Agreed, there's not many suitors cause JBB was careless with these signings
It bothers me to think about because around this time two years ago I remember thinking about the payroll situation with this team, and thinking that we had just about zero legitimately "bad" contracts on the books. The most questionable contract we had was probably McDonagh's, who I think still had four years left after that season and you could argue his overall performance and trajectory wasn't likely to maintain it's value over that time. (I would personally say McDonagh's playoff performances alone justified his salaries, fwiw.) We were still gonna end up getting squeezed by the flat cap because we had pay raises due for players who we couldn't accommodate, but I found it easier to live with "flat cap screwed us" over "we screwed ourselves".
Fast forward to now - really, FF just a few months later but it's even more apparent now - and we're littered with questionable contracts. I can forgive the Vasi contract a bit, maybe questionable to go all-in on a goaltender because sometimes goalies just break and what can you do, but for a while it looked like a wise move to lock him in during his should-be-prime years. Cernak for eight years was questionable but I thought the AAV was ok. Cirelli for $6.25M x 8 was really questionable. Sergachev for $8.5M x 8 was a ridiculous leap of faith. It's like we would still talk about Sergachev as this green prospect with unlimited upside when in reality he had played five seasons of NHL + an entire seasons' worth of games in the playoffs and he was still prone to making rookie mistakes in his fifth season. And JBB thought "yep, he's gonna ascend still". That was the worst contract, easily, Sergachev had never shown to be that level of player. And now we're hamstrung with anywhere from 2-4 bad contracts hanging around our necks for the next while to come, chewing up ~$17M-$30M of our cap space in the process.
I don't want to use the phrase "breath of fresh wind" too easily when talking about JBB at first because that feels massively disrespectful to the work Yzerman did, but what JBB did do at first was show more boldness at going out and making moves to try and put us over the top, and with Coleman and Goodrow it's hard to argue against that. The Hagel move in 2022 was also very good even if it didn't pay off during that playoff run. Ever since then, JBB has way more misses than hits, and that's no small part of the reason we find ourselves where we do today. There was always going to be a decline following the great run we had, some of that was unavoidable no matter what we did, but those decisions have accelerated the process. It's going to take some real creativity to turn this around and get us into another Cup contention season or two with this core before it's too late. This off-season cannot have the idea of "run it back" anywhere, this particular team has run stale and needs work.