If you are going to resign him for 30M per year, you keep him. If you aren't, then you jettison him before the draft.
30m per year on the open market sounds like a stretch, but let's go with that for the sake of argument. Look at how the actual payments would affect DK and why he'd be willing to accept a smaller extension than that.
DK is due $4m in base salary in 2022. We could franchise him in 2023 for ~$24m and then let's say in 2024 he walks and signs a mega-deal structured similar to what Devante Adams just got but with your higher $30m/year price tag instead.
The payments to DK under this scenario A would look something like this:
2022: $4m
2023: $24m
2024: $26m (22m signing + 4m base)
2025: $26m (20m roster bonus + 6m base)
2026: $24m (base)
2027: $36m (base)
2028: $38m (base)
He'd be making a total of $178m over the next seven years, but it's important to recognize the time value of money. With a 10% discount rate that would be a net present value (NPV) of $115m in 2022 dollars, and a NPV of
$75m for the next five seasons.
Now let's look at the other scenario, where we give him a generous but not record breaking extension (say, 80% of what Adams just got).
Under that scenario which I'll call Option B, the payments would look like this:
2022: 19m (16m signing + 3m base)
2023: 21m (16m roster + 5m base)
2024: 14m (base)
2025: 28m (base)
2026: 28m (base)
This is $110m over five years, which is worth
$82m in 2022 dollars. That's a gain of
$7m over option A. There's also less risk involved because he's getting the contract right now instead of playing two years with potential risk of injury. He'd also be hitting his next big contract two years younger at the age of 29 rather than 31, which significantly increases the chance of another big payday.
In fact, you could reduce the extension even a bit further for those other reasons and still have a deal that would be preferrable to DK than playing another year on a rookie deal and then risking the franchise tag.
Which is all a long winded way of saying that one of the main perks of drafting a talented player is not just getting them under the cheap rookie deal, but also being able to work out an extension with them that is favorable to both sides. That advantage disappears by the end of the first extension, which is why smart teams are careful about how many third contracts they hand out.
Unless negotiations are going poorly behind the scenes with the agent, which is always possible, we should expect to be able to sign any great players that we draft to a reasonable first extension.
