The Green Bay Packers offensive line was demolished by the Detroit Lions on Thursday Night Football, further demonstrating the impact of David Bakhtiari's injury woes.
The All-Pro offensive lineman has spent the last three seasons battling back from a season-ending injury in 2020. He's had setback after setback and now finds himself back on injured reserve for the next four weeks.
The Packers may still get Bakhtiari back this season, but Ian Rapoport cast doubt on that with reports of another surgery on the horizon.
The big issue for Green Bay now is that not having Bakhtiari on the field this year is only half of the problem.
David Bakhtiari injury setbacks have put Packers in a salary cap trap
Bakhtiari signed a four-year extension making him the highest-paid offensive lineman in the league on Nov. 15, 2020. Just over a month later, he tore his ACL.
Ever since, the Packers have been performing a high-wire act with his salary cap In each of the last three seasons, Green Bay has converted Bakhtiari's salary into a bonus, creative accounting to lessen Bakhtiari's hit. But lessening the cap hit for 2021 or 2022 or 2023 meant kicking the can down the line to 2024.
Next year, Bakhtiari will have a cap hit of $40.4 million, per Spotrac, that's the highest number for any non-quarterback in the NFL and higher even than Derek Carr or Russell Wilson.
There seems to be hope of Bakhtiari coming back healthy in 2024, but that was the hope in 2021 and 2022 and 2023. He's played 13 games in that span. He will be 33 years old on Sept. 30, 2024 and with so few games under his belt in the last three seasons, there's no telling if he'll even be an effective lineman at that point.
Even if the team can restructure Bakhtiari's deal to bring that massive cap number down again, they'll be committing more in the long term to a player whose injury track record has been wholly unreliable as of late.
If Bakhtiari can't play in 2024, the team will be on the hook for $19 million in dead cap no matter what.
