It is a little more complicated than that in regards to Smith and Harper..
What I am pointing out is "what that entails".. In this case the devil is in the details.

Smith took a $6M pay cut for this year... it wasn't any restructure that gave us cap relief. Cutting Smith next year leaves us with 3.35M in dead money. To understand what that means, this year we only have 1.1M in dead money.

If Harper does exactly what Smith did that would still leave us with 3M dead money next year if he is cut.

Both "restructures" combined if both are cut would leave us with 6.3M in dead money for 2014. Paying both of them would result in an increase cap hit of 6M.

So when you think you are saving 10M next year on Smith, you are not.. it will cost us 5M to replace him + 3M in dead money so next year we take an 8M hit because of Smiths contract... so that is not a full 10M in savings. It is more like 4M and Brees contract goes up 1M to that savings is cut to 3M.

Here is a list of Ballooning Cap Hits for 2014 that have huge amounts of dead money associated with them: 11M increase in Cap hit from these three players next year.

Jari Evans - 2014 Cap hit 11M (+5M from 2013) Dead money if he is cut 9M
Ben Grubs - 2014 Cap Hit 9M (+4M from 2013) Dead Money 9M
Curtis Lofton - 2014 Cap Hit 5.2M (+2.1M from 2013) his 2015 Cap hit is 9M

In a year when Strief, Graham, and Jenkins come up for FA we can not afford to have 6.3M in dead money.


As far as I know, restructuring does not alleviate dead money, which is why Smith had to take a cut in salary this year.

The moral of the story is that if we think we are bad in 2013 with Cap space... wait until 2014.