If the Raiders trade Khalil Mack for two first-round draft picks, are those two players going to be as good as Mack? Probably not. The draft is unpredictable, and you can’t count on two players whose identities you don’t even know to turn out to be as good as Mack, a three-time Pro Bowler and one-time Defensive Player of the Year.
So why would the Raiders do it? Because Mack will be far more expensive than the two players the Raiders would get with two first-round picks.
Mack will likely demand a contract similar to the one that the Rams just gave Aaron Donald. That would mean cap hits of about $9 million this year, $17 million next year, $25 million in 2020 and $28 million in 2021.
Two first-round draft picks won’t cost anything close to that against the salary cap: The first overall pick in the 2019 draft will have cap hits ranging from around $6 million to around $11 million over the next four years. And the 32nd pick in the first round of the 2019 draft will have cap hits ranging from around $2 million to around $3 million a year.
So while there’d be no way for the Raiders to know right now which picks they’d get in the draft order, or which players they’d take with those picks, they know they’d be saving a lot of cap space if they traded Mack for two first-round draft picks. And projecting it out even further, those two hypothetical players will be in their primes in their mid-20s when Mack is starting to decline in his 30s, and they can remain under team control for longer thanks to the fifth-year option and the franchise tag.
The question, then, isn’t whether two first-round picks will add more value to the Raiders than Khalil Mack adds. The question is whether two first-round picks plus all the players the Raiders would be able to sign with all the cap space they’d save will add more value than Mack adds. That makes it a closer call, and easier to see why the Raiders just might trade their star pass rusher.
