For the Saints, this is a serious repudiation of their all-in philosophy from a year ago and the quality of the team Sean Payton and Mickey Loomis thought they had built. I wrote about their cap woes in December, and while I pointed out the accounting method that would enable them to overcome their $27 million nightmare and get underneath the hard cap, there wasn’t going to be much space to reshape their franchise.
New Orleans had already cut Curtis Lofton and Pierre Thomas this offseason, but to make serious changes to its roster in the years to come, it was going to have to carve one or two of the top salaries off the books. One of those players, apparently, was Graham. While the Saints get $19 million in cap relief over 2016 and 2017, they don’t actually save any money in 2015. With the dead money on his deal, Graham’s cap hold actually rises from $8 million to $9 million. The Saints then add the $4.5 million on Unger’s deal to their 2015 cap, and they’ll also owe an extra $750,000 or so for the salary difference between the draft picks they just traded.
After battling so hard to get underneath the cap of $143 million, New Orleans is already nearly $3 million over the cap. Loomis suggested after the trade that he made the deal to improve New Orleans’s defense, which certainly makes it strange that he traded Graham for a center and not a defensive player.
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To say the Saints players aren’t taking this well might be an understatement. Brees noted afterward that he was shocked by the trade and ” … loved [Graham].” Cornerback Keenan Lewis publicly said he wanted the remaining three years of his contract guaranteed or wanted to be released, which ranks right up there with “Operation Shutdown” as far as hollow, leverage-less threats go. The Saints brought in Tramon Williams for a visit last night, but they’ll have to convince him to work with a very strict, player-unfriendly contract structure to come to New Orleans. They’ll also have to convince him he isn’t coming to a team that’s falling apart.
