Pat Patriot
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- Mar 19, 2019
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The Patriots made a couple of trades last week and many eyes will be on New England to see if they’ll be making any more move in the hours leading up to Tuesday afternoon’s deadline.
Beyond the way a player fits onto the roster, the Patriots have to think about how they’d fit under the salary cap. The team has over $2 million in cap room at their disposal and head coach Bill Belichick was asked during a Tuesday conference call if that would impact the team’s ability to make more deals.
Belichick said that it would “definitely affect us” and noted that teams “really don’t gain much cap space” by releasing players at this point in the year. There are other ways to restructure contracts and Belichick didn’t rule anything out, but added the team has to think about potential salary cap charges over the second half of the season when making decisions on Tuesday.
“It would depend on the player and the salary and what your other options were on the team and how big of a gap you’re talking about in order to be able to make all of that work,” Belichick said. “Certainly we have to account for the rest of the season. It’s unrealistic to think we’re not going to have any additional salary cap charges in the next eight weeks. We have to have some type of a cushion or budget to handle those, some of those anticipated expenses. We don’t know exactly what that number is going to be, but there are a number of things that could come into play there. Yeah, it’s definitely part of the conversation. No question.”
The Patriots have proven to be nimble when it comes to finding ways to bring in players they believe can help them, but the cap gymnastics this time may not lead to a deal in the next few hours.