I'm gonna bump this up because I realized something else about this trade. If you look at the contract, it scales up like crazy at the tail end of the contract. There is no chance that the owner who proposed the contract ever had no intention of ever paying that, and will not face any repercussions for it. So why did our resident expert in doing shifty things do this? Since players are slightly incentivized by non-guaranteed money, it increases his chances of winning the signing.
Basically, the current system is accidentally rigged in favor of people with huge amount of cap space willing to sign a player and immediately trade the player. Someone who wants to actually sign and play this player can't compete with this contract offer. It's not a viable option. The trade is a nice workaround so that the new team can renegotiate the bad contract and the original owner has to deal with the cap consequences for one season.
I see two ways to fix this: 1) The cap hit doesn't hit all happen the next season, but follows the timing of the contract. I don't understand why it hits all in the next year right now anyway. An unexpected retirement can blow up a well managed cap, but owners can pull things like this sign and trade and wash their hands of it in a season. I understand poor owners can wreck teams for a few seasons.
2) Cap season to season salary increases. Make the window 5%-10% increases in salary each year, or just freeze it at 5%.
