Minnesota Vikings salary cap space will open up this weekend

The Minnesota Vikings are in the midst of a roster retooling coming on the heels of a startling 14-3 finish in 2024. While the playoffs didn’t end the way the team and fans hoped, Minnesota has been working hard to patch their roster holes and build a strong team around first-year starting quarterback J.J. McCarthy. Part of that has been saving and repurposing money through savvy moves, including designated veteran center Garrett Bradbury as post-June 1st release.

If you aren’t familiar with the “post-June 1st designation”, we’ve got a detailed breakdown for you here. The short version is that after June 1st, releases are treated differently in terms of the salary cap. Instead of the entire dead money on a contract hitting all at once, the dead money is split between the current year and the following year. This can allow teams to create cap space in the current year by deferring some of the dead money hit to the next year.

Any releases that occur after June 1st are subject to this change, but teams can also choose to designate two releases each season as “post-June 1st” even if they happen in March through May. As you might expect, this designation essentially treats those two releases as if they occurred after June 1st. The catch is that, while the players are released effective immediately and can therefore sign elsewhere, the cap savings doesn’t apply for the team until after June 1st.

The Vikings took advantage of this rule to save a significant amount of cap space with Garrett Bradbury. But just how much cap space will the Vikings save after June 1st, and how much dead money will be deferred to future years?