 million and cut him a $28 million bonus. That $28 million bonus could be prorated at $7 million a year for 4 years or $4 million a year for 7 years, those would be in the range of things we have done, but it could also be prorated at $2 million a year for 14 years by adding like 10 more void years to his contract. The problem is you then set up for a scenario where over a few years in a row of doing that, Carr could carry $100 million of money prorated out into the 2030's, that all hits at once if he retires, is cut, is traded, or simply lets his contract void on the first void year because he thinks he can get a better offer. That is how we could really go Enron with Mickeynomics. And if that happens, restructuring Granderson and Hurst ain't going to get us out of hot water.