Players like to restructure their contract because it means getting their money sooner. (The key here being 'restructure', meaning making the same money but having it paid out differently ... as opposed to 'renegotiate', which means changing the amount of money being paid out (which could be more money or less money).)
To illustrate:
Donald's salary next year is $9.25M and he has a roster bonus of $5M. So he is set to get paid $14.25M next year, $5M of it in March and the other $9.25M spread over 18 equal payments during the regular season. (His cap hit is $26.75 because it also includes $12.5M of prorated bonus money from previous years.) [
overthecap.com]
A restructure typically involves converting some of the money owed AD this year to a signing bonus, which allows the team to spread the cap hit over 5 years instead of absorbing it all this year ... but doesn't change how much money AD gets from this contract.
If the Rams and AD agreed to convert all of his roster bonus and $8.25M of his salary to a signing bonus AD would get $13.5M now and get the remaining million dollars in 18 equal payments during the regular season. For the life of me I can't imagine why AD wouldn't agree to that (and if anyone can think of a reason please chime in).
The reason the Rams play along is they can spread the cap hit of the $13.25M signing bonus over 5 years at $2.65M a year. That reduces AD's cap hit this year from $26.75M to $16.15M: $1M salary in 2022, $2.65M prorated signing bonus from this restructure, plus $12.5M prorated signing bonus from previous years.
That's $10.6M in cap relief in a win/win restructure of AD's contract.
AlbaNY_Ram
Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 02/18/2022 03:57PM by AlbaNY_Ram.
