Contract figures reported when a player signs are usually far larger than what he ends up being paid. The gap is structural, and it comes from how the deals are built.
Most contracts are not fully guaranteed
A team can generally release a player and stop paying his remaining salary, which means the later years of a deal are options rather than obligations.
The announced total assumes every year is played, so it describes a maximum rather than an expectation.
Guaranteed money is the portion the team owes regardless of whether the player remains on the roster, and it is the only part he can count on.
The signing bonus does the real work
A signing bonus is paid at or near the point of signing, which makes it the most secure element of any deal.
For accounting purposes it is spread across the contract years, so the team records a fraction annually even though the money has already left.
This spreading is why releasing a player still leaves a charge on the books: the unrecorded portion of a bonus already paid accelerates onto the current year.
Guarantees can be conditional
Some money is guaranteed only against injury, meaning the player receives it if he is hurt but not if he is released for performance reasons.
Other amounts become fully guaranteed on a specific date, which is why teams make roster decisions in the days before those dates arrive.
Reading a contract therefore requires knowing not only how much is guaranteed but when and against what.
Structure reflects negotiating power
Players at positions with many available replacements receive smaller guaranteed portions, because a team can walk away and sign someone else.
Players who are genuinely difficult to replace secure guarantees deeper into the contract, and the depth of those guarantees is a better indicator of how a team values a player than the headline number.
Agents and teams both understand this, which is why the announced figure is sometimes inflated deliberately to satisfy a player's standing.
Why the structure persists
A hard salary cap makes long-term guarantees risky for teams, since committed money cannot be recovered if a player declines.
The collective agreement permits this arrangement, and changing it has been a recurring demand in labour negotiations rather than something teams would concede voluntarily.
Until that changes, the meaningful question about any signing is how much of it the team cannot escape.