The Pittsburgh Steelers have a hole at the wide receiver position. However, a trade must make sense for both sides in a deal from the perspective of the teams involved. There are no friends or favors when it comes to trade negotiations, and a negative cap hit by the team trading a player usually happens when a player forces their way out, or as Steelers head coach Mike Tomlin once said we’ll tolerate you until we can replace you. As the latest name to Pittsburgh via trade, here are the reasons why Seattle Seahawks wide receiver Tyler Lockett is not coming to the Steelers via trade ahead of the 2024 NFL Draft.
Seahawks Salary Cap Situation
According to www.sportrac.com, the team has $20,201,962.00 in available cap space at this moment. As of right now, they are carrying seventy-seven players on their active roster. They will look to add another thirteen players to their roster before training camp. Most of them will probably come in the form of draft selections during the 2024 NFL Draft, as well as their undrafted free-agent class.
They will need an estimated $8,408,793.00 in order to sign their 2024 rookie class. They may want to carry some additional money to account for in-season expenses such as replacing a starter or depth player lost due to a season-ending injury. So let’s say that number is $4,000,000.00, both of those amounts you should subtract from their available salary cap number. That would set their estimated available salary cap at $7,793,169.00. According to www.overthecap.com the Seahawks if they traded Lockett to the Steelers before June 1, 2024, would incur a cap hit of roughly ($8,000,000).
That would leave them over the NFL salary cap by ($206,831.00). There would need to restructure several players before trading Lockett away, to accommodate the cap hit. The Steelers would have to make a pretty attractive trade compensation offer to the Seahawks to make them interested in agreeing to a trade. The Steelers would be taking on an estimated $10,089,821.00 in salary from his current deal with the Seahawks against their estimated available salary cap space of $11,139,353.00. The team would have to restructure the contract of outside linebacker Alex Highsmith to give themselves additional flexibility.
