BakoSaint

Unfortunately because of the way we have managed our salary cap, trading Lattimore does not provide much immediate relief, its about break even for 2025. It would provide massive cap relief in 2026 and beyond totaling 18m in already guaranteed money and $16m in salary. His 2024 salary has been reduced to the vet minimum of about $1.2 million via restructures that kick the can down the road and one of the main advantages of a trade is the other team taking on the rest of the current year salary. But the prorated portion of Lattimore's 2024 Salary another team would pay would be only about $0.5m because the Saints have already cashed out the rest with restructures.

Trading Lattimore would have the same effect on future years caps as cutting him pre-June-1 which would both trigger a massive 2025 dead cap hit, but relieve us of his 2025 base salary and clear him completely from the 2026 cap for massive relief then.

Cutting or trading Lattimore results in:
$18m savings for Lattimore's 2025 Salary and Roster Bonus
-18.25m cap hit from Lattimore's past salaries we restructured out to 2026-2028 that would hit immediately
~13.4m that hits in 2025 no matter if we trade, cut, or keep Lattimore.

This would be the net cap result of trading Lattimore:

2024: Save $0.5m, which can be carried over to 2025
2025: Net cap hit $0.25m (but 2024 carryover would offset this)
2026: Save $18m over cutting Lattimore in spring 2026, or $28.5m in 2026 and $8m in 2027 over keeping Lattimore through 2026.

If we keep Lattimore, we could designate him a Post-June-1 cut in the offseason and save more in 2025 by kicking more dead cap to 2026, essentially making the $18.25m above hit in 2026 not 2025.

Overall we need to eat the dead cap on Lattimore whether it all hits in 2025 or 2026. We can do lots of other things to shift money between 2025 and 2026 so getting anything we can for Lattimore makes sense, even a 7th. Since the Chiefs can get Lattimore for $0.5m for the rest of the year, we might get a bit more.

I generally favor these trades, not for the big return, but because they guarantee a veteran is no longer on the team, which means the front office can't get drunk and extend them at way over market. Cut up the credit card.

If we want more financial relief, we could ask the Chiefs to take additional players, whose contracts carry guaranteed salaries or bonuses for future years. If the Chiefs don't want those players they could cut them at the end of the year. It's unlikely, but if we could get a team to take Jordan, Davis, Mathieu, Olave, Bresee, Foskey, etc we could get more cap relief. Lattimore has no future guarantees, only backloaded money for past work, so that minimizes the financial advantage of a trade vs a cut to current years base salary.