[You Need a Thneed]

I don't believe that these huge numbers in the last year are correct. By the last year of the contract, most of the benefit of cap reduction is gone, as the player will have played a few years for less than the cap hit to mostly even it out.

The penalty is the worst when retiring in the off season before the salary drops below the cap hit.

The ways it's being stated here doesn't make any sense. The idea is to recapture the salary cap benefit received, not to severely punish the team on top of recapturing the benefit.

It should work out that a player retiring before the final year of a contract in which he would make 1 million but his cap hit is 5 million, that his team would have a $4 million recapture penalty in the following season, no matter what the contract terms were beforehand.

It doesn't make sense to "recapture" $17 million when the difference between the salary paid and the total cap hit to date is only $5 million.