I've sat this one out a little while because I am one of the people involved, but I thought I would add a little context.
1. There is no rule against cash in trades in this particular world, though I am not necessarily against there being one (I am not for it, but I could live with it).
2. As the one who offered the trades, I made them roughly cash-neutral and wasn't worried about a small discrepency (but as it turns out others were). There was about 70K in each deal in my favor, but I had no plans for it. I was not making a deal to gain cash in any way, as there really was nothing I could do with it. I am nowhere near close enough to transfer anything to prospect (which = $0 exactly right now).
3. We re-worked the deals, complete with my putting together a spreadsheet to figure out how each player's salary would decrement from offer to expected acceptance to completion to make the deal as cash-neutral as possible. That really wasn't too hard to do.
One of the strange things in all this was, that despite a fairly active and sprited debate between Mike, one other owner, and me, the fireworks were from those that didn't want to read the discussion. Our debate was probably more civil than those who objected to the debate.
I have big problems with the concept of having a rule against cash in trades, but more in concept than in practice. But I don't intend to go into that here and rehash a couple of 20-odd page debates that have already happened on these forums.
This post is just to add a little context and point out that although the subject matter talks about "Rules are Rules", there really isn't one in the case that caused this subject to be posted in the first place.