It’s the same thing though even if you have a “healthy” cap.
Not many teams are as bold as Denver was in cutting a player they just signed to a mega deal after just two seasons.
In our case, we signed him at a time where we had to borrow dollars from the future and can’t cut him because the cap hits would accelerate, and in other teams’ case they would have signed him using present dollars and in order to maintain the illusion of a healthy *current* cap, they wouldn’t want to cut him still.
Again, what Denver did was rare. If you sign a guy to a $100+ million deal, you’re kind of stuck with it for a few years, typically.
Our cosmetics just look atypical because we borrowed from the future to get the deal completed.
If Carr signed a more traditional deal, his cap hit this year would not be as low as it is, and his cap hit next year would still be pretty high to where we likely would want to hold onto him for one more year. It just looks different because instead of the money being spread more evenly, we have it set up to where it’s relatively cheap this year and more expensive than it would be next year once we restructure.
Teams aren’t cutting big contracts they suddenly don’t like after 1 or 2 years all over the place league-wide; they live with their errors just like we do, and we just have to do more administrative work (restructures) to live with ours.