Packers Free Up Needed Cap Space Restructuring Kenny Clark
By Paul Bretl
It has now begun. At nearly $51 million over the salary cap — and that doesn’t include every expense either — the Green Bay Packers made their first cap-saving move on Wednesday, and it was a predictable one.
According to Field Yates of ESPN, the Green Bay Packers have restructured Kenny Clark’s contract.
As Yates lays out, this move created $10.892 million worth of cap space in 2022 by converting $13.615 million worth of Clark’s 2022 compensation to a signing bonus and adding two voided years to the contract.
The mechanics of this move are fairly simple. Clark has three years left on his contract plus now the two voided years, which equals five total years to push cap charges into. Now that $13.615 million can be spread out in equal portions of $2.723 million over those five years via a signing bonus, which results in the $10.89 million in savings this season.
According to Over the Cap, Clark still comes with a $9.975 million cap hit in 2022 with a base salary, or $1.03 million, a bonus of $7.72 million as well as a workout bonus of $700,000. Prior to this move, Clark’s cap hit was nearly $20 million this season.
As far as the two voided years go, those are there for bookkeeping purposes as a way for teams to spread out cap charges and lower cap hits. His contract still expires following the 2024 season, and if at that point a new deal isn’t reached, the cap charges pushed to the voided years hit the books in 2025 as dead cap.
Of course, the downside to any of these restructures is that while teams may be lowering the current cap hits, those charges have to go somewhere—so the cap hits for Clark in 2023 and 2024 have now just increased.
As I mentioned, this was one of the more expected moves to take place—it was a quick and easy way to create nearly $11 million worth of needed cap space. Two other cap-saving maneuvers you can expect to happen are restructures for David Bakhtiari as well as Aaron Jones.
Clark is coming off another fantastic season in which he logged 64 pressures — the fourth most among all interior defensive linemen — and three sacks, according to PFF ($$), along with six tackles for loss.