INDIANAPOLIS – During his season-ending news conference, Green Bay Packers general manager Brian Gutekunst said he’d “probably restructure everybody” to create salary-cap space.
“We’re on the way,” Gutekunst said at the Scouting Combine on Tuesday, a day before the team restructured defensive tackle Kenny Clark’s contract.
A source confirmed the move, first reported by ESPN.com’s Field Yates, created $11.068 million of cap space by taking his $13 million base salary down to the league minimum of $1.165 million and taking the difference plus a $2 million roster bonus and turning it into a signing bonus. A void year was tacked onto the end of the contract to help with the accounting.
The good news? The Packers started the day with $6.458 million of cap space (or $2.55 million once the draft class is signed), according to OverTheCap.com. Now, the Packers have $17.526 million of cap space (or $13.618 million after the draft class).
For now, only 10 teams have more cap space, though that’s obviously subject to change with plenty of moves to be made league-wide before the start of the league-year and free agency on March 15.
The bad-on-paper news? Clark’s cap number for 2024, his final year under an extension signed in 2020, is a staggering $27.5 million. That’s the second-highest among all interior defensive linemen; it would be 10th-highest among quarterbacks. Moreover, with back-to-back restructures on top of a back-loaded deal, Clark’s 2025 cap number – when he’s no longer under contract – is close to $14 million.
However, Clark won’t turn 28 until October. An in-his-prime player, Clark presumably will be in line for an extension, if not this season then next offseason.
The Packers have one more big-ticket item to restructure, left tackle David Bakhtiari, but Gutekunst might treat that move as the glass door in front of a fire extinguisher.
“Obviously, for the last few years, we’ve been kind of pushing things out. At some point, you’ve got to pay up a little bit, and we’re going to do a little bit of that this year, I hope,” Gutekunst said. “We’ll always have a couple of guys that we hold as far as restructuring goes until we need them. A lot of it is opportunity as we get into free agency and the opportunities that present themselves.
“If, all of a sudden, there’s something that maybe we didn’t expect to come up and we might be able to help our football team, then we’ll reach out to those guys. But I feel like we’re not going to have the resources that we had a few years ago when we were able to do a lot of stuff, but I do think if there’s an opportunity to help our football team that we’ll be able to do it.”
After a Pro Bowl season in 201, Clark had four sacks among his 53 tackles in 2022. Out of 100 interior defensive linemen with at least 152 snaps on passing plays, Clark ranked 17th in ProFootballFocus.com’s pass-rushing productivity, a metric that measures sacks, hits and hurries per pass-rushing snap. However, the team captain wasn’t as strong as usual against the run.
Clark was joined in the starting lineup last season by Jarran Reed and Dean Lowry. Those players are set to hit free agency.
It has been another offseason of using the credit card for Gutekunst. Earlier, he restructured the contracts of Jaire Alexander and Preston Smith and Aaron Jones stayed following a pay cut,
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