Saints & Raiders Worth Watching As Trade Partners For Antonio Brown

Mike Silver says the Saints are a team worth keeping an eye on as a potential landing spot for Steelers WR Antonio Brown. 

According to Ian Rapoport, there’s a market currently developing for Brown with the Raiders and several others worth watching as potential trade partners.

The issue for the Saints is that they will need to pay Michael Thomas a huge contract at some point in the near future and they’re currently without a first-round pick this year. 

The Raiders are clearly looking to upgrade talent on both sides of the ball and have three first-round picks to work with in 2019.

Brown met with owner Art Rooney II a few weeks ago and both parties agreed that it was time to move on. He has been the subject of trade rumors since he was benched for Week 17’s game after an incident that occurred during practice. 

Pittsburgh would incur a $21 million cap hit by trading Brown, which is typically too prohibitive for a team to take on. However, reports have said Pittsburgh believes they can easily offset the cap hit.

Brown is owed a $2.5 million roster bonus on the third day of the league year, which could work as a deadline of sorts for the Steelers to trade him.

Brown, 30, is a former sixth-round pick of the Steelers back in 2010. He’s currently in the third year of his five-year, $72.71 million contract that included a $19 million signing bonus and stands to make base salaries of $12.625 million and $11.3 million over the next two years of the agreement.

Trading Brown would be really tough for the Steelers, considering that they would take a $21.12 million cap hit by moving him before June 1. After that, the dead money hit drops to $7.04 million with the remainder being carried on their 2020 salary cap.

In 2018, Brown appeared in 15 games for the Steelers and caught 104 passes for 1,297 yards and 15 touchdowns.

We’ll have more regarding Brown and the Steelers as the news is available.