I already figured Cooper was going to get about $20m a year. Which is really about 5 years $45m guaranteed, with more guaranteed vesting in year 3 of his contract if we want to keep him. After the end of year 2 you can usually gain cap space if you need to release them, years 4-5 are always big cap savers for releases.
Honestly, the WR contracts, and what we're looking at arent that bad. $20-25m signing, maybe more if you actually expect him to play out his contract at a top level. Allows you to spread more money and keep year 1 + 2 salaries lower. I doubt they'll set a weird precedent though, so it'll be interesting how they structure years 1+2 with the signing bonus.
WR contracts, and most in general, have signing and Year 1 + 2 salary guaranteed, (maaaaybe "some" of Year 3), with the rest of Year 3 becoming guaranteed if we keep him to a certain date before that season.
Year 4 is usually an out, where you can cut and just eat the rest of the signing bonus. These are also years that usually are the big salaries and cap numbers, so you actually gain a good amount of space even eating the signing bonus.
Like year 4 of DLaw, he actually has a $25m signing bonus, potentially just like Amari. This might actually be a fairly good reference point. In year 4, releasing him would save 14mill on the cap, even with the dead money, then saving 20mill in year 5.
You could even cut him after year 2 and save $7mill.
When you factor in that his year 1 cap hit is going to be like, 11mill, year 2 will be ~20m but the savings from year 1 offsets that. Then you can release him and actually save cap it's not going to be some huge cap burden. Especially with it going up and new CBA.
Right now, we have about $100mill in cap space next year, even giving Amari a "20m a year" deal, we'll still have about $88million. Considering Dak will have a lower year 1 even with "30m a year", we're going to have $60+ million to tender Jaylon, do whatever with Zeke, Byron. Can rollover the rest and that's plenty. Pretty painless honestly.
