It's not a video game. You can't just make a 28 million offer and expect them to instantly accept then everything be rosey going forward. World doesn't work like that.
Brown wasn't going anywhere next year. Go out explore the trade and free agent market to see who you can get before you have to figure out how to structure brown's deal. Not to mention teams have to meet with agents, talk about it on both sides, make offers and counter offers them narrow it down. That all takes time. Heck I just took a new job with someone I knew and it was easy as hell and it still took two weeks to get all finalized.