Would Demetrius Jackson's $500K count against the cap if we cut him?
If so, that number jumps up to nearly $800K away from max, which means we have to make a trade.
Jackson has $650K guaranteed if not waived on or before 7/15/17. If we cut him, the $650K counts against the cap. If we trade him for salary relief we pay him nothing. Problem is, we may have to pair him with a mid/late second rounder to get the job done.
An additional nuance is that, if we cut him while we are at 12 contracted players or less (which is the current situation) we would also need an empty roster charge of 816K for the vacated roster slot.
Which means that, while in the long run waiving Jackson would reduce actual salary by 734K, in the short term, waiving him actually eats into our cap space by 82K.
So the only way to open cap space with DJ's contract is to trade it. But as the math shows, that by itself is not enough. You have to get rid of DJ's, Mickeys _and_ Rozier's contracts without taking in any, stash Yabu and you then still need Hayward to agree to a tiny discount. Dumping a contract for cap space usually costs you a draft pick. Probably a late second rounder for DJ's, though Rozier might have enough value to get you a modest pick back in return. But it's a lot of separate things that have to happen to make it work this way.
Ultimately, all paths keep leading back to the fact that Danny's going to need to move one or two of AB/JC/MS. Moving just one of those contracts -- and those are all very tradable players -- solves his problem. In fact, if he moves AB or Jae, then he possibly can even choose to not stash Yabusele.
You also have to look at the fact that Danny ultimately has to deal with the fact that both AB & Marcus are up for new contracts next summer. It can make extra sense to pro-actively deal one of them now.