Restructuring Danielle Hunter's Contract Feels Like a No-Brainer for the Vikings
Outside of Kirk Cousins, no Vikings player currently has a higher 2022 cap hit than Danielle Hunter. With an $18 million roster bonus that takes effect on March 20th, Hunter's cap number is $26.1 million.
For now.
There's been plenty of talk about what the Vikings might do with Hunter this offseason, but it really seems quite simple. Minnesota can save over $13 million in cap space by restructuring Hunter's contract, something that is already written into the language of the deal. They'd be converting that roster bonus to signing bonus and spreading it out over 2022, 2023 (the last year of Hunter's contract), and two void years.
That move alone gets the Vikings — who are currently around $16 million over the cap — pretty close to being cap compliant. Add in similar restructures for players like Harrison Smith, Adam Thielen, Dalvin Cook, and/or Eric Kendricks, and the Vikings can create plenty of room without doing anything to Cousins' contract.
Sure, you could cut players like that and have even more cap flexibility going forward. But why would you want to do that? Having talented football players on your roster is a good thing. You can always kick the can down the road from a salary cap perspective, to some extent.
I could understand the argument to move on from someone like Michael Pierce (positional redundancy), Thielen (age), or even Cook (positional value). But with Hunter, a restructure that keeps him around seems like a no-brainer. He's still just 27 years old, is one of the most dominant pass rushers in the game when healthy, and proved early last season that his 2020 neck injury didn't have lasting effects. The pectoral tear that ended his 2021 campaign was an unfortunate, unrelated injury.
Hunter is simply too talented for the Vikings to let him land anywhere else this offseason, especially given the importance of his position and the lack of edge rushing depth behind him. Restructuring his deal and hoping he stays healthy and thrives in Ed Donatell's scheme seems like an obvious move for GM Kwesi Adofo-Mensah to make.
He seems to agree.
“Danielle was actually one of the first people I spoke with [when I got hired]," Adofo-Mensah said this week in Indianapolis. "Really good player. Incredible person. We were talking about traveling. Again, one of those things you love about an NFL relationship. He was traveling somewhere I had been, and we caught up about that. He is a really good football player, and to build championship teams you need a lot of really good football players. He is somebody who we want to continue to work with going forward, and we’re excited to talk through all of the possibilities with that."
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