Void Year Cap Hits

This isn’t the full story, as it assumes all options will be picked up which may not be the case with Kerby. At the same time, while there is stuff going around about the Lions being cheap, this table would suggest very much the opposite.

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I kinda wish I knew what this stuff means moving forward :sweat_smile:

Void years are a funky way of making cash that has been paid to players only count against the salary cap after the contract has finished.

Take Hutch’s contract for example. If he sees it through all the way to the end, he’ll be paid $185 million in cash between now and his final year in 2030. But, because of void years, the total he will count against the salary cap will be $140 million, and the year after his contract expires, when he’s a free agent and signs for another team, the Lions will have a $45 million cap hit for Hutchinson to make up the difference between what he’s been paid and what has been counted on the cap.

In the short term this is good for the team because it creates additional space on the cap to sign other players. In the long term it means that large chunks of the cap will be taken up catching up on this accounting trick.

In short, it’s a way of borrowing cap space from the future.

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Much appreciated! :+1:

Seeing the Philadelphia year by year is like watching a python eat an elephant. It’s going to take a while but at some point in the future there’s going to be an incredibly big pile of s*** they have to deal with just like New Orleans has

Much like government spending or the stock market, things can stay irrational a lot longer than Common Sense would indicate.

One would hope that this at some point for league rules among the teams changes from a somewhat consensus of “hey it all ends up getting paid at some point so some teams can choose to have this giant deferral situation” to a little bit more Nuance thinking where they set the deferral limit as a percentage of cap in any single year.

Because I’m pretty sure that’s what baseball’s going to do after the lockout occurs next year cough cough Ohtani cough…

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It might be hard for the league to push through rules like that. The players union will oppose it pretty hard because deferring cap hits benefits the players, I think cash spending was 106% of the cap across the league last season because of all the ways teams can defer cap hits.

A limit would certainly be fairer, not every team has the appetite to operate this way or the ability to defer huge amounts of the cap because of cashflow limitations.

There will be a reckoning though if the overall league revenues stagnate or even start declining.

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