Army put himself in a bad situation without any outs and it feels like it was on purpose. Let's spend up to the cap on inflated contracts after getting rid of a SC core and also give those albatross contracts nobody deserves NTCs. I just can't.....
I think this is a pretty disingenuous way to describe what happened.
I think that the 'core' of the 2019 Cup was ROR, Petro, Binner, Parayko, J-Bo, Tarasenko, Schwartz, Perron, and Schenn. Every other skater played under 17 minutes a night in the playoffs in 2019 and that group comprised our #1 goalie, the top 2 centers, the top 3 D, and the 3 best wingers. Throw in Berube as the Cup-winning coach if you want.
Every player in that group returned the following season and Schenn's extension was given to him before the 2019/20 season began. Faulk was brought in and extended before that season began as well.
J-Bo suffered a completely unpredictable career-ending medical event in 2020 and Petro left in free agency in 2020.
Krug was signed in the 2020 offseason. At the time he was signed, all of ROR, Binner, Parayko, Tarasenko, Schenn, Schwartz, and Perron were still on the roster. That's 7 of 9 guys from the Cup core plus the coach who were still here. Many of the support players from the Cup run (Thomas, Bozak, Barby, Sunny, Sanford, Dunn, and Bortz) were still present on the roster. All told, 14 guys who played 15+ games for us in the 2019 playoffs were still on the roster for the 2020/21 season after all of the Schenn, Faulk, and Krug's contracts were given out.
Binner was given his extension during the 2020/21 season.
Dunn was selected in the expansion draft and Schwartz left in free agency in 2021 offseason.
We traded for and signed Buch just before the start of free agency in 2021 and signed Saad at the opening of free agency in 2021. Then we extended Parayko a few months later. We had a great record in 2021/22 and brought in Leddy at the deadline. On the opening day of free agency in the summer of 2022, Leddy was extended and Perron walked as a UFA. Kyrou and Thomas were extended prior to the start of the 2022/23 season.
That accounts for every full NTC and $4M+ contract on the roster today.
It was after all of those signings that we moved on from ROR, Tarasenko, Barby, and Berube.
I fully agree that mistakes have been made. There was a cascading series of events on the blueline and bad contracts given out. But it is not true that we dismantled the core and then gave out those contracts. We kept a lot of the core around for years and all of those contracts were given out to supplement the remaining core with good players in a win-now window. We didn't win again, the window closed, and now we are left with some ugly contracts. But they were all given out when a good amount of 'core guys' were still here (and a few non-2019-core players became damn good players on our roster).