As if Detroit sports fans weren’t already down in the dumps, we twist the knife a little deeper.
Might the Lions have the best chance at Detroit’s next championship? Sobering thought, right?
We’re here to talk about something equally depressing: All the money that the Detroit organizations are doling out on players who aren’t even with the respective teams anymore.
We’re talking “dead money.”
In technical terms, defined aptly by Tyler Raborn in a 2013 Bleacher Report story, dead money is salary cap space that a team must allocate to a player who has been let go.
In more loose terms, dead money is paid by a team to make a particular player go away.
Nearly a dozen players, still on the books for Detroit’s four major professional sports teams, fit the description. In this exercise, we go by the latter, more loose definition.
Which players are no longer with the Lions, Tigers, Red Wings and Pistons, but they’re still costing them?
With the assistance of MLive sports reporters from their respective beats, let’s take a look. The athletes, or former athletes, are listed in order from least expensive to most expensive.
Total figures listed in each header reflect what was owed to each athlete in 2017 and beyond.
