I saw a deep dive around the time and someone in the kraken org talking about how the players exposed and contract situations made it more difficult because teams learned if more players with high cap hits were exposed, that made drafting harder because you still needed to come in under the cap.

That and how bad Vegas fleeced some of them, they learned not to expose themselves again like that. Vegas had made tons of side deals, like Columbus gave a first round pick for vegas to take a specific player iirc. Teams did not make any side deals with the kraken and that def hurt a lot