New Orleans Saints Forums - blackandgold.com - 2024 Saints Salary Cap Watch

Quote:

Originally Posted by BakoSaint (Post 993689)

My worry is that the ends justify the means and the team believes the surgery was successful and is optimistic (PR line) because they can't afford for it not to be. They believed Michael Thomas was coming back at full strength 4 years in a row, and he weighed half as much and nobody was throwing the word degenerative around, but the cap ramifications were similar so the optimistic news leaks before every restructure and extension were similar. I guess we all have different trust thresholds and my trust threshold for optimistic injury updates during restructure season has been expended.

My skepticism from a month ago regarding Ram's surgery appears to be proving out. The optimism helped make the restructure seem like great news, when in fact it was more of a painful financial necessity. At least we got Ram to take a pay cut for the year in the process, but I prefer to be realistic and not get caught up in the spin on a player with a degenerative knee.

Realistically restructuring Ram with a pay cut to avoid a big immediate cap hit was probably the best of several bad choices available to us. The main thing we guaranteed with the restructure was a $6.5m bonus what would have guaranteed March 16 anyway unless we cut him before that date. Restructuring in a way that guaranteed more would have been a disaster. Cutting him before March 16 to avoid the bonus would have created a dead cap hit of over $30 million dollars, and we already used both of our post-June-1 designations on Thomas and Winston. So in the end we paid $6.5 million for a lottery ticket on the off chance Ram does fully recover and become a star again, or perhaps a 2023 where he comes back but is diminished but still worth around $6.5m, and we get to delay the dead cap hit.

There is nothing terribly wrong with how we handled the Ram situation. We blew a lot more cash with Carr, Jordan, and Thomas in recent contracts. But I think its a lesson for everyone that positive injury updates should be taken with a grain of salt, because appearances are something the organization also manages, and that includes making the moves they have to make look better than they are and then letting fans down gently when bad news looks inevitable and time is running out. Even 'it's not looking great but there is lots of time' may mean 'he's probably done, but we don't want to hit you all at once with that, so lower your expectations, and we'll get back to you.'