Taysom Hill will (as a result of creative bookkeeping that has continually delayed his cap hits) count $15.8M against the Saints cap if he plays there this year.

Which is frankly too much and would generally see him released. The issue is that if they cut him, he counts (due to that same creative bookkeeping) as $16.9M against the 2024 cap.

For most teams, this would be worth cutting him. Yeah, it costs an extra million to not have him play, but it saves you $11M against the cap when you don't have to cut him in 2025.

But the Saints being so far over the cap creates two problems

1. They can't really afford to think about the future, they need to eke out every penny of savings now
2. The only way to have a noticeable drop in someone's contract is to sign them to a new contract or extension. That's what the Saints have done with Taysom in the past (the creative bookkeeping mentioned) and it's why his cap hit is so high now. It's as likely as not that they do the same again, pushing the hits back again.

On point two for example, the Saints could take his $10M salary for this season and restructure it as a $1M salary with a $9M signing bonus (which is spread equally across the 4* remaining years of his contract).  Which would reduce his cap hit this year to about $8M - half of what it would be if they cut him.  They could get it even lower if the work it as an "extension" to spread it across 5 years

*Not actually 4 years since the last two auto-void, but a mechanism for pushing cap hits into those years

Of course, this just makes the future situation worse and at some point, the Saints will have to bite the bullet and deal with the cap problems they've created.  Most expected them to do it after Brees retired. Or after they first season with Jameis. And they've kept pushing more and more back each year and making the eventual issue bigger.

So...is this the year the Saints finally reset and pay the price?  Not just on Taysom, but on everyone?  Probably not. As mentioned, the biggest cap hit is Derek Carr...but his is fully guaranteed for 2024. Cutting him in $2024 would INCREASE his cap hit by $17M. 

For better or worse, next season simply isn't a reasonable time to rebuild, take the financial hits and start a team of min salary players.  Beyond that, they lack the draft picks to do so and have seemed committed to both their coach and GM.  If they're both trying to keep their jobs next season, they're not going to blow it all up.

Much more likely is that they continue to shove the cap hits into the future, hoping for a miracle. Then, if/when everything goes bad in 2024, the organization cleans house in 2025.  Cut Carr (cutting him 2025 saves $29M for that season's cap), eat all the dead money on their other players (including Taysom) and field an absolutely terrible min salary team with a new head coach, possibly a new GM and an understanding that this will be a long process to rebuild the team