Pretending that the 2nd wildcard team in the Eastern conference that Boston bounced in 6 games in the 2nd round was a legit Cup contender is extremely disingenuous, if not complete revisionist history. Hell, up until that point they were the only NHL team that hadn't even won a single playoff series.
Not only that, we know from interviews Jarmo wasn't expecting Cup contention by holding Panarin and Bobrovsky, but he no longer wanted to push being competitive into the future and wanted to see what the roster could do before Panarin and Bobrovsky walked. He even mentioned at the time they weren't considered Cup contenders.
“We said right from the start, we’re not going to trade Panarin for just draft picks,” Kekalainen says, adding he always believed Bobrovsky’s performance would even out. “It doesn’t make any sense for us, we’re just moving the window with our team into the future. This franchise has been doing that enough. We weren’t going to do that. We wanted to see what this team could do."
...
“We don’t think we’re taking any crazy chances,” says Kekalainen. “Because we weren’t considered a Cup contender, everybody is like, “Ooh, ahh, they’re mortgaging their future; we don’t feel that way at all. If you have 10 great prospects of the same age, they’re not going to all play for you anyway. Our future is in good shape. We can afford to sacrifice some draft picks to get some immediate help, and that’s what we did. This was not a thing that happened at the deadline. This was a thing we’ve been thinking about all year.”
If you want to say you admire him for simply going for it, despite the low chances and not being a top contender, but wanting to have as much success as possible and be competitive -- fine, that's fair. But to sit here and revise history to suggest they were Cup contenders, you're only fooling youtself. No one considered them as such, their track record in the playoffs in previous seasons didn't suggest they were. It was widely held belief that mortgaging their future was a bad decision. It didn't take a time machine, everyone knew what it was at the time.
Ultimately, they did win their first playoff series, which I guess was basically Columbus' Stanley Cup, so maybe you were right afterall?