To be clear, I'm not criticizing teams for cutting players early if their value has declined. In a league that doesn't have fully guaranteed contracts, that's just smart business. But I'm not going to say it's fine for a team to do that while expecting the player to play through the whole thing no matter what. That's the double standard.
For a hypothetical, let's say the Packers give Clinton-Dix a 5 year, 40 million $ extension with 25M in guarantees. The guarantees are virtually all in the first two seasons. So they sign him and then he regresses big time. They give him the two years, he doesn't improve, and so they cut him with minimal cap implications. Fans would applaud the release, as it would free up cap space by getting rid of a bad contract. No one would lament that the Packers were being selfish by not honoring the remainder of the deal.
So conversely, let's say the same thing happens but that HHCD takes his game to another level. He's playing like a top 3 safety and after two years, with increasing cap ceilings, the going rate for his services is 12M/season. If he asked for a raise and threatened a hold-out, most of those same fans would shred him as a me-first jerk. But why? Why is that different than the team cutting him early? If they can say that circumstances have changed and we're tearing up this deal because we can, then at the very least players should be able to exercise what leverage they have to try and get a deal that better suits them when circumstances shift their way.
