Now that the Pittsburgh Steelers’ 2023 season is getting underway after the team finished above .500 but failing to make the postseason last year, we turn our attention to the next chapter of Steelers football and everything that entails. One thing that it means is that some stock evaluations are going to start taking on more specific contexts as we get into the season, reflecting more immediate plusses and minus rather than trends over long periods. The nature of the evaluation, whether short-term or long-term, will be noted in the reasoning section below.
Player: CB Desmond King
Stock Value: Purchased
Reasoning: After releasing bonus punter Braden Mann, the Steelers filled the vacancy on their 53-man roster by reportedly agreeing to a one-year contract with veteran CB Desmond King. With six seasons and over 4,500 defensive snaps under his belt, he brings a lot of experience and versatility to the secondary, with an emphasis on his ability to man the slot.
A former fifth-round draft pick out of Iowa in 2017, Desmond King, still 28 years old, has made a nice career for himself. Having spent most of his first six seasons with the Los Angeles Chargers, he was traded to the Tennessee Titans in 2020, and played the past two seasons with the Houston Texans. Houston released him with their final roster cuts rather than paying him his $3 million base salary, plus an additional $500,000 in per-game roster bonuses. They accrued a dead money hit of $1,455,695 by releasing him, a combination of the balance of his original signing bonus and the fact that $500,000 of his base salary for 2023 was guaranteed. They still saved $3 million minus displacement with the release between his base salary and roster bonus.
Anyway, the point is that he’s now a Pittsburgh Steeler, right? It doesn’t matter what the Texans saved by parting ways. While he’s had a bit of an up-and-down career, on the whole, King has been a good player and is the best and most experienced slot defender they now have, at least on paper.
The question is whether he is going to start there, and when. He’s going to have to get up to speed on this defense, though he is not unfamiliar with learning on the fly, having been traded in-season before in 2020. Although he was inactive for his final game with the Chargers, he started the next week for the Titans and logged 54 defensive snaps.
As of right now, all we can say for sure is that he gives the Steelers yet another option for how to lay out their secondary. Is the primary package still going to feature Patrick Peterson shifting into the slot? I can only imagine they are going to be doing some mixing and matching at the start of the season to figure out what works for them.
One other thing to note is that King also has experience as both a punt returner and a kick returner, though he has done little in the kick return game since 2019. He returned a career-high 33 punts in 2022, however, for 309 yards, averaging 9.4 yards per return. That could give the Steelers another option in addition to Calvin Austin III and possibly make Gunner Olszewski expendable.
