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The difficult relationship between the New Orleans Saints and catcher Michael Thomas has spread to the public, and it is not improving.
Thomas suffered a lingering ankle injury sustained in a Week 1 win last season over Tampa Bay.
He ended up running out of time and appeared in just seven games overall, capturing 40 passes for 438 yards a year after leading the league with 149 catches and 1,725 yards. Thomas was placed on the injured reserve at the end of the season, but returned for the playoffs, where he caught five passes for 73 yards with one touchdown in two games.
Jeff Duncan of Nola.com reported on Saturday that immediately after the playoffs ended, Thomas was advised by Saints medical staff to have ankle surgery. But after getting a second opinion, Thomas decided to try a more conservative approach to see if the ankle would heal through rehabilitation and therapy. The team reportedly backed Thomas and agreed to a rehabilitation plan, and Thomas was given progressive benchmarks to achieve over the next three months of his recovery during training.
Things took a turn for the worse from there. According to Duncan, Thomas then went dark in the squad and ignored several calls over a three-month period as then-team coach Beau Lowery, wide receivers coach Curtis Johnson and the head coach Sean Payton all tried to reach him to see how his ankle was. Do.
When Thomas returned to the team in June, it was discovered that his ankle had not healed, so he eventually underwent surgery. Recovery time from surgery will cause Thomas to miss several games to start the 2021 season.
Sean Payton showed his frustrations when he spoke to the media about the late intervention: “Obviously we wish it had happened sooner than later, and quite frankly it should have.”
#Saints HC Sean Payton says Michael Thomas’s surgery should have taken place earlier than it did. Clearly disappointed with the whole.
Thomas is expected to miss the start of the season as he recovers.pic.twitter.com/tp2h9HR6Xu
– Ari Meirov (@MySportsUpdate) July 28, 2021
In what appears to be a reference to Duncan’s report that he ignored calls for months before deciding to have ankle surgery, Thomas wrote on Twitter Monday: “They tried to damage your reputation. You saved theirs by not telling your side of the story.
Payton was asked to comment on Thomas’ tweet, but declined to do so. “I don’t want to have a social media-based press conference,” Payton said.
The ankle problem isn’t the only problem the Saints had with Thomas. There was also an incident in training early last season when he hit safety guard CJ Gardner-Johnson during practice. The Saints fined him the amount of a game check and decided to make him inactive for a Monday night game against the Chargers.
Jeff Duncan of Nola.com reported at the time that the Saints making him inactive for a match “had less to do” with the fight than his conduct after the fight. He “responded” to the coaches (including Sean Payton) and “turned down the lawyer” after the incident.
There was a belief among league circles last season that the Saints could possibly look to trade Thomas as more and more evidence of friction emerged.
However, the Saints’ approach to the salary cap flies in the face of any potential trade-off. The global push over the last few years of the Drew Brees era has led New Orleans to move as much of the salary cap as possible into the future. Ahead of the 2020 season, the Saints converted $ 10 million of Thomas’ salary into a bonus and split it into five equal installments of $ 2 million from 2020 to 2024. Earlier this offseason, New Orleans converted 11 , $ 6 million of Thomas’ bonus salary and spread it over the remaining four years of the contract. In total, that means New Orleans added $ 16.7 million in cap fees for the 2021-2024 seasons.
The result of these movements creates two potential problems. First, the Thomas swap would now leave New Orleans with $ 31.6 million in total cap – $ 8.9 million in 2021 and $ 22.7 million in 2022. That would put the Saints in roughly $ 56 million above the 2022 salary cap of $ 208.2 million as it stands. New Orleans has overcome more precarious salary cap situations – in the last offseason they had to cut a $ 100 million deficit – but another way of looking at it is even worse:
New Orleans extended Thomas a year earlier before the final year of his rookie contract in 2019. He played one season on overtime – last year. If New Orleans traded Thomas, it would have ended up paying $ 43.1 million for a one-year extension. This level of mismanagement is unprecedented outside of quarterback, and even at QB he would rank near the peak of all-time bad investing. That would add up to over $ 1 million per reception Thomas would make in the first year of the deal and just under $ 100,000 per yard earned.
The Saints have never let sunk costs or dead ceilings get in their way before, but that would be pushing things to extremes, even for them.
Either way, the tea leaves suggest the relationship is in a rough spot right now. It would be hard to imagine the team trading Thomas given his importance to offense when in good health, but we rarely see the Saints having a strain like this on the home crowd. If Thomas is feeling under attack, as he mentioned in his tweet on Monday morning, we’ll likely hear his side of the story sooner rather than later. The Saints are in a difficult situation and it is far from over.
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