Lions restructure Halapoulivaati Vaitai’s contract, create over $2 million in cap space

The Detroit Lions have restructured guard Halapoulivaati Vaitai’s contract, again, to create some cap space.

Lions right guard Halapoulivaati Vaitai is currently on IR with a back injury, with surgery making his time line to return unclear. But he has done something to help the team.

According to ESPN’s Field Yates the Lions restructured Vaitai’s contract on Saturday, opening up $2.42 million in cap space.

If this feels like this has been done before, you’re right. The Lions restructured Vaitai’s contract to create a little bit of cap space to get through the end of last season. But as players come off IR and PUP lists this year, the team has few options to restructure deals and Vaitai’s expensive multi-year deal is a prime candidate to restructure. He is in the third year of a five-year, $45 million deal.

Halapoulivaati Vaitai contract restructure details

The exact details of Vaitai’s restructure haven’t hit the appropriate outlets yet, but it’s safe to assume part of his $6.5 million 2022 base salary will be converted to a signing bonus to create that $2.4 million in new cap space. How that’ll be specifically spread to future years is unclear, but bonus guarantees are evenly split over remaining years of a deal so the cap hits and dead money hits if he’s moved on from will rise some in 2023 and 2024.

There is the possibility a void year will be tacked on to Vaitai’s deal just to spread out the bonus implications on the salary cap.

So the Lions have probably married themselves a little more to Vaitai for the rest of his overpriced contract, though the potential out in 2024 still should be palatable in terms of dead money against cap savings. Right or wrong, there just aren’t many choices to create cap space this year. Now, what will be done with little bit of extra financial space?