Anthony!":e55l8wt2 said:
HawkGA":e55l8wt2 said:
22 million sure doesn't feel like a lot of money.
Well t5o be honest he missed some dead cap money that comes off our books we should have more like 25-28 mil
http://overthecap.com/salary-cap-space
If forced to guess my guess would be he's including that but also pulling out the draft-spend estimate and the minimum roster spend estimate (more below).
onanygivensunday":e55l8wt2 said:
spotrac.com currently has us at $30M of cap space available with Marshawn still on the books. Cut him before June 1st and add $6.5M, giving us $36.5M to work with.
You also have to factor in the minimum spend to get the roster up to 51 (only top 51 count against the cap).
The cleanest way to do this IMO is just to assign 750K per player, which captures the range of draft picks (both higher and lower) as well as being the veteran minimum for players w/ 4-6 years of experience.
To get to 51, using a combination of draft picks and 4-6 year vet minimum guys will cost the Seahawks $12 million or so, and then you'll basically want to leave the 2-3 million dollar cushion that every team needs to go into the season with.
So, that 36.5 to "play with" in FA is in reality right around that 21-22 that the author is citing.
To be totally clear here I don't know if this is how he got to that number and I swear on all things holy I wasn't trying to reverse engineer to get to it also, but his estimate looks correct to me.
Remember though, that's 21-22 million to PLAY WITH for your own FAs and others FAs, meaning, money that can be distributed above the veteran minimum spend. Basically the Hawks are losing 7 starters and likely don't want to replace them all with replacement-level players (i.e. guys at the vet minimum whose option is to take the vet minimum or not be in the NFL) and they've got 21-22 million on top of the vet minimum to do that. If you do that equally for just the starters and go replacement level or worse for everyone else it would be seven guys each at 3.7 million. You can of course pull from that equality across the seven starters and take on more replacement level guys (e.g. take 3 million from one starter to bring him down to replacement level and you now you have 6.7 for another starter) but you can't get around what the pool itself is.
The other thing to consider too is that it's not this year, but next year, in which the toughest decisions for the Hawks are going to have to be made (near the top of the league in money already allocated and near the bottom of the league in # of players signed), so you likely don't want to be adding too many more (if any) big money multi-year deals as they'll be even more of a pain point next year and the year after than they are this year.
In any case, really nice article IMO, and does a good job of capturing a lot of moving parts. That said, I think he's overestimating Baldwin's value on the open market. He had an amazing half season, but on his contract Harvin was both way overhyped and way overpaid on his contract. Because Harvin's career has been such a mess since then I think people forget how ridiculously overhyped he was. I think the Hawks have as much (or more) to think about than anyone in terms of the cap, and I think they're really, really going to need to nail their next draft or two (think their drafts from a few years ago instead of their recent ones), but they're young and have their core locked up, and have as good of a chance as anyone in staying competitive over the next four to five years (maybe better than anyone).
