Why Vikings fans probably shouldn’t get too hyped up for the NFL Trading Deadline

The trading deadline in the National Football League is one week from today, and there will be plenty of teams looking to make some moves as the second half of the regular season approaches. Unfortunately for Minnesota Vikings fans, as things stand right now our team will probably not be one of them.

Field Yates of ESPN has compiled a list of the salary cap space that each team has available a week from the trading deadline and the Vikings. . .well, they don’t have a whole lot of room to maneuver.

As you can see from the list, no team in the National Football League currently has less salary cap space than the Vikings do. They have $1,352,712 worth of space under the cap, which really isn’t going to allow them to do much unless they restructure some folks.

We mentioned this as part of our Five Good Questions from our readers over the weekend, but if the Vikings are going to swing any sort of deal it will likely be similar to those that we saw after the final cuts when they traded for Ross Blacklock and Jalen Reagor. Those two players are both still under their rookie contracts, meaning they’re fairly inexpensive. If Kwesi Adofo-Mensah and Rob Brzezinski don’t do any salary cap gymnastics over the next week, the number of trade targets the Vikings are going to have will be limited.

We’re not saying that the Vikings won’t do anything before the trade deadline in order to make a deal for a player they think can help them. We’re just saying that, as things stand right now, they’re not really in a position to do that sort of thing.