Report: Seahawks create cap space by restructuring contract of Jamal Adams

The Seattle Seahawks are set to open the 2023 regular season Sunday when they host the Los Angeles Rams at Lumen Field. One of the issues the team has dealt with for the majority of the offseason was a limited amount of cap space, something which led the team to restructure the contracts of a pair of veterans.

In the wake of the draft it was Tyler Lockett whose contract was restructured to create $5.69M of cap space, and then as the team reported for training camp the team restructured the contract of Quandre Diggs in order to create $6.163M of cap space. Now, according to a report from Field Yates of ESPN, Wednesday the Seahawks were one of several teams creating cap space through a contract restructure, this time with Jamal Adams.

For those curious about the math behind the conversion, Adams was set to have a base salary of $11M in 2023. A player of his experience has a minimum salary of $1.08M for 2023, meaning the Seahawks could convert $9.92M of base salary into signing bonus. Doing that would free up $6.613M of cap space by pushing $3.306M into each of 2024 and 2025 while reducing Adams’ 2023 cap hit from $18.11M to $11.497M

As a result of the restructure, Adams will now have cap hits of $26.916M in 2024 and $27.916M in 2025, while the team would carry a dead cap charge of $20.833M in 2024 if he is released following the 2023 season.

The additional space created gives Seattle somewhere in the neighborhood of $9M of cap space for the 2023 season as the league moves to regular season accounting with the start of the regular season on Thursday.