Miguel has tweeted his estimate of what this likely means. I bet he nails it pretty close. It's worthwhile to note that while this is not Tom Brady level restructuring, Amendola did not need to do this and probably had a bit of leverage here, given that he was holding a pretty hefty dead cap number, making him hard to cut. To cut him, the Patriots would have had to accelerate $3,600,000 and that would be his dead money hit this year, to save only $1.5 million on the cap. Would they have done it? Possibly, but this is a bluff that I think a decent number of players in Amendola's position would have called -- are they going to replace him for $1.5 million next year?
As Miguel sees it, Amendola gets no new cash this year. The only thing that's in it for him, is that his $4,000,000 salary is converted into a $3,000,000 signing bonus, plus $1,000,000 in salary. So, instead of getting paid $250,000 per week this year (as under his current contract) he gets $3,000,000 now and $62,500 per game. That's something, to be sure. But, in exchange, he gives the Patriots back $3,750,000 in salary in the next two years, taking a $2,000,000 pay cut in 2016 and a $1,750,000 pay cut in 2017. That $3,750,000 translates directly into cap savings for the Patriots, and Miguel sees them taking $2 million of it this year, $1,000,000 of it next year, and $750,000 of it in 2017.
The only cost to the Patriots is an increase in the cost to cut him in 2016 and 2017 -- it goes up each year $1,000,000 (from $2.4 million to $3.4 million next year and from $1.2 million to $2.2 million in 2017). In other words the most simple way to think of this is that the Patriots converted $3,000,000 in salary this year into signing bonus so they can spread it out, and Amendola took a pay cut to ensure that his overall cap number over the next three years would go down.
Again, I don't know if Miguel has it right, but I bet he's pretty damned close, and more important, this was a really cooperative move by Amendola. I'm sure some would say that he didn't exactly earn the $10 million he received in the last two years, and so throwing us back $3,750,000 is only fair. Fair enough, but you don't really ever see a team saying to a player, "hey you overperformed the last couple of years, so here's more money." Thumbs up to Amendola.
https://twitter.com/patscap/status/576074842233012225
