Restructure Contracts

[Goodell]

I have it now live to restructure a contract from your Roster page. There will be a restructure link roughly under your draft pick list. Click on that and it will go into further details and provide a list of good candidates (making over $1M salary).

I would be very cautious in rushing off to restructure a deal quickly unless you were just over the cap and need to get under. Things can change in an off-season with trade proposals or draft picks to be paid, etc. What you think today could be very different tomorrow sometimes, so probably best to not restructure a contract until you need to. Often once in the hole restructuring a contract is the best way to get out of it, but if you already used it you cannot again.

- 1 contract can be restructured by each team each year.

- That player cannot have just signed a deal this year, not have had his contract restructured before.

- The 2009 salary is cut in half creating savings this year but also will just defer that money to the last year of their contract -- often forcing you to cut them a year early (and not have any unlimited bidding rights if cut a player versus letting contract expire to enter FA market).

- The player will also get a signing bonus for helping out the team here and putting off payment until later -- $2M SB for B+ players or better and $1M SB for everyone else. That goes against the cap spread out over the remaining years of the deal (so if 2 years left 500K each year in SB annual added for new $1M SB tacked on).

Adding SB to a player will just hurt you if you plan to cut or trade anytime soon because it just creates a bigger cap hit, so best to restructure a contract that has a ton of salary but that you want to keep around. Also a good idea not to restructure early because a long off-season ahead where lots of trade proposals could involve that player you restructured and just giving you a bigger cap hit then if traded.

Let me know if any questions or problems. I'd probably make note of the player's financial information and your cap totals before clicking and then after just to make sure it was processed correctly and that the estimated savings worked out. It seemed to for me in a test.