The Saints lack for trade candidates approaching the NFL deadline. Fans may be calling for a fire sale, but making premature moves would only hurt the team further:
Check any New Orleans Saints community online and you’ll find fans calling for wholesale changes to the black and gold. There are people upset in the Facebook comments, the Saints subreddit, super forums, message boards, and Twitter groups all around — and more than a few want the Saints to tear it all down and start over, trading whoever they can to get draft picks and, they think, much-needed salary cap relief.
But because the Saints have so many players playing on restructured contracts, most of their roster is already on the NFL minimum salary. That makes offloading them easier because an acquiring team is only on the hook for their remaining base salary (unless they agree to take on other payments during negotiations) but it also minimizes the salary cap savings New Orleans would recoup by moving players.
To illustrate that point, here are the most expensive remaining salaries on the books for 2022:
- K Wil Lutz: $2,077,778
- DT Shy Tuttle: $1,486,833
- QB Andy Dalton: $1,210,000
- RG Cesar Ruiz: $1,077,177
No other player would cost an acquiring team to pay more than $1 million in their base salary the rest of the season. But it’s more complicated than that. The new team would take on the rest of that contract and future payouts for base salary, roster bonuses, workout bonuses, and so on (though the Saints will still have any prorated bonuses counting against their own salary cap as dead money).
So while the Saints could theoretically trade, say, Michael Thomas to a new team (with his new squad paying him only $632,500 for 2022), that team would have to pay his $15.5 million base salary in 2023, and the Saints would still be counting more than $25 million against the cap due to previous restructures and his signing bonus. That could be negotiated down by consolidating various bonuses into salary and asking the new team to pay them instead, but the counterbalance to that kind of maneuver would be less-valuable trade compensation. The Saints would be approaching it from a position of weaker leverage. Over The Cap’s Jason Fitzgerald laid out all of their 2023 options in greater detail, but the point is that the Saints aren’t in a position to kickstart the rebuild with many moves at the 2022 deadline.
All of this has been said to say that a fire sale isn’t coming for New Orleans — at least not a productive one. If the Saints do tear everything down to the foundation to start a rebuild, it won’t do much to improve their salary cap outlook nor their stockpile of draft assets. All it really accomplishes is further eroding their roster.
But maybe it gets to a point where changes are necessary. There could be a point of no return where you wave the white flag and just offload whoever you can for whatever you can get back. That feels unlikely with Mickey Loomis still on top of the orgchart as the NFL’s longest-tenured general manager. He and the Saints told everyone who would listen that this team was ready to compete, and that Allen was stepping into a perfect situation. Changes on the coaching staff feel more realistic than roster turnover. In the end, though, I think the Saints are going to ask for patience from fans and try to spin this all on injuries derailing their season early on. They’ll do what they can to keep their core together another year or two before making any big moves.
But, hey, maybe they get started now. If that’s the case, here are some trade candidates who could be on the move by the Nov. 2 NFL trade deadline:
