Let's talk salary cap

St. Geezy said
And how much space is that? And how much space remains to be able to pull from from the next five seasons? And your analysis only includes restructures to create buying power. We can cut or extend guys to play with the numbers as well.

Man, if the off-season where we went in nearly $100 million over the cap yet signed the league’s highest paid free agent that year wasn’t proof enough that this is all just accounting cosmetics to tinker with, I don’t know what else to say.

We don’t like the players acquired, many of the ones we do like got hurt, and we don’t like the people coaching them…we can’t now turn around and say it was the cap strategy’s fault.

The Saints can create $115m in space by restructuring every penny possible and adding void years to max out the benefit, which puts us last compared to every other team if they decided to do the same:

That chart assumes each team either (a) restructures without adding void years or (b) does a max restructure that adds void years to spread the cap hit over five years. It's not hard to expect us to have less room to push into future years than other teams because we have already borrowed so much from future years. Quoting the article that @baarbogast posted:

How excessive is the Saints use of restructures? From 2020 to 2024 they have ranked no lower than 2nd in a given year in the amount of salary converted to a bonus for salary cap purposes. Over the entire term no team is even in the same ballpark as New Orleans. The Saints have restructured around $450 million to create nearly $340 million in cap space over that timeframe. The amount converted is a staggering $254 million more than the next closest team. They have “created” $182 million more in cap room than the next closest team. In recent years they have had to restructure almost every eligible contract to function. They are up to nearly 50 restructures, almost 25 more than the next closest team and that does not even count a few players who were extended in large part to lower their cap hits.

Any extensions aren't likely to add more space than a restructure because they will likely come with new money. Also, due to all the restructuring, we have few (if any) contracts that will benefit more from a release than a restructure due to dead money.

Even leaving those points out, other teams would have the same (and likely better) options due to less dead money on the books.