well it depends - postecoglu has had sucess releasing players who still had years on their contracts.
Most players want to play 0 so if the coach tells them they are not going to be getting any time for the next 2 years of their contract, then maybe they may want to move on in search for playing time
A few of those players were able to be offloaded to other HAL clubs (by mutual consent), like Reddy for us so weren't paid out and didn't take up cap space. We have a lot of players that would be considered foreigners to other HAL clubs so makes it harder offloading players to other clubs.