Well, not being able to restructure or buy out contracts certainly does affect that.
But that McGinn contract is not great. Rust's contract is pretty ugly too, as are the rest of them you name. I guess it's a logical extension on how teams are operating now, but that doesn't mean it's
good in the abstract. And in the end, I think that ultimately, it's one of the reasons we didn't squeeze more cups out of this era-- it's just simply too hard to build a roster even taking away the parity and lack of prospects. It's also why I wish we would have explored trading TB, not signed McGinn for a dumb deal, and not resigned Carter and run some internal stop-gaps instead. We basically shot ourselves in the lower body because we panicked that we'd lose some ultimately mediocre pieces and now we're stuck with a mediocre roster at the end of era and no room to make any moves going forward.
I'm not trying to sound alarmist or stealing PensX's thunder or anything. I don't expect us to compete for a Cup, just have some cool last hurrahs. I just think it's hard to look at the roster moves we've made over the last 3-4 years and have them be anything above "okay" or "possibly decent". The best non-UFA/RFA moves we made frankly in 5 years were trading Marino and Matheson.
