It’s your daily reminder that the salary cap is an illusion. That regardless if a team is up against it, they can always find a way to move money around and free up some room. The Raiders went with restructuring Rodney Hudson’s deal not a year after he signed it according to ESPN’s Field Yates.
As is often the case, this deal is great for both sides.
Hudson gets his entire 2020 salary guaranteed in the form of a roster bonus, and gets two years tacked onto his contract that would make him a Raider until 2024. But those two years can be voided.
With Hudson’s cap hit lowered to just $5.2 million, the Raiders free up $9.28 million to spend this year, which they need because they were up against the salary cap as it stood, even before signing their rookie class.
They had $55 million to play with coming into free agency, but they ran through that pretty quickly, signing 12 outside free agents. They would have been about $4 million in the red without the Hudson restructure. Instead they sit at $5.2 million according to overthecap.com. That is just enough to cover the rookie pool.
